The Library Concierge Project at Stanford University

To meet the challenge of ensuring that library staff and scholars/patrons are aware of the full range of resources and services offered through the library, the Stanford University Libraries initiated a Library Concierge Project in November of 2011. This article describes the program and provides an assessment of how well the Library Concierge Project has met its goals of promoting a service-focused culture and educating staff. A description of the concierge concept in action is also provided, along with anecdotal evidence of the impact of the project on supported scholars

A Grand Challenges-Based Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication and Information Science [MIT Grand Challenge PubPub Participation Platform]

Identifying Grand Challenges A global and multidisciplinary community of stakeholders came together in March 2018 to identify, scope, and prioritize a common vision for specific grand research challenges related to the fields of information science and scholarly communications. The participants included domain researchers in academia, practitioners, and those who are aiming to democratize scholarship. An explicit goal of the summit was to identify research needs related to barriers in the development of scalable, interoperable, socially beneficial, and equitable systems for scholarly information; and to explore the development of non-market approaches to governing the scholarly knowledge ecosystem. To spur discussion and exploration, grand challenge provocations were suggested by participants and framed into one of three sections: scholarly discovery, digital curation and preservation, and open scholarship. A few people participated in three segments, but most only attended discussions around a single topic. To create the guest list of desired participants within our three workshop target areas we invited a distribution of expertise providing diversity across several facets. In addition to having expertise in the specific focus area, we aimed for the participants in each track to be diverse across sectors, disciplines, and regions of the world. Each track had approximately 20-25 people from different parts of the world—including the United States, European Union, South Africa, and India. Domain researchers brought perspectives from a range of scientific disciplines, while practitioners brought perspectives from different roles (drawn from commercial, non-profit, and governmental sectors). Notwithstanding, we were constrained by our social networks, and by the location of the workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts— and most of the participants were affiliated with US and European institutions. During our discussions, it quickly became clear that the grand challenges themselves cannot be neatly categorized into discovery, curation and preservation, and open scholarship—or even, for that matter, limited to library science and information sciences. Several cross-cutting themes emerged, such as a strong need to include underrepresented voices and communities outside of mainstream publishing and academic institutions, a need to identify incentives that will motivate people to make changes in their own approaches and processes toward a more open and trusted framework, and a need to identify collaborators and partners from multiple disciplines in order to build strong programs. The discussions were full of energy, insights, and enthusiasm for inclusive participation—and concluded with a desire for a global call to action to spark changes that will enable more equitable and open scholarship. Some important and productive tensions surfaced in our discussions, particularly around the best paths forward on the challenges we identified. On many core topics, however, there was widespread agreement among participants, especially on the urgent need to address the exclusion of knowledge production and access of so many people around the globe, and the troubling overrepresentation in the scholarly record of white, male, English-language voices. Ultimately, all agreed that we have an obligation to better enrich and greatly expand this space so that our communities can be catalysts for change. Towards a more inclusive, open, equitable, and sustainable scholarly knowledge ecosystem: Vision; Broadest impacts; Recommendations for broad impact. Research landscape: Challenges, threats, and barriers; Challenges to participation in the research community; Restrictions on forms of knowledge; Threats to integrity and trust; Threats to the durability of knowledge; Threats to individual agency; Incentives to sustain a scholarly knowledge ecosystem that is inclusive, equity, trustworthy, and sustainable; Grand Challenges research areas; Recommendations for research areas and programs. Targeted research questions, research challenges: Legal economic, policy, and organizational design for enduring, equitable, open scholarship; Measuring, predicting, and adapting to use and utility across scholarly communities; Designing and governing algorithms in the scholarly knowledge ecosystem to support accountability, credibility, and agency; Integrating oral and tacit knowledge into the scholarly knowledge ecosystem. Integrating research, practice, and policy: The need for leadership to coordinate research, policy, and practice initiatives; Role of libraries and archives as advocates and collaborators; Incorporating values of openness, sustainability, and equity into scholarly infrastructure and practice; Funders, catalysts, and coordinators; Recommendations for integrating research, practice, and policy

Support for the Research Process, an academic library manifesto

When we shift our attention from 'save libraries' to 'save scholarship', the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works' [adapted from Clay Shirky]OCLC Research (Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio, USA); Research Libraries Grou

Gender Mistakes and Inequality

In nearly every interaction, we sex categorize one another. This simple, unconscious, and ubiquitous act of categorizing someone as male or female has been shown to contribute to the creation and conservation of a variety of kinds of gender inequality. This dissertation examines the impact of gender mistakes – situations where an actor becomes aware that someone they assumed was male is female (or vice-versa) – on the behaviors and attitudes of the person who made the mistake. Results of this experimental research indicate that individuals who have mistakenly classified someone as the “wrong” sex, and interacted with that person on the basis of that mistake before learning of their mistake, are less likely to use sex as a basis for categorization in a subsequent situation. These results indicate that gender mistakes could contribute to a reduction in gender inequality through decreased individual reliance on sex categorization by those who have experienced a situation where they became aware of having sex categorized someone incorrectly

Accelerating the Adoption of Open Science

Panelists: - Arianna Becerril-García (Redalyc) - Ana Persic (UNESCO

Open Access at MIT and Beyond: A White Paper of the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research

MIT researchers, students, and staff have long valued and put into action MIT’s mission to generate and disseminate knowledge by openly and freely sharing research and educational materials. Indeed, the Institute has been at the forefront of the sharing culture: MIT launched OpenCourseWare (OCW), a free webbased publication of virtually all MIT course content in 2001; in 2002 released DSpace, an open-source platform for managing research materials and publications co-created by MIT Libraries staff; and adopted the first campus-wide faculty open access (OA) policy in the US in 2009. Convening an open access task force was one of the 10 recommendations presented in the 2016 preliminary report of the Future of Libraries Task Force. In July 2017, Provost Martin Schmidt appointed the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research (OA task force) to recommend ways that MIT’s OA policies can be revised and updated “to support MIT’s mission to disseminate the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.” The OA task force is co-chaired by Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Hal Abelson and Director of Libraries Chris Bourg, and includes a diverse and multidisciplinary group of faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students (see Appendix A). The term “open access” as used by the task force comes from the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative and refers to research literature (typically journal articles) that is immediately, freely available on the public internet: Anyone would be able to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”1 That said, open access is applied in different ways; i.e., OA doesn’t always imply that you can reuse research articles for “any lawful purpose.” Articles may be cost-free to read but still subject to publisher policies that limit other uses. Educational materials, data, and code, which MIT researchers routinely create and release publicly, may also be made openly available under different terms. Open access may have begun simply because the web allowed for easy sharing, but it has evolved into a complex movement with political, social, and economic dimensions. The scholarly journal publishing system is unique in that researchers contribute their articles with no expectation of payment; at the same time, some publishers charge ever-increasing subscription fees, restrict authors’ rights to reuse work, or both. Variations in the type of open access that will help “fix” the system are at the heart of debates among researchers, funders, librarians, and publishers. This white paper is the first deliverable of the OA task force. Its goal is to give MIT students, staff, and faculty an overview of the open access landscape at MIT, in the United States, and in Europe to help inform discussions at the Institute over the next year. These discussions, which will take place at community forums and in other venues, including the task force idea bank, will help inform the task force as it develops a set of recommendations across a broad spectrum of scholarly outputs, including articles and books, data, educational materials, and code. Part I of this paper provides an overview of current OA policies and movements in Europe and the United States as a way to give broader context to what open access means in practice internationally. Part II explores MIT researchers’ approaches in terms of making their publications, data, code, and educational materials openly available

DLF Liberal Arts Colleges Preconference : introduction and keynote

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