While we have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information. Their behavior, undertaken without consultation or attendance at formal academic events, urgently forces those of us in scholarly publishing to confront some fundamental questions about our organizations, jobs, and assumptions about our work.

Most students today arrive at college assuming that a Google search is the first choice for doing research, that MySpace is the model for creating online content and building peer communities, and — perhaps most important — that multitasking with various electronic devices, often from remote locations, is the traditional way to do class work. The implications of those changes must transform our publishing strategies.

If "digital natives" are the next audience for our scholarly resources, shouldn't we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver our content? In fact, is content even what we should be focusing on for this next generation of users, or are the tools, functionality, and access built on top of the content what are of real value?

As publishers, we are going to have to adapt quickly and creatively if we wish to remain true to our missions as information professionals and yet be relevant to users. Are we ready?

Until now we have not only controlled the development of content, but also its discovery and delivery. We can call copyright foul when the books or articles or teaching tools we publish are used in ways we haven't anticipated, and continue business as usual. We can keep our scholarly credentials pure by avoiding any venture that hints of cooperating with a commercial enterprise. We can frown on much of what students do with technology as "entertainment." Or we can think creatively about what comes next for publishing.

Until now we have spent most of our energies in rear-guard actions: fighting Google over copyright infringement in its plans to digitize library books, for example. It's time to think "beyond Google."

Going forward, our work must take a more experimental turn. We need to get serious about developing online publications that allow students to freely explore the vast array of content and tools available through the World Wide Web, while still allowing an appropriate level of guidance concerning how to select and evaluate the sources that they find. And we must look at methods to deliver and store content in ways that allow students to use their remote devices to access it and that work through and enhance the online communities where they spend so much of their time.

To develop those, we need to initiate conversations with new players and new partners.

In essence, the old model of working in a publishing industry that operates independently from other sectors of the information community is no longer effective. The concept of competing with those other industries and players for dominance in the user market has become not only pointless but also destructive, to our own organizations and to the information environment as a whole.

Soon online-gaming companies, commercial search engines, manufacturers of electronic devices, and high-school students will become our advisers and collaborators. To understand the world in which students live and work, our market research will include arranging focus groups with teenagers, purchasing (and playing) video games, and observing college, high-school, and middle-school students socializing, studying, and relaxing.

One strategy we could pursue involves meeting users on their own turf. Since we know that students are spending more and more time in social-networking environments like MySpace and Facebook, building complex communities and sharing musings and opinions on everything from new bands to favorite books, let's form a partnership with one of those companies to build a networking space focusing on the information needs of students. Such a site could enable dialogue and collaboration among its users, discussion of readings, and creation of multimedia class projects. Faculty members and librarians could create profiles of their own, with commentary on the subject under discussion, and users could decide how to integrate the content and tools we provide into the environment they create for themselves.

Another potential partnership involves working with a commercial search engine to create edited, peer-reviewed content sections that could be found when exploring a specific topic. Publishers with editorial strength in a particular field — public health, say, or Arabic language, or regional history — could contract to build content portals in those topics for specific types and levels of readers, using their skills to identify, review, edit, and design the special sections and accompanying tools for the search engines. The search engines would benefit through improving their services and being able to promote the quality of what users discover; instead of worrying about that quality, publishers could help shape it — and be paid for their work and related products.

A third model involves online gaming, which is already beginning to attract significant attention among students and professionals. With their rich role-playing environments that fascinate so many players, games can be a powerful vehicle for learning. Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require participants to develop skills in leadership, strategic thinking, team building, conflict management, and problem solving — skills valued in teaching students and training professionals in a variety of fields. A partnership with one or more of the gaming companies could shape the next generation of textbooks and professional publications. Users could work as an online team, relying on hand-held devices, to access data and "play" games that, for example, allow them to test leadership styles or develop strategies or take on decision-making roles during a business or foreign-policy crisis.

What all this means is that the lines between scholarly publishing and commercial ventures are blurring. Too many skills are required to meet the needs of our new users alone: We cannot be software developers, educators, librarians, search-engine specialists, and designers of commercial Web sites all by ourselves.

Thus a number of things are clear: First, partnerships are the critical element in developing effective and relevant resources for the next generation of information users. Second, we need to face the fact that commercial search engines are now the mechanism of choice for finding information, and we desperately need Google and other powerful players in the search-engine field to help users find our content and services. We must begin treating such players as valued partners with whom we will negotiate effective ways of collaborating that benefit our businesses and our users. Finally, we know users are becoming used to communicating in sophisticated, interactive, and collaborative online environments, and therefore that the traditional forms for publishing content are at risk of becoming irrelevant if they do not evolve.

Keep in mind that we are all mutually dependent, and that no group is in a position to dictate the discussions or the outcomes: Search engines need the content provided by publishers and libraries to provide a high-quality experience for users; libraries need stable, robust technology platforms, wide use of their collections, and growing communities of new users; scholars and students need more effective access to information and the skills to determine its quality and value. So it is alarming that those groups are so often in conflict that they end up in court rather than at a conference table.

At the moment, it is not clear what the exact models of cooperation will look like. And it is not clear who the leaders who step up to meet the challenge will be. What is clear is that we must identify or, if necessary, recruit such people and place them in positions of leadership and authority in the scholarly-publishing field.

To move forward, we will need the ability to understand our users and their changing behavior, a willingness to experiment with new business models, and an appreciation of hybrid organizations that take advantage of skills contributed by various players with diverse backgrounds. Leadership of such a team will require an understanding of each of those players and the value of their contributions, as well as a clear and imaginative view of the future information landscape. It will be difficult. But the next generation will create new models of scholarly publishing whether or not we choose to participate. The only question will be what role we carve out for ourselves.