Open is not enough! Sustainability, inclusiveness, and innovation in scholarly communication

This keynote presentation for Northeast Institutional Repository Day 2019 by Kathleen Shearer looks at scholarly communication and a system of next-generation open repositories through the lens of sustainability, inclusiveness, and innovation. Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), an international association of repository initiatives with a membership of over 140 institutions worldwide from 40 countries on all 5 continents. COAR’s aim is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access repositories based on international collaboration and interoperability. Shearer has been working in the area of open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for over 15 years. She has been the Executive Director of COAR since 2015, and participates in numerous other organizations in Canada and internationally. She has been an active member of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and is co-chair of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group, “Long Tail of Research Data”. Shearer is also a research associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and was instrumental in launching the Portage Initiative in Canada, a library-based research data management network

Opening Keynote: Working Together to Build and Sustain a Global Knowledge Commons

The widespread deployment of repository systems in higher education and research institutions provides the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication. However, repository platforms are still using technologies and protocols designed almost twenty years ago, before the boom of the Web and the dominance of Google, social networking, semantic web and ubiquitous mobile devices. This is, in large part, why repositories have not fully realized their potential and function mainly as passive recipients of the final versions of their users’ conventionally published research outputs. In order to leverage the value of the repository network, we need to equip it with a wider array of roles and functionalities, which can be enabled through new levels of web-centric interoperability. In November 2017, COAR published the recommendations for the next generation of repositories. The vision for this work is “to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community.” In this presentation, Kathleen Shearer will present the current international context for scholarly communication, outline her vision for a more sustainable and equitable system for scholarly communication, present the recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Report, and discuss the key issues and challenges involved with moving forward

Repository Networks: Past, Present and Future

Repositories represent critical infrastructure for open science / open scholarship. They preserve and provide access to a wide range of valuable research and educational resources, including articles, pre-prints, research data, images, software, and so on. However, the value of any individual repository is greatly enhanced when it becomes part of a distributed network, enabling resources to be more discoverable, linked with other related content, and part of the larger international corpus of international research. This article discusses the evolution of repository networks since the early 2000s and presents the current vision of the COAR Next Generation Repository Initiative to significantly enhance the networking capabilities of repositories.Peer Reviewe

Promoting Open Knowledge and Open Science: Report of the Current State of Repositories

This briefing paper presents an overview of the international repository landscape. The paper has been produced by COAR on behalf of the Aligning Repository Networks Committee, a group of senior representatives from repository networks around the world. While principally intended for the Global Research Council (GRC), the paper has also been written with a broader audience in mind. Over the last 20 years, open access repositories have been implemented around the world and are now fairly widespread across all regions. Repositories provide open access (OA) to research publications and other materials and enable the local management and preservation of research outputs. They are a key infrastructure component supporting the growing number of open access policies and laws, the majority of which recommend or require deposit of articles into an OA repository

Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action!

Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem, including scholarly communications. Diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation measures will allow the scholarly communication system to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs, and research topics that support the needs and epistemic pluralism of different research communities. In addition, diversity reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which inevitably leads to monopoly, monoculture, and high prices. Bibliodiversity has been in steady decline for decades.1 Far from promoting diversity, the dominant “ecosystem” of scholarly publishing today increasingly resembles what Vandana Shiva (1993) has called the “monocultures of the mind”2, characterized by the homogenization of publication formats and outlets that are largely owned by a small number of multinational publishers who are far more interested in profit maximization than the health of the system. Yet, a diverse scholarly communications system is essential for addressing the complex challenges we face. As we transition to open access and open science, there is an opportunity to reverse this decline and foster greater diversity in scholarly communications; what the Jussieu Call refers to as bibliodiversity3. Bibliodiversity, by its nature, cannot be pursued through a single, unified approach, however it does require strong coordination in order to avoid a fragmented and siloed ecosystem. Building on the principles outlined in the Jussieu Call, this paper explores the current state of diversity in scholarly communications, and issues a call for action, specifying what each community can do individually and collectively to support greater bibliodiversity in a more intentional fashion

Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action!

Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem, including scholarly communications. Diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation measures will allow the scholarly communication system to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs, and research topics that support the needs and epistemic pluralism of different research communities. In addition, diversity reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which inevitably leads to monopoly, monoculture, and high prices. Bibliodiversity has been in steady decline for decades.1 Far from promoting diversity, the dominant “ecosystem” of scholarly publishing today increasingly resembles what Vandana Shiva (1993) has called the “monocultures of the mind”2, characterized by the homogenization of publication formats and outlets that are largely owned by a small number of multinational publishers who are far more interested in profit maximization than the health of the system. Yet, a diverse scholarly communications system is essential for addressing the complex challenges we face. As we transition to open access and open science, there is an opportunity to reverse this decline and foster greater diversity in scholarly communications; what the Jussieu Call refers to as bibliodiversity3. Bibliodiversity, by its nature, cannot be pursued through a single, unified approach, however it does require strong coordination in order to avoid a fragmented and siloed ecosystem. Building on the principles outlined in the Jussieu Call, this paper explores the current state of diversity in scholarly communications, and issues a call for action, specifying what each community can do individually and collectively to support greater bibliodiversity in a more intentional fashion

Time to Adopt: Librarians’ New Skills and Competency Profiles

On the one hand, libraries are at the forefront of the digital transformation and digital information infrastructures, on the other, they manage and curate cultural heritage collections. This brings about new ways of engagement with information and knowledge and the need to rethink skills and competency profiles – which enable librarians to support e-research all along the research cycle. This paper presents findings of the joint Task Force on Librarians’ Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication