Scholarly communication as a discipline has many logical places where its work fits into academia; however, it also impacts many other parts of our world. From learning opportunities for people who are incarcerated to improving the efficiency of crops planted by farmers in the field to the information driving some of our most commonly used devices, scholarly communication impacts our daily lives in numerous ways.
Since 2007, JSTOR has been researching ways to provide access to their resources to people who are incarcerated through the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative. In 2018, they began working on an improved, offline version of their services. This work has had to account for many of the same factors other teachers and learners have had to address recently, such as COVID-19 and an increase in surveillance technology. While the report focuses on how JSTOR’s work with incarcerated learners has been impacted, the conclusions and recommendations are likely of interest to the broader scholarly communications community.
Another open research platform is working to improve crop efficiency for farmers and other agricultural community members. This open platform for crop nutrition created by the Consortium for Precision Crop Nutrition and Agmatix is primarily for researchers, but the creators expect that the shared data will be used by researchers and benefit farmers indirectly. The platform is working on digitizing information in print and migrating data into a standard format that researchers can access easily. A second database, the African Plant Nutrition Institute and Innovative Solutions for Decision Agriculture, has already been created. As more data is added to the platform, further opportunities for research that can lead to increased efficiency for farmers will appear.
Finally, the Wikidata platform turned 10 years old in October 2022. Wikidata (a separate platform from Wikipedia, although both are run by the Wikimedia Foundation and do interact) is a semantic database with over 1 billion unique items described in it. As volunteer editors add items and information about those items, Wikidata becomes more powerful and increasingly useful to search engines and virtual assistants in answering queries and questions. Although the impact of scholarly communication reaches the wider world, Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team primarily supports our campus faculty, staff, and students in their work and studies. If you have questions about topics related to scholarly communication, making your past or current projects Open Access, or would like to include your materials on our institutional repository ISU ReD, contact Milner Library’s Scholarly Communication Team at isured@ilstu.edu.
