The past few decades have witnessed profound changes in science, scientific communication, and scientific scholarly journals. The dichotomy between greater specialization and big science has been increasing and is expected to continue to do so. Scientific research is also becoming more multidisciplinary, often involving many in-depth specialties coupled with more collaboration among universities, government and industry, and extending across national borders. Science education has also changed as more faculty teach and collaborate across disciplines, departments, and universities. Faculty and students alike are using new technologies extensively for teaching and learning, and research opportunities are increasingly incorporated into undergraduate curricula. Research results are often communicated rapidly to the public through traditional media and the Internet with both positive and negative consequences, the latter occurring when the results and/or conclusions are later found to be invalid. Some of these changes are a manifestation of new communication technologies; but such changes also create the need for new ways of communicating, which must be carefully explored.Introduction
Learning is fundamental to science, whether directly through research and discovery or through education and other forms of lifelong learning, and communicafion is at the heart of learning. We can learn by acquiring information and developing appropriate understandings. But learning can also result from the creativity associated with the thought processes needed to organize and explain our ideas through writing or personal discourse. Many have agreed with Garvey (1979) that communication is the "essence of science." Our studies have shown that information is one, if not the most important, resource used for performing research, teaching, and other scientific endeavors, and it is also the principal output of scientists" work that is communicated to others. Scientists spend a large proportion of their time communicating, and some evidence suggests that the proportion has increased from approximately 43 percent in the early 1960s to over 50 percent in recent years. Even though the total time spent communicating is consistently high among different types of scientists, the ways in which they communicate vary dramatically.
Scientists typically communicate by receiving information through such modes as observing, reading, and listening and by sending information through talking, writing, and creating images. This communication is accomplished through a number of communication channels including conferences and their proceedings, journal articles, and books. Each such channel can involve numerous distribution means (e.g., journal articles are communicated through personal subscriptions, local and remote library access, and preprints, reprints and photocopies provided by authors and colleagues) and several media (e.g., journals are found in paper, CD-ROM, online and microform). Together, the combination of channel distribution means and media form an extensive and complex pattern of information flow.
It is abundantly clear that individual scientists communicate using a variety of modes and channels, but the extent to which they are used varies among scientists, depending on their individual learning styles and abilities, the field of science, the type of work (e.g., basic or applied research, teaching), and other factors. Communication patterns are also a function of requirements for channel attributes such as information content accuracy, comprehensiveness and currentness, as well as, availability, accessibility, and costs. Because information needs and requirements differ, scientific communication has evolved into the multitude of modes, channels, distribution means, and media-each establishing an important niche in an array of communication processes that help scientists more effectively create, communicate, and use scientific information.
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