Values and Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist | Commonplace

Introduction Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute Through the Next Generation Library Publishing project (2019–2022, generously funded by Arcadia Fund), Educopia Institute, California Digital Library, and Stratos, in close collaboration with COAR, LYRASIS, and Longleaf Services, seek to improve the publishing pathways and choices available to authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructures to support library publishers. In addition to building publishing tools and workflows, our team is exploring how to create community hosting models that align explicitly and demonstratively with academic values. In this Values and Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist, we are piloting a tool that can help scholarly publishing service providers demonstrate their adherence to and support for agreed-upon academic values and principles. We invite feedback and engagement with these ideas and with this work, which is generously supported by a grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. This Framework and Assessment Checklist and its affiliated documentation have been prepared by Sarah Lippincott and Katherine Skinner and edited by Nancy Adams, Hannah Ballard, Terra Graziani, Jennifer Kemp, Brandon Locke, Catherine Mitchell, Kristen Ratan, Oya Reiger, Kathleen Shearer, John Sherer, Nick Shockey, Eric van Rijnand Sarah Wipperman. Background Over the last 30 years, well over 100 manifestos, open letters, and documents have been prepared by scholars, librarians, publishers, and other scholarly communications players in explicit hopes of reclaiming or recalibrating the scholarly publishing landscape.1 These statements have pointed to a set of relatively consistent ideas regarding what values and principles the statements’ authors believe that scholarly publishing providers should seek to uphold in their work, including representative governance; sustainability; equity, diversity, and inclusion; transparency; openness; and reproducibility/reusability. Thus far, most of these values and principles statements have been issued by attendees of a hosted event or a set of participants in a project, community, or association to guide behavior. With few exceptions, these documents have not been structured to enable users to assess or demonstrate their compliance. Instead, their users often signal their support via signing or invoking a statement, and signatories to a statement may work in direct conflict with its terms with no fear of repercussions. After studying these statements in 2019–2020, our team recommended reworking values and principles statements to include measurable actions, so that adherence can be readily assessed and audited.2 In a white paper published in March 2020, we proposed a methodology for assessment that mission-driven scholarly publishing service providers can use to demonstrate their adhesion to agreed-upon academic values and principles. Following the paper’s positive reception, we have drafted a pilot framework to further test this concept. The Next Generation Library Publishing project now seeks feedback on this framework. With this assessment framework, we hope to differentiate those with close adherence (perhaps with a designation, e.g., Trusted Community Partner) and to incentivize better alignment between publishing tools, services, and platforms and the scholarly communities and publics they ultimately serve.