Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In the past few decades, interest has increased concerning the future of formal scholarly communication and scholarly publishing in light of the recent changes in information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Waltham, 2010; Oppenheim et al. , 2000; Borgman, 2000; Bohlin, 2004). Many scholars believed that ICTs would change the current scholarly publishing and dissemination practices by replacing traditional publishing platforms with new formal and informal publishing platforms. Therefore, it was suggested that publishers were moving quickly toward the use of the Internet as a platform for the distribution of their research, making the boundaries between formal and informal literature non-existent (Bohlin, 2004; Hurd, 2000; Stewart et al. , 2013).
Interestingly, the Internet was also thought to lead the publishing world and provide academia with great resources, a threat to the existence of the traditional publisher (Oppenheim et al. , 2000). However, despite this optimistic belief, recent studies found that there is no noticeable change in scholarly publishing practices. For all scholars, the only motivation to publish and disseminate their research through formal channels is to improve their academic career (Mulligan and Mabe, 2011; Procter et al. , 2010).
This paper reports findings of a study conducted on a theoretical sample of 40 researchers at 4 universities in the UK regarding the change in their scholarly publishing activities, informal publishing, factors that affect the researchers' decision on scholarly communication and the use of informal channels in dissemination.
Literature review
Regarding the use of ICTs, particularly Web 2.0, in scholarly communication, it was found that these technologies allow scholars, research groups, publishers and institutions, such as universities, to publish, disseminate, review and retrieve scholarly research. In addition, the open access movement, followed by institutional repositories as a medium to publish articles, created optimism for the future of scholarly publishing. For instance, Lynch (2003) argued that the importance of open access would be that it could serve as an instrument for restructuring the current economics of scholarly publishing. Notably, the movement toward open access initiated discussion regarding the acceptance among researchers to publish in open access journals. Chen et al. (2009) assumed that scholars would be more likely to publish and use open access publications if these open access journals could be recognized and accepted by...