The term "scholarly communication" is a very broad term. It can cover everything from two scholars conversing between themselves, to discussion boards, to print and online journals and more. Furthermore, scholarly communication impacts almost every facet of academic life. Scholars often collaborate when writing for publication, tenure and promotion boards rate scholars in part on service and publication, and scholars keep themselves current on events happening in their fields of expertise. Thus, when examining scholarly communication as impacted by information networks, there are many ways of approaching the subject.

Our group has defined scholarly communication, for the purposes of our presentation, as follows:

Scholarly communication is the circulation and authorization of knowledge amongst professionals within academic disciplinary and transdisciplinary activity networks. The products of scholarly com-munication are made publicly accessible and open to critique by peers. They are intended to advance a discourse within a scholarly community that includes credentialed individuals within and (in some cases) outside of the academy.

We have chosen to look at a few of the many ways in which information networks impact scholarly communication. Tom examined the influence of digitization on scholarly publishing, while Steve looked into the economics of electronic scholarly publishing. David reviewed copyright law, Lexie covered the user's perspecitve of scholarly publishing, and Cherie examined the effects of electronic scholarly communication on tenure and promotion. Finally, Darren covered some areas of concern in inter-networking information.

The issues we discuss: