How to practically apply values-driven scholarship to producers and systems that advance open scholarship has been a puzzle. In the Educopia Institute white paper Encouraging Adherence to Values and Principles: A Case for Assessment Strategies, the authors examine over 100 “principles and values” statements from academic institutions and how they relate to scholarly publishing service providers. Institutional reward systems and commercial publishing interests have driven a wedge between professed academic values and publishing practices. This paper provides an annotated inventory of categorized values statements and offers lessons from them, including that specificity more often leads to effective action. The Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project takes the adherence challenge one step further with its Values and Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist which has been recently issued for public review through September 30th. The Checklist concretizes an approach to assessing values and principles with specific indicators and examples. As the Framework and Checklist evolve, they will provide very useful models for our Libraries’ efforts to evaluate content and infrastructure service providers according to our stated values.
