How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-16
Summary:
Use the link to access the full text article published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, An excerpt from the article reads as follows: "Since Clifford Lynch’s infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it’s lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (Rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and the American
Chemical Society, as well as their CEOs (Berrett, 2012). Moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010; Lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue? ... Many libraries successfully scuttle new scholarly communication initiatives before they even begin via planning practices that set these initiatives up to fail. Vague planning scope, plentiful undefined buzzwords
(like 'institutional repository,' itself a phrase with no clear service outline as referent), and dilatory red tape
can murder an initiative in its cradle. Phraseology in the planning committee’s charge or deliverables that threatens other campus stakeholders such as campus IT, local research centers, or the university press guarantees that the new initiative will have enemies even before its birth. The best, most destructive planning attitude, of course, is that a scholarly communication initiative is a thing (such as an IR or a publication database) that a library sets up (because other libraries do, not for any internally-coherent reason) and then leaves strictly alone, rather than a conscious long-term investment in change to a set of entrenched and difficult-to-modify social, economic, and technological systems ..."