Future of Scholarly Communications Committee Promotes Equitable, Sustainable Academic Publications at Faculty Senate Meeting | The Cornell Daily Sun

"The Ad Hoc Committee: Future of Scholarly Communications presented at the Wednesday, March 8 Faculty Senate meeting in Schwartz Auditorium at Rockefeller Hall to discuss the effects of large corporations on academic publications. To kick off the meeting, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian Elaine Westbrooks, who serves as the co-chair of the committee, emphasized the significance of Cornell libraries.... Following Westbrooks’s presentation, Prof. K. Max Zhang, engineering, who serves on the University Faculty Library Board, introduced the Ad Hoc Committee: Future of Scholarly Communications. According to Zhang, the committee is made up of roughly 15 members, representing both Cornell’s library system and academic side. The committee details seven charges towards more accessible scholarly journals. Zhang summarizes these charges into four categories — assessing the current publishing model, evaluating new publishing models, identifying the University’s role in new models and reporting to the faculty about the problems of for-profit publishing.... “I want to be clear that I do not believe that publishers are inherently evil, or bad,” Westbrooks said. “What I really want to bring home is the fact that this is not good for science, it’s not good for scholarship and it’s not good for innovation to have a small set of multinational companies, that we call an oligopoly, control all the academic publishing in the world.” ..."