The changing landscape of research, open access, managing information and intellectual property rights has added a sense of earnestness to the need to define the library’s role in scholarly communication.
A definition is: scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs. (ACRL, 2003). Thus it is about the creation of scholarly work and not the conversion of scholarly work.