ACRL Releases: “Open And Equitable Scholarly Communications Creating a More Inclusive Future” Report

From an ACRL/ALA Publication Announcement:

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is pleased to announce the release of “Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future,” prepared for ACRL by Nancy Maron and Rebecca Kennison with Paul Bracke, Nathan Hall, Isaac Gilman, Kara Malenfant, Charlotte Roh, and Yasmeen Shorish.

Developed over the course of a year with leadership from the Research and Scholarly Environment Committee (ReSEC) and with a high degree of community involvement this powerful new action-oriented research agenda encourages the community to make the scholarly communications system more open, inclusive, and equitable by outlining trends, encouraging practical actions, and clearly identifying the most strategic research questions to pursue. This report is an important contribution to ACRL’s core commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion which includes valuing different ways of knowing and identifying and working to eliminate barriers to equitable services, spaces, resources, and scholarship.

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“Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications” is organized into three major priority areas—people, content, and systems—and each of these areas delineates several specific effective practices being used now and research topics that can help further the work in the future. The first section on people addresses embracing diversity and inclusion, improving the working lives of people engaged in scholarly communications, and increasing awareness concerning creators’ rights. The second section, content, acknowledges the opportunity for greater inclusion and openness by rethinking what scholarship “counts” and creating more representative and open collections. The third section on systems identifies several avenues to explore: supporting sustainable technological infrastructure, creating systems that permit more access to more people, building mission-aligned organizational and financial systems, and advancing innovation in academic libraries. The agenda includes extensive appendices, including an essay on issues of social justice in scholarly communications, findings from the online survey, and an annotated list of recommended readings.

Direct to Full Text Report
148 pages; PDF.

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Scholarly Communications