Advancing Open: Views from Scholarly Communications Practitioners

Preamble

Intent of Event

Given the bold actions of our European counterparts in advancing open scholarship at consortial, national, and regional levels — including Projekt Deal, Plan S, and the Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development — the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Open Repository Working Group (ORWG) Task Group for Community Building & Engagement (CBE) prioritized creating an opportunity for the Canadian academic library scholarly communication practitioner community to convene, share best practices and expertise, and explore refreshed strategies to foster open scholarship in Canada.

It is vital that the Canadian open scholarship community keep pace with the global advancement of open and reusable research, and scholarly communication practitioners — who have constant immersion in the open scholarship space — are uniquely positioned to consider current and potential activities, supports, and priorities at local, regional, and national levels that will best advance open scholarship across Canada. In order to provide a forum for practitioners to be heard, the CBE group organized Advancing Open, a 1.5-day event held in Vancouver, British Columbia, May 6-7, 2019. This event provided a unique opportunity for scholarly communications practitioners to convene and delve into two key questions:

What is holding open scholarship back in Canada?

What actions and strategies will mobilize open initiatives and uptake in the academic environment in Canada?

Focus on Practitioners

Advancing Open welcomed more than 70 participants from across Canada who either work directly in areas of open research such as open repository archiving, research data management planning, and library and press publishing, or who work in other areas of the library (e.g. collections, systems, liaison with academic departments) and whose work increasingly intersects with open scholarship.

The event used an unconference approach through primarily small-group facilitated “breakout sessions” to discuss work done to date in specific areas related to open scholarship and propose actions for moving forward; all discussions were led and facilitated by members of the scholarly communication practitioner community. Participants were welcome to move among the groups, or stay in one group they were particularly interested in.

Discussion focused on five key themes that had been determined following preevent consultation with the open scholarship community:

Open Policy (institutional, regional, national, and international policies)

Open Workflow and Operations (e.g. day-to-day open scholarship work)

Open Technology (software and/or infrastructure that supports open scholarship)

The Human Element — Open People (diversity and inclusion, workload, and community support)

Open Outreach (open scholarship advocacy)

Notes were taken by members of the CBE group and other planning committee members in each discussion session in order to document the perspectives of participants to the best of our ability, and it is thus the perspectives of the participants at Advancing Open that form the backbone of this document. This document summarizes, analyzes, and proposes recommendations for future action. Using the notes generated during the plenary sessions and themed sessions on specific aspects of scholarly communication practice, a number of common perspectives and themes were identified that the event participants felt are essential to advancing open scholarship in Canada. This paper presents the perspectives of participants in these five specific themed discussions in no particular order.

The event was a rare opportunity for the Canadian academic library scholarly communication community to convene, critically reflect on the success of its efforts to date in supporting open research practices, and chart a path toward sustainable infrastructures for these practices. Advancing Open proved meaningful to the community in several different ways:

the transfer of knowledge from experienced practitioners to those new to scholarly communications or to the profession;

the sharing of demonstrated best practices to increase engagement at the local level (but also with a strategic eye to influencing provincial and national policy)

critical assessments of previous and current efforts to lower the economic barriers to both the creation and dissemination of academic publications, and identification of measures that have been most successful to date;

and, identifying aspects of open access scholarly communications and publishing that require improvements, and proposing recommendations for implementing those changes.

The Advancing Open event helped identify practitioner-led directions and solutions designed to increase the uptake and commitment to open scholarship that will support a future-ready and competitive Canada where citizens have full access to their institutions’ world-class scholarly research. In turn, this report has been written for the scholarly communications community in Canada to a) use as a discussion instrument with academic library leaders and decision makers and b) strengthen both vertical and peer-level strategic alignment for advancing open scholarship in Canada. The report will also help the scholarly communications community set its own priorities for grassroots action.

The State of Open Scholarship in Canada

The Library and Information Sciences (LIS) sector has been invested in open access (OA) since the very beginning of organized, collective efforts toward OA for all peer-reviewed research. Seventeen years later, the LIS sector continues to work toward and advocate for the now broader concept of open scholarship, which encompasses open access, open data, open educational resources, and open research practices. LIS professionals have consistently taken the position that open scholarship is an essential public good that must be strengthened and supported by all open scholarship stakeholders. Supporting open access initiatives at the local level — via institutional repositories, open journals, and monographs, and by funding open platforms and initiatives such as Érudit, the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR), and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) — is central to the future of open scholarship that is conceived of as serving the public good.

