While Budd here focuses on the periodical as the vehicle for research sharing, the monograph may also be used for this purpose. What are the assets and liabilities of sharing research findings via a monograph?
As research becomes increasingly important, publication of research findings and conclusions also becomes more important. To what degree is it the responsibility of the university to publish the research produced by its faculty? This was fairly common in the latter 19th and early 20th Centuries.
How important is the library collection to the researcher? Why?
Does it seem likely that the increased emphasis on research/publication will decrease in the future? Is it likely that the same trend will affect colleges and community colleges?
What is the difference between "formal" and "informal" communication in any academic discipline or profession?
There is considerable evidence that the "harder" the academic discipline, the more likely that periodicals will be heavily used and that publication will be periodical based. What is a "hard" academic discipline? A "soft" one?
External funding is especially important in the sciences and much less so in the humanities. What impact might this have on research/publication?
As academic disciplines become more fragmented ("twigging"), the audience for scholarly books becomes much smaller and less profitable. Likely solutions?
The university press is faced with problems as on-campus subsidies decline.How central might the university press be to a research university?
Most academic research libraries are haunted by the "serials pricing crisis." What does this involve?
A large proportion of the most expensive,and heavily used scholarly periodicals, are published by profitable multi-national or foreign publishers. Would it be better if universities and academic discipline associations/organizations published these journals?
Given the pressure to publish in order to attain tenure and promotion, what are the major assets and liabilities of this reward system? What might be done to improve it?
What impact does this reward structure have upon the academic library?
It is a notable irony that the academy forces faculty to publish as frequently as possible, gives their products away, and then buys back the intellectual content at inflated prices.
This section is not properly titled. It should be the "on-campus cost of research."
What might be done to reduce these costs to the academy?
The referee system is designed to insure that all published articles pass through a quality control filter. Some allege that referees are often opinionated rather than being objective and tend to favor traditional, mainstream research methods and topics. Does "peer review" seem reasonable to you? Alternatives?
The Internet has made the "invisible college" even more important. What is the invisible college and how might it impact scholarly communication?
So far, digital scholarly periodicals seem to have had little impact on the problems facing academic libraries? Why might this be the case? Would digital periodicals distributed via the Internet likely be less expensive than hard copy ones?
The cost of scholarly periodicals has created a situation in which many academic libraries have had to substantially reduce their purchase of books and cancel periodical subscriptions on a fairly regular basis. What might be done to the scholarly communication system to change this? Is such change likely?
