The 41st session of UNESCO General Conference ended yesterday with the adoption of key agreements demonstrating renewed multilateral cooperation for educational recovery, open science and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
“Innovators abound in the fields of libraries, archives, museums, publishing, and higher education. Many of these idea generators find ample support for the creation of tools and technologies that enable new forms of knowledge production, dissemination, or preservation as those tools are first imagined and piloted.
However, when these innovators attempt to sustain their creations, external funding and attention often wane. A well-documented “Valley of Death” stretches between softfunded projects and sustainable programs. Without deep knowledge of how to build a support community, and how to manage such elements as resources, communications, engagement, and governance, innovators find the bridge between grant funding and ongoing operations very difficult to cross….
Many potential tools and services wither, not due to shortfalls in demand or shortcomings in those products, but rather to a lack of attention to organization and community building….
We [at Educopia] are now openly sharing the model that we have developed and refined over the last twelve years. Community Cultivation – A Field Guide provides a powerful lens that can provide both emerging and established communities with ways to understand, evaluate, and plan their own growth, change, and maturation. We are offering this Field Guide freely in the hope that it will empower more community facilitators and leaders to invest in the health and sustainability of their own collaborative networks….”
“ResearchGate and Springer Nature have been in serious discussions for some time about finding solutions to sharing scientific journal articles online, while at the same time protecting intellectual property rights. The companies are cautiously optimistic that a solution can be found, and we invite other publishers and societies to join the talks….”
The Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study was a two-year investigation, undertaken under the auspices of the Public Knowledge Project with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The intent of this initiative was to examine whether scholarly publishing models, involving cooperation between the relevant stakeholder, might provide a means of moving subscription journals to a sustainable form of open access publishing. The study explored potential cooperative associations involving disciplines, national initiatives, and regional models. It utilized a series of (a) three case studies, (b) a publishing industry/library survey and interviews, (c) a publishing internship, and (d) a number of related technical developments with Open Journal Systems.
Direct to Full Text Report https://docs.google.com/document/d/1COaY7PM8jXA97b9uMpSQ0a0vYhQGSaDrIooGvd8G2Jw/
“The progress of scientific and technological knowledge is a cumulative process, one that depends in the long?run on the rapid and widespread disclosure of new findings, so that they may be rapidly discarded if unreliable, or confirmed and brought into fruitful conjunction with other bodies of reliable knowledge. “Open science” institutions provide an alternative to the intellectual property approach to dealing with difficult problems in the allocation of resources for the production and distribution of information. As a mode of generating reliable knowledge, “open science” depends upon a specific non-market reward system to solve a number of resource allocation problems that have their origins in the particular characteristics of information as an economic good. There are features of the collegiate reputational reward system — conventionally associated with open science practice in the academy and public research institutes – that create conflicts been the ostensible norms of ‘cooperation’ and the incentives for non-cooperative, rivalrous behavior on the part of individuals and research units who race to establish “priority.” These sources of inefficiency notwithstanding, open science is properly regarded as uniquely well suited to the goal of maximising the rate of growth of the stock of reliable knowledge.
High access charges imposed by holders of monopoly rights in intellectual property have overall consequences for the conduct of science that are particularly damaging to programs of exploratory research which are recognized to be vital for the long-term progress of knowledge-driven economies….”
“The academic library industry exists within a capitalist system that is bigger than us….I am encouraged by Open Library Service Platform (LSP) efforts like FOLIO, which conceive of a library business and user experience world that works differently (and by that I mean similarly to the consumer digital experience that is pervasive in the rest of the software and media world). It remains to be seen if that vision can be achieved. The ultimate success of initiatives like FOLIO will rely less on strategy and cunning and more on a commitment by libraries and large vendors to the ethos of open source development and sustaining an entrepreneurial spirit. It is the least cynical thing I have seen develop in this industry so far and that is encouraging….”