Researchers funded by Canada’s three federal research funding agencies are required to comply with an open access policy on publications. Additionally, a research data management policy has been drafted which — in its preamble — is situated within national declarations on openness, including the Action Plan on Open Government and the Agencies’ own internal broad policy shift toward openness. Other research-funding agencies have similar policies, and several postsecondary educational institutions have now adopted institutional open access policies or mandates. Despite this progress at developing high-level mandates, recent research into the current state of open scholarship in Canada has shown researcher compliance rates with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (that is, making scholarly articles openly available within 12 months of publication) is below 50%, a compliance rate that is well below other countries’ compliance rates in the United States and the United Kingdom. This indicates there is a great deal of work that remains to be done in order to create a strong foundation upon which to base a modern approach to open scholarship.

The Canadian scholarly communications landscape has grown in the nearly two decades since organized efforts toward open access began: a study by Shearer in 2003 on behalf of CARL identified 12 universities in the country which had already implemented an institutional repository (IR). By 2019, there were approximately 67 academic institutional repositories in Canada. The vast majority of the IRs are multi-disciplinary, and the most commonly used software used to support those IRs is DSpace (48% of identified repositories).

Where once the establishment of an institutional repository was seen as groundbreaking, the boundaries of open scholarship have grown immensely in Canada and elsewhere, with considerations of OA/APC funds, institutional open access policies and mandates, open data requirements, open educational resources, embedding open scholarship into tenure and promotion requirements, relationship-building among various stakeholders, and scholar-led community publishing initiatives all equally essential to the current discussion of open scholarship in Canada. This report will address many of the aforementioned issues from the perspective of scholarly communications practitioners, a group which is witness to the minutiae of implementing open scholarship policies and initiatives, and who have a unique perspective on our current capacity — as individuals, practitioners, institutions, regional consortia, and national agencies — to not only support open scholarship, but ensure it grows to meet the needs of future researchers, information professionals, and citizens alike.

Methodology

An unconference approach was chosen for this event as the participants attending were generally anticipated to have a high level of expertise or knowledge in the field. The goal was to have participant-driven discussions on key topics. The data which forms the basis of this report is comprised of extensive notes taken during discussions at every plenary and breakout session held at Advancing Open. These notes were taken by members of the Advancing Open Planning Committee, and can be viewed here. These notes attempted to capture the ideas, arguments, challenges, and opportunities expressed by participants, at times recording direct quotations.

After the Advancing Open event, Holly Pickering and Daniel Cockroft (MLIS/Humanities Computing research assistants at the University of Alberta) performed text analysis to analyze the vast amount of text produced, synthesize the notes into broader concepts, concerns, and proposals, and note divergent opinions and comments. The CBE task group then analyzed these documents and used them to create this report as a reflection of the scholarly communications practitioner community in Canada: its concerns, priorities, and goals for the future of open scholarship.

We now present our findings representing the gathered perspectives of the 70 members of Canada’s open scholarship community in attendance at Advancing Open.

Open Scholarship Policy

Three discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In the Open Policy sessions, the questions were:

How should Canada prepare for upcoming changes in publishing brought on by Plan S and other international OA policies?

The stick vs. the carrot — should we be focusing our efforts on pushing for OA policies or on ways to incentivize open (e.g. recognition of open publishing in advancement and promotion guidelines)? How does this play out locally? Can both strategies effectively work together?

CARL and CRKN have stated recently that they are committed to working with other stakeholders to develop a “made-in-Canada” approach to sustainable open scholarship. What do you think such an approach should look like, and how can you contribute?

International Initiatives

The launch of international initiatives like Plan S shows that the information landscape is shifting along with the culture of scholarly publishing, but participants at Advancing Open expressed the view that Canada, unlike Europe which has been working toward OA2020 for some years, is not currently prepared to make a major step toward a transformative open scholarship model of this kind. The necessary foundation of funders and networks has not yet been established in Canada, and participants cautioned that a simple duplication of existing international initiatives is not sufficient, as many do not address the underlying inequities and commercial interests at the heart of many “transformative” plans and agreements.

Reactions of participants to the draft Plan S implementation guidelines specifically indicated that this initiative would be hard to enforce and the technical requirements for repositories and journals were excessive and difficult to implement (e.g. a mandatory requirement for JATS/XML). After the Advancing Open event, cOAlition S did release a revised implementation guide that lessened some of the technical requirements, but the now “strongly recommended” criteria is still currently out of reach for many Canadian post-secondary libraries. Other concerns included the heavy emphasis on Gold OA over other models; no mandate for open source (OS) infrastructure, which will hinder progress in this area and may call into question security of community investment in open; and a lack of clarity regarding how read and publish agreements will work in practice.

This initiative in its current iteration is not right for Canada, but it opens up dialogue as demonstrated by the number of responses it has elicited, including from the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) and the CARL Response to Plan S. While Plan S is not something that Canada can or should adopt at this time, it does open the conversation to consider different models for creating a “made in Canada” approach. We need to evaluate international initiatives (e.g. Norway, Germany, California) and learn from successful national Canadian initiatives (e.g. Portage).

Relationships with Stakeholders

Discussion of Plan S highlights the need for academic libraries to engage broadly with academic associations and researchers. While national organizations like CARL and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) have indicated they wish to take a leadership role in open scholarship, there are multiple stakeholders and to be effective, they cannot do this alone. Firstly, open scholarship must work for researchers or it will not be successful — working with this group is key. Secondly, it is necessary to build a more transparent, reciprocal relationship between scholarly communications practitioners and national organizations that represent and/or provide insight to the perspectives and interests of researchers, including Canada’s federal granting agencies and learned societies.

We need to strengthen leadership/practitioner communications through deliberate, planned information-sharing strategies and events. Clarification of open scholarship roles and goals of leadership organizations like CRKN, CARL, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), and Canada’s federal granting agencies are key to this discussion. It is clear that the current means of working toward adoption of open scholarship are not adequate, and “encouragement” to practise open scholarship is not sufficient.

Participants posed questions on how to define the roles among national stakeholders, and what their relationships to practitioners should encompass. Clarification from national stakeholders on their capacity to lead open scholarship initiatives and areas of support they can offer is an important part of these discussions in order to better identify and define opportunities for collaboration and meaningful progress.

Institutional Policy and Advocacy

Institutional OA policies at Canadian universities are not, in themselves, the solution. However, an OA policy is an indicator that open scholarship is officially endorsed by the institution, that there has been a stronger degree of open scholarship socialization among administrators and faculty at those institutions, and it couples with the Tri-Agency requirements for open access. Institutional OA policies vary widely from statements of “encouragement” to establishment of mandatory practice, but wherever they are on the spectrum, they have the potential to influence and motivate researchers to consider open scholarship options. While it has yet to be determined if an institutional OA policy alone can translate to action, it does open up an opportunity for discussion and education.

An OA policy is a tool that must be partnered with additional resources in order to increase impact. One essential resource is extensive training of staff in libraries and research offices who are on the frontlines of offering ongoing open scholarship outreach and advocacy. The United Kingdom is an example of established training and support models (e.g. UKRG, Jisc, RLUK, SCONUL) that correlate with an uptake of open scholarship that is much greater than in Canada.

Participants of Advancing Open viewed integrating open scholarship into tenure and promotion regulations and in collective agreements as an essential component to furthering open scholarship and changing the culture of academic publishing. Questions posed by participants included how such conversations get started within institutions, and how advocacy from the academic library could play a role in those conversations. Some institutions in North America have already undertaken this work, and their experience can provide guidance on how the library can advocate through OA policy and influence promotion and tenure guidelines to promote a more equitable and accurate evaluation of scholarship.

Impediments exist in the form of academic values of individualism and competitiveness in publishing and research, combined with a complicated approach to academic freedom and publishing. Faculty are also constrained by institutional and/or departmental evaluation criteria, which often rely on ideas of prestige and related metrics like the Journal Impact Factor, and often do not fight as hard for their copyright as they do for their academic freedom. In addition, some disciplinary practices prescribe specific journals in which faculty should publish, which effectively blocks participation in open scholarship publishing.

Despite these challenges, the aforementioned examples of combined top-down (policy) and bottom-up (advocacy) approach can shift institutional inertia.

Resources

Article Processing Charges (APCs) were seen by many participants as an unsustainable and inequitable model, but it is documented that several Canadian institutions have OA funds in place that help pay for APCs. Open scholarship needs consistent infusions of funding, but many event participants felt funding should be directed not at APC funds but to alternative and more sustainable models, open scholarship initiatives, education, and outreach. If universities redirected their APC funds to open scholarship initiatives, those cumulative funds could support staff to develop more intuitive processes and systems to integrate open scholarship into faculty workflows, and shift energy to advocating, discovering and collecting content that complies with green OA.

Open Technological Infrastructure

Two discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In the Open Technological Infrastructure groups the questions were:

How should academic libraries approach investments in the technical and computing services that underlie open scholarship to ensure a sustainable, lean yet versatile, ecosystem?

How can the open community move away from institutions operating their open services in isolation and instead help foster communal expertise and guidance on essential open software functionalities?

Leadership in Advancing Open Source Infrastructure

Many Advancing Open participants expressed a desire to reduce duplication of effort and focus on collaborative initiatives, but current open technological infrastructure requires significantly increased support from the federal level in Canada. While the infrastructure discussions occasionally focused on specific software, the real concern was the lack of coordination within the country for technology-based initiatives when it comes to people and time resources. Canada has the tools to do this work, but no coordinated plan to do it together. An oftheard question was the following:

“Canada is small, why do we each need to run our own repository?”

