Sustainability and innovation in scholarly communication

By Kathleen Shearer

Sustainability - Implies a holistic approach to addressing problems that takes into account multiple dimensions including ecology, society and economics, recognizing that all of these dimensions must be considered together to find lasting prosperity

Innovation - the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, unarticulated needs, or existing market needs

The access problem

Bid deals lock-ins

Slide from Stéphanie Gagnon, Université de Montréal Libraries (and thanks to Richard Dumont and Vincent Lariviere)

5Slide from Laura Czerniewicz presentation at OR 2016 in Dublin

But it’s not just problem of access…

The participation problem

Juan Pablo Alperin: http://jalperin.github.io/d3-cartogram/

The pressure to publish in "luxury" journals

encourages researchers to cut corners and

pursue trendy fields of science instead of

doing more important work.

“Today, academics from Ecuador try to walk

under a journals culture that will have little

impact on the knowledge of our reality and,

instead, will have high impact aimed at

satisfying external markers and personal

egos.”

Translated from Spanish by Dominique Babini

Fernando Carrión, FLACSO

“La academia revistera” 12/April/2014

“Openness is not simply

about gaining access to

knowledge, but about the

right to participate in the

knowledge production

process, driven by issues

that are of local relevance,

rather than research

agendas set elsewhere or

from the top down”

Leslie Chan

The other problems…

YES!

The top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers

published in 2013.

Former President of Elsevier clearly delineates the fact that the publishers' power lies in their ability to make "kings” out of researchers(Jean-Claude Guédon)

Sir Timothy Gowers “perverse incentives”

It’s a vicious cycle

Research evaluation and P&T decisions

based on IF and high citations

Cultivate research projects that are hot topics and of global

interest

Publish in English in a

prestige journal

Enjoy fame, fortune, and fawning by

colleagues and others

Receive more funding for

more research

A solutionTo reposition the institution (and the library) as the centre of a scholarly communications and a

global knowledge commons

Lorcan Dempsey’s “Inside-out library”

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• The traditional library was built on an "outside-in" model: information materials were brought to the institution and made available for use.

• But, our environment has now changed. We live in an age of information abundance and transaction costs are reduced on the web. This makes the locally assembled collection less central. At the same time, institutions are generating new forms of data—research data, learning materials, preprints, videos, expertise profiles, etc.—which they wish to share with others.

These need to be managed and disclosed, as an "inside-out" perspective becomes more interesting.

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MIT Future of Libraries Report

We see repositories as the tools to actualize this vision

Repositories are nodes in a larger network, contributing their collective contents to a global knowledge commons on top of which value added services can be built.

Dual mission:

1. “Showcase” and provide access to institutional research

2. Nodes in a global knowledge commons21

Next Generation Repositories Working Group (launched in April 2016)

Eloy Rodrigues, chair (COAR, Portugal)

Andrea Bollini (4Science, Italy)

Alberto Cabezas (LA Referencia, Chile)

Donatella Castelli (OpenAIRE/CNR, Italy)

Les Carr (Southampton University, UK)

Leslie Chan (University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada)

Chuck Humphrey (Portage, Canada)

Rick Johnson (SHARE/University of Notre Dame, US)

Petr Knoth (Open University, UK)

Paolo Manghi (CNR, Italy)

Lazarus Matizirofa (NRF, South Africa)

Pandelis Perakakis (Open Scholar, Spain)

Jochen Schirrwagen (University of Bielefeld, Germany)

Daisy Selematsela (NRF, South Africa)

Kathleen Shearer (COAR, Canada)

Tim Smith (CERN, Switzerland)

Herbert Van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory, US)

Paul Walk (EDINA, UK)

David Wilcox (Duraspace/Fedora, Canada)

Kazu Yamaji (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

Draft Conceptual ModelDraft conceptual modelBy Rick Johnson, Notre Dame University, United States

“Vague but interesting…”

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Open peer review

Recommender systems

Standard usage statistics

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By Petr Knoth, Open University, UK

To support these services, we need to improve the functionality of repositories

-To be of, not just on the web-Global interoperability (exposing content in a standardized way)-Pro-active repositories-To support development of value added networked services

Next Generation Repositories

Our vision involves more that just articles

All the valuable products of research should be shared!

The case of a distributed, public

infrastructure

• It can better support the needs and of diverse regions, disciplines and languages

• Redundancy is a safeguards against failure

• Not at risk be commercial buy-out

• Places the library at the centre

But, a distributed approach is more challenging in terms of a common vision, coordination and branding

What we need to achieve the vision?

1. Address the issues of journal-based impact measures

2. A plan to incremental shift of money away from big publishers

3. Invest in the “inside our library” + value added network services

4. Promote widespread interoperability, alignment and international buy-in!

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30Australasia, Canada, China, Europe, Japan, Latin America, South Africa, United States

Let’s work together

It’s time to act or we will be left behind

Thank you!