The scholarly record has become more and more restricted over the past 40 years and as a result, its future viability is imperiled. To change this course, Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A call to action notes: “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.” This call to action describes the problems and outlines actions to take by researchers; funders and institutions; infrastructure providers; libraries, consortia and library associations; and policy makers. One of these recommended actions, among several others, is for funders and institutions to endorse the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Stay tuned for more discussions about DORA in the coming months.
Fostering Bibliodiversity is a good companion publication to the Future of Scholarly Communication and Publishing in the 21st Century (recording) webinar. Heather Joseph of SPARC, Kathleen Fitzpatrick of Michigan State/Humanities Commons and John Willbanks of SAGE Biomedical Division discussed the strong imperative for scholar-owned, principle-based, shared open scholarship demonstrated by the COVID-19 crisis. They described characteristics of a global ecosystem with examples that enable equitable access for contributors and users: real-time and open exchange of processes/methodologies, data, analysis, review prior to and through publication; open infrastructure with shared governance; and partnerships and collaborations that are in service of a common good, rather than a sales business model.
