Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination, and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books, and conference papers.

There are many issues with scholarly communication, which include authors' rights, the peer review process, the economics of scholarly resources, new models of publishing (including open access and institutional repositories), rights and access to federally funded research, and preservation of intellectual assets.

Common methods of scholarly communication include publishing peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, academic monographs and books, book reviews, and conference papers. Other textual formats used include preprints and working papers, reports, encyclopedias, dictionaries, data and visualisations, blogs and discussion forums. Other forms, particularly in the arts and humanities include multimedia formats such as sound and video recordings.

The modern research author requires a reliable and standardized method to make research data available to other members of their community. This need has resulted in the development of a new form of scholarly communication known as data publishing. The process involves making data accessible, reusable and citable for long term use and is more elaborate than simply providing access to a data file. Data is becoming an important element of scholarship as a sharable source to be reused and shared. The same data can be accessed by multiple researchers to ask new questions or to replicate research for verification and augmentation. Categories of data differ among disciplines, as does its accessibility. Many publications have begun to offer incentives to scholarly researchers to publish their data and have developed the necessary infrastructure in support of e-research. Technical, policy, and institutional factors are becoming more established. The next phase will see the integration of the process into a standardized data publishing methodology.

There are several types of data that researchers must to protect when collecting, handling, storing and sharing data to safeguard the confidentiality of contributors. There are three primary types of information. Personally identifiable information includes any data that allows the identity of an individual to whom the information applies to be realistically deduced by either direct or indirect means. Protected health information includes individually identifiable health information transmitted or maintained in any form or medium by a covered entity. Other sensitive information that should be protected include data that if it were disclosed would have a significant likelihood to cause psychological, social, emotional, physical, or reputation harm. A common approach for data sharing that includes confidential material is through de-identification or anonymization. There are numerous techniques for the de-identification of data including simply removing specific variables or by using statistical techniques such as top-coding, collapsing or combining, sampling, swapping, or disturbing the data. For qualitative data, redaction can be used to hide data elements that cannot be made public. However, it is important that future research requirements be taken into consideration when developing a de-identification or anonymization plan.

A key element of the scholarly communication process is ensuring that research meets a level of quality and is of scholarly merit. This is normally done through a process of peer review, where other researchers in the same discipline review the research write up and decide if it is of sufficient quality. For example, in the case of a journal article, the author(s) of a piece of research will submit their article to a journal, it will then be sent to a number of other academics who specialize in the same area to be peer reviewed. The journal will often receive many more articles than there is space to publish them, and it is in their interest to publish only those of the highest quality (which will over time increase the reputation of the journal). If the reviewers feel the article is of a high enough quality for the journal, they will often request some changes to be made and once these are done, accept the article for publication.

Libraries and librarians play a critical role in the aggregation, evaluation and dissemination of scholarly communication. The Scholarly Communication Toolkit was designed by the Research and Scholarly Environment Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to support advocacy efforts designed to transform the scholarly communication landscape.

The future of research libraries will be shaped by broader developments at research universities in the areas of creating, sharing, disseminating, and curating knowledge. Universities face fundamental policy choices in all of the areas that have been recast by developments in information technology. Current trends in digital scholarship practices across the humanities, science, and social science have significant implications for research libraries in academic institutions as a means of framing policy choices.