Roger Schonfeld
Director, Library and Scholarly Communication Program
Ithaka S+R
Donald Waters
Senior Program Officer, Scholarly Communications
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
This session will provide an overview of the development of research workflow platforms, with an emphasis on the strategic implications for the academy. In many laboratory-based and quantitative science and social science fields, discovery of and access to the research literature has migrated largely to a platform-delivered, activity-tracked, analytics-enabled environment. Similar shifts to platforms and tracking are underway in these fields for other components of the researcher workflow, such as data gathering and analysis. In other fields, especially in the humanities, where research is structured around primary sources in a variety of non-quantitative formats and results tend to be reported in monographs rather than journals, online platforms that facilitate end-to-end workflow with activity tracking and analytics have been slow to emerge but are now becoming possible. In addition to the overview that we will provide of this differentiated structure, we hope to engage the audience in a vigorous discussion about the contributions that library leaders, CIOs, and university research executives can make to position their institutions strategically in this emerging dynamic.
