3. The Research Communications Revolution
3.1. The ways in which the published findings of research are produced, disseminated, managed, consumed and preserved have changed fundamentally over the past twenty years. The activities, roles and responsibilities of the various players in the research communications system—researchers, universities and other research institutions, research funders, publishers, learned societies, libraries, aggregators and secondary publishers, as well as readers—have been transformed. For all the organisations that act as intermediaries between authors and readers, the last two decades have brought unprecedented changes in the nature and scope of their activities, and continuing uncertainties as to the boundaries between their specific roles.
3.2. These changes are but part of a wider context of developments in the digital world: jockeying for position on a global scale between content providers, device companies, packagers, aggregators, delivery platforms, bandwidth suppliers and so on, all seeking a competitive edge. And change continues apace. Mobile access anywhere and at any time to content of all kinds, tagged with metadata, fully searchable, and interwoven with a rich array of other multimedia, is becoming a general expectation; and interactivity and interrelationships with social media are developing fast. All these developments bring the need to reconceptualise working patterns and practices. But few individuals or organisations have a clearly-defined vision as to what the research communications landscape will look like in ten or twenty years’ time.
3.3. In this context, it is important to understand where we have come from; what has changed, why and how; and the key factors that are likely to drive change into the future. We consider in this section the nature of and the drivers for change under three main heads: economic, technological, and social.
Economic factors
3.4. Research and its outputs. There are some six million researchers in the world, and their number has been growing fast. That growth has reflected significant increases in expenditure on research and development (R&D), particularly by Governments. Across the 34 members of the OECD, for example, gross expenditure on R&D increased by over 60% in real terms in the ten years to 2008, and in major research countries it has tended to exceed the rate of growth in GDP. Up to 2008, therefore, across OECD countries as a group, R&D grew as a proportion of the economy as a whole: from 1.9% in 1981 to 2.3% in 2008.[1]
3.5. Of course, much of the expenditure on R&D is devoted to the development of products, processes or services, relatively little of which results in the kinds of research findings and outputs that are reported in books and journals. Governments
- ↑ See OECD Science, Technology and R&D Statistics, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/strd-data-en .
