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Information about several papers discussed at a meeting convened by the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) in Berkeley, California, on November 1, 2007 is presented. The goal of the meeting was to explore various aspects of scholarly publishing. Discussions at the event included the importance of distinguishing between informal dissemination and formal publishing, and the challenges posed by both to the university community. Budgetary and academic freedom concerns were also explored.

This study reports on five disciplinary case studies that explore academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. The case studies are based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders — faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors — in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty attitudes and actual publishing behavior. There is much more experimentation, however, with regard to means of in-progress communication, where single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition as they are for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to ‘move’ faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, ‘final’ publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]