Sustainability of Scholarly Information

Sustainability is an increasingly important subject for universities and their information services. As research projects produce new types of digital outputs, there are new challenges for their long-term storage, access and preservation – challenges that are complicated by short-term staff contracts that often leave no one with responsibility. The growth of Open Access (OA) requirements challenges the economic sustainability of traditional publishing models, whilst recognition of the importance of climate change means that environmental impact increasingly needs to be considered both by individuals and organizations. Chowdhury’s The Sustainability of Scholarly Information comes at a very opportune moment, designed as it is to encourage both discussion of and research into the sustainability of information amongst information science researchers.

Chowdhury considers three dimensions of the sustainability of scholarly information: economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability. Following an introduction to the work and an overview of the three dimensions of sustainability in Chapters 1 and 2, Chapters 3-5 consider each of the three dimensions in turn. Chapters 6 and 7 give attention to two particularly important issues in sustainability: print vs digital content, and Open Access. Chapters 8 and 9 provide conceptual models for sustainable OA and green information services. Chapters 10 and 11 consider the sustainability of information access and information models. Chapter 12 considers the current state of research on sustainability.

This is a wide-ranging book, possibly too wide ranging. Whilst the need for an integrated approach to the topic of sustainability is persuasive, the difficulty of such integration is aptly shown by a work which occasionally feels disjointed, for example, as you find yourself stepping from a detailed breakdown of the calculation of greenhouse gases in one chapter to a detailed breakdown of the types of files in OA repositories in the next. The wide scope of the book also means that Chowdhury’s often-optimistic perspective on new technologies and services are not as persuasively supported as they might be. The structure of the book also creates what feels like too much cross-referencing and repetition of ideas as topics are discussed from different perspectives. Some of the models and diagrams are also of questionable value; as George E.P. Box noted, “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. Unfortunately, I am unconvinced of the usefulness of some of Chowdhury’s models.

Despite these criticisms, this is nonetheless an extremely useful introduction to the increasingly important topic of sustainability, and one which will undoubtedly provoke discussion amongst information researchers.