Adieu to Educopia: An Interview with Katherine Skinner - The Scholarly Kitchen | OCT 26, 2022

"But the thing that I am currently the most proud of has gotten very little attention so far, which is the FOREST framework that Sarah Lippincott and I published earlier this year. A lot of my thinking over the last couple of years has continued to be around how you bring about system change. People have been trying for years to compare and contrast different businesses and different models. But we’re often comparing apples to oranges, and we’re often vilifying one thing and raising something else up, and binaries are just really not helpful. I’ve been stumbling toward the pathway to FOREST as a potential solution to this problem for years. A key moment in that was when Mike Roy and David Lewis came to me in 2018 to ask me to join their Mellon-funded project called “mapping the scholarly communication infrastructure.” That project gave us a really important opportunity to build and test a census-based, data-informed approach to understanding the system we’re in. As one part of that project, we piloted a census tool with more than 40 institutions. It was designed as a broad-based analysis of scholarly communication infrastructure providers’ business frameworks and governance designs. It was also intended to surface their financial realities, including questions about year over year changes and reserves. It let us really see, maybe for the first time, that we think of some entities as being far more sustainable than they actually are, while we think of others as far less sustainable than they actually are. Historically, we have lacked that data, and so our beliefs in and attempts at “sustainability” have been often fueled by vague perceptions at best. And now Invest in Open infrastructure is taking some of the questions that we were asking there, plus many others, and is taking this work to the next level. The other piece of this “pathway” to the FOREST framework was my longstanding interest in values and principles. There are all of these contemporary versions of values-based frameworks — POSI, of course, being one that that right now is maybe most prominent, and also the FAIR principles, CARE principles, and so on. But what do they actually accomplish? Do they “work”? Why haven’t they yielded the change that we seem to be trying to push for with them? I looked at the more than 100 manifestos and documents — everything from the Budapest OA Declaration to the Scholar-Led Manifesto that just came out. These sorts of manifestos are everywhere; a lot of them are really really good, and they have a lot of signatories. But arguably, they haven’t been able to bring about the changes they imagine, and I think that might be because they so often lack accountability mechanisms. As part of our Arcadia-funded “Next Generation Library Publishing” (NGLP) project, we tried to distill down the values and principles that we found in those 100+ manifestos to see whether there is a common core — and there is. So then we tried to draw out how you can know if your practices match specific values and principles, and how you can know how to improve that match over time. Not just through a sort of self-nomination by a service provider or publisher or tool developer, and not just by checking a box, because that’s very black and white. What we wanted was a way of seeing and showing a spectrum of practices that encourage better alignment between values and actions. And that’s what the FOREST framework does, which is why, of the things that I’ve helped to do in my career thus far, I think it may be the most important. The big question now is, as I step away from Educopia, which could have been the mouthpiece to push it through, what do we do with the framework. How do we make sure it still gets considered as a potential basis for some assessment that is missing right now in the field? I trust my NGLP and Educopia colleagues, and especially the framework’s lead author, Sarah Lippincott, to help keep this moving forward...."