Introduction

Sustainable developments rely on the three pillars of sustainability – economic, social and environmental sustainability – and this chapter discusses various aspects of sustainable communication processes in today's digital age. It proposes an integrated model for study of the sustainability of scholarly communication processes in general, and sustainability of information services in particular. First a generic framework for study of the sustainability of information systems and services is proposed. The model is then used to investigate various factors responsible for the economic, social and environmental sustainability of information systems and services. It is shown that the conceptual model can be used to study the sustainability of the scholarly communication processes in general. The proposed model can also be used to identify factors responsible for the sustainability of any digital library or information service.

The three pillars of sustainable information services

In today's world typical scholarly information systems and services comprise library and information services, commercial journal and database services, open access journals and database services, digital libraries and repositories, and even various search engine services. These services deal with different types of content and data in order to meet the information needs of different types of users and communities. They may be offered or controlled by various institutions, funding bodies and business models; and governed by institutional, national and international regulations and policies. However, as argued throughout this book, in order to achieve sustainability, information systems and services should be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. Various research issues in information science and their implications for the three forms of sustainability are discussed in this chapter.

Scholarly communication processes

Scholarly communication is a process through which research and scholarly outputs are created, peer reviewed and disseminated, and preserved for future use (ARL, 2013). Traditionally a large part of the scholarly communication process is publicly funded. For example, the research and scholarly activities that generate scholarly output are funded by governments or research funding agencies. Such funding usually comes either directly through research and/or dissemination grants or indirectly through staff remuneration in education and research institutions where academics and researchers produce research output as part of their activities.