Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation

Northwestern University Library's Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Curation supports Northwestern scholars through active exploration of new models for disseminating research results, and by developing programs to support long-term retention and reuse of the scholarly output of the University. 

Scholarly Communication

Scholarly communication is the process by which scholars create, evaluate, and share the results of their research and creative work. In recent years, traditional forms of scholarly communication have become less economically sustainable as access restrictions and the high price of journals present barriers to maintaining an open and cost-effective system. Today, with common acceptance of digital publishing, scholarly communication concerns have broadened beyond journal costs to include issues affecting content creation and dissemination—copyright, author's rights, open access, self-archiving, peer review, collaboration. For more, please visit our Guide to Scholarly Communication.

Digital Curation

Digital curation describes a range of activities to manage, protect, share, and preserve digital content, both born-digital and converted from physical formats. Many academic fields are being completely transformed by widespread availability of digital information and computing power. Digital humanities and escience are examples of emerging communities of practice that seek to understand and respond to the special challenges--infrastructural, policy, and intellectual--of working with very large collections of digital information. Dedicating new effort to address these challenges is a natural extension of the library's traditional mission to preserve knowledge, to share knowledge, and to support the creation of new knowledge. The Center will serve as an anchor for collaborations to connect library professionals, with decades of information management expertise, to the faculty and data specialists working to devise digital curation services.   

For More Information

Information about the Center—its services, resources, events, and affiliates—can be found on this website and in this printable one-page document (PDF). In addition, the Center publishes a blog, posts on Twitter, and saves bookmarks on Delicious. Questions and requests for consultation can be directed to the Center director, Claire Stewart, Head, Digital Collections and Scholarly Communication Services, and via email at cscdc@northwestern.edu.