| Scholars in all fields are taking advantage of the wealth of online information, tools, and services to ask new questions, create new kinds of scholarly products, and reach new audiences. The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data- and information-intensive collaborative research. These developments exist within a rapidly evolving social and policy environment, as relationships shift among scholars, publishers, librarians, universities, funding agencies, businesses, and other stakeholders. Scholarship in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities is evolving, but at different rates and in different ways. While the new technologies receive the most attention, it is the underlying social and policy changes that are most profound and that will have the most lasting effects on the future scholarly environment. This is an opportune moment to think about what we should be building. |