Support and leadership specifically pertaining to digital preservation is unclear at a national level; institutions are trying to do this work on their own, and yet gaps still remain in the funding landscape for which no one has taken responsibility. Digital preservation is a core functionality of the library; it differentiates the library from a publisher as logical content steward of institutional knowledge production. Potential national leaders already invested in knowledge dissemination in this landscape include Portage, Library and Archives Canada, and Canada’s federal granting agencies — with the latter organization close to having mandates for both open access and open research data, the life-cycle of research outputs in its entirety must be considered and supported at each step in that cycle. At the moment, a Canada-wide preservation infrastructure does not currently have a final “home” with any national body.

A common vision leads to the type of impactful leadership found in other countries by creating a long-term sustainable approach to infrastructure. An example of this leadership is demonstrated by CRKN and CARL joining the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and supporting global initiatives like DOAJ and SHERPA-RoMEO. Further collaboration and partnerships like this are essential to growing Canadian capacity to support open scholarship domestically and internationally. Increased connections with Library and Archives Canada and Canada’s federal granting agencies are seen as important developments in fostering a national approach to open source infrastructure that supports open scholarship.

Sustainability

There is debate among the community regarding the best approach to sustainable discoverability and interoperability infrastructure for open content: some practitioners propose a universal national infrastructure, while others are in favour of a distributed, coordinated system. An example of shared infrastructure is Arca from BC, which is a shared repository run by BC Electronic Network serving 14 institutions. Some public libraries are also participating. In addition, Arca has a Memorandum of Understanding with the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) which allows those member libraries to have access to the Arca services. Arca addresses concerns of institutions wanting to brand themselves by allowing for customized sites; a similar project using Islandora is the Council of Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL) CAIRN initiative. DSpace may also be used to house more than one repository in a shared instance, as seen by the VIURRSpace example on Vancouver Island. Shared services are also a possibility for digital preservation: COPPUL has an MOU in place to provide access to digital preservation services for Arca (via Archivematica-as-a-service, a hosted service). While these examples are encouraging, they demonstrate effective provincial or regional collaboration and highlight a lack of opportunity for making intentional connections that could be the foundation for a coordinated national approach.

Regardless of the approach, collaboration and shared resources have been identified as essential at all levels — regional, consortial, and national. Existing models in Canada have proven successful, including the Public Knowledge Project and the Federated Research Data Repository. Immediate first steps offered by practitioners include shared services based on function rather than each institution having local teams do all the work of scholarly communications. In this scenario, expertise of those practitioners in metadata, for instance, can be harnessed in a collaborative manner across regions and nationally rather than our current system which often silos practitioners within their own institution. Other common functional areas identified include development of open source infrastructure, improved indexing of institutional repositories, and a “one place to look” discoverability layer for repositories.

In order to expand the scope of work that’s currently being done, removing inequality between regional consortia is needed in order to build a federated system. For example, COPPUL and OCUL currently work together on select initiatives, and the scholarly communications community should prioritize expanding that collaboration to CAUL and the Bureau de coopération interuniversitaire (BCI). This again speaks to issues of underinvestment by provincial and federal bodies, as the resources available to each region to build those regional infrastructures are quite different — national funding is needed to bring each region up to a common standard, and then sustained funding is required to ensure regions can build their infrastructure together so that no region is left behind.

In a related fashion, the open scholarship community can leverage the expertise and connections we already have. For example, CARL institutions could commit to providing one day a week from their technical and scholarly communications experts’ time to work on national development issues. This type of collaboration would benefit the community as a whole and connect scholarly communications and information technology in a meaningful and sustainable method, as well ensuring that labour is working in a coordinated way. Another suggestion from participants was for all institutions to fund a national service, similar to the Dataverse model.

Practitioners also identified the importance of consulting with disciplinary communities and associations to understand their needs. While Open Science has a strong foundation, the publication process within humanities is quite different with an emphasis on monographs. Open monographs are a growing field, with digital publishers such as Open Book Publishers, OA university presses like Athabasca University Press, and software like Pressbooks offering new options for open publishing of books, but there still exist challenges in terms of funding and human resources to grow these possibilities. This growth should be done with researchers’ voices centred in our planning and implementation. The scholarly publishing ecosystem is changing; preprint servers are an indication from specific disciplines that their needs are not well served by traditional publishing. All stakeholders in scholarly communications need to be at the forefront of discussions that are trying to build an ecosystem that does serve disciplinary needs while ensuring open content is discoverable.

One key factor to ensuring sustainability is understanding that access is not equality, and open is not the same as visible. Barriers exist, and are built into, current open scholarship infrastructure. Barriers encompass a wide spectrum of issues, one example being specific content format and language: many publishing and content platforms do not currently support Indigenous languages. We must ