Scholarly Communications

In this Unit, you have learnt about different aspects of scholarly communication – particularly its genesis, importance and ethics of academic publishing, and different communication channels available in academic publishing. Some of these channels are commonly described as primary sources as they provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. There is also existence of secondary sources. Indexing and abstracting services are usually a kind of secondary sources helping the academic researchers in literature search and discovering primary literature available in academic journals and other worthwhile research literature. Historically, scientific journals were initiated by learned societies and other scholarly communities for reporting results of concluded research work s or scientific discoveries. Now many for-profit publishers have started publishing research journals. The emergence of interactive online databases and online gateways of primary literature marks arrival of personalized web-based services for disseminating scholarly literature to global researchers, institutions and prospective authors.