Digital Scholarship: Exploration of Strategies and Skills for Knowledge Creation and Dissemination

Abstract

Abstract— Widespread access to digital technologies has enabled digital scholars to access, create, share, and disseminate academic contents in innovative and diversified ways. Today academic teams in different places can collaborate in virtual environments by conducting scholarly work on the Internet. Two relevant dimensions that have been deeply affected by the emergence of digital scholarship are new facets of knowledge generation (wikis, e-science, online education, distributed R&D, open innovation, open science, peer-based production, online encyclopaedias, user generated content) and new models of knowledge circulation and distribution (e-journals, open repositories, open licenses, academic podcasting initiatives, etc.). This paper provides a review of existing frameworks which have been proposed so far to get a grip on digital scholarship and address the following questions: -What strategies are followed by digital scholars to interdisciplinarily (co)create, curate and translate their ideas on the Internet? - How do digital scholars spread their ideas on the Internet? - What set of key skills need to be learned (and updated) by scholars who actively create and/or disseminate academic knowledge through the Internet? Despite the potential transformation of these novel practices and mechanisms of knowledge production and distribution, some authors suggest that digital scholarship can only be of significance if it marks a radical break in scholarship practices brought about through the possibilities enabled in new technologies. This paper address some of the key challenges and raise a set of recommendations to foster the development of key skills, new models of collaboration and cross-disciplinary cooperation between digital scholars.