Digital Documents and the Future of the Academic Community.

This paper examines the dynamics of change in scholarly publishing and the impact of technological innovation upon the academic community for which the system of scholarly communication serves as an infrastructure. For the purposes of this discussion, what is of immediate interest is the way the productivity issue frames the possible dimensions of the dynamics of technological innovation, thereby setting a research agenda for the future. From the perspective of academic publishing, the academic community consists of two markets in which "gift" exchanges are governed by contract, that of authors and that of the consumers, the largest of which are academic research libraries. Higher education is both the producer and consumer of scholarly publications. Three new factors define the conditions within which a system of scholarly communication may evolve: (1) the emergence of a global economy in which intellectual property is an important source of wealth; (2) the end of the cold war as a stimulus for national information policy which took the form of federal funding for research; and (3) the cultural diversity of society, and the replacement of a melting pot idea by a transnational culture, which may create new social contexts for education. The remainder of this paper examines issues related to digital documents and academic productivity, and digital documents and the academic community. (AEF)