In Pursuit of Equity: Applying Design Thinking to Develop a Values-Based Open Access Statement – In the Library with the Lead Pipe

"On August 2, 2017 Elsevier announced its acquisition of bepress, the academic software firm that produces Digital Commons–an institutional repository platform used by libraries across North America. At the University of Western Ontario, the largest bepress institution in Canada, the news came as a surprise to library staff. Conflicting opinions arose: our users appreciated Digital Commons’ features, but to use an Elsevier product for a repository intended to disseminate open access (OA) works would run contrary to our organizational and professional values. Our professional ethos to support equitable access to scholarship and our professional ideal of user-centred decision making seemed to be in direct opposition to one another. At least, that was the conflict that we anticipated, until we realized that the individual values of Western Libraries’ staff–and subsequently their individual understandings of OA–are not as homogenous as we had first assumed. As Roger C. Schonfeld (2017b) put it, we have over time failed to “align unambiguously on what [our library and its support for OA are] trying to accomplish.” Without a strong foundation, we have consequently failed to create meaningful strategic avenues within our organization to engage with our community around OA, and to achieve our goals related to open scholarship.

As we wrestled with this conflict and emotion, we recognized that we as a library cannot practice according to our values if we do not know what our values are. We confronted head-on our assumption that our organizational values were clear-cut and in stark contrast to users’ needs, which was preventing our ability to respond to Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress. To make an informed decision in the face of the Elsevier acquisition, we needed to provide space for all staff perspectives related to OA to be heard. Only by doing so could we begin to collectively shape an understanding of and strategy for OA. In reality, our values were more nuanced than we had initially anticipated, which is something we only came to realize after providing staff with a space to articulate their perspectives. Throughout this process, we challenged the notion that our organizational policies and practices are an accurate reflection of the values of the entire staff complement. By turning the lens that we use to understand the needs of our users on ourselves, we were able to unpack our individual values and create a meaningful, grassroots policy statement on OA...."