Scholarly communication: a discipline that should be promoted

Abstract

Scholarly Communication is the name given to a wide field of activities related to the different ways in which the authors of academic works publish and disseminate their results. It includes tasks whose connections to this publication are not only direct, but mutually influenced. These are the tasks of dissemination, treatment, analysis, and information retrieval, such as those carried out by databases and other agents. But the issue goes even further and other activities must be added, equally interconnected, such as preservation and increased visibility, along with specialized actions carried out by university libraries. It is concluded that academic communication, despite its breadth and diversity (or precisely because of it), should be studied by a unified discipline that, thanks to a holistic vision, helps to overcome its main problems. This paper presents some of these problems and defends the need for both the field of activities itself and the discipline that studies them to receive a clearer and more determined impulse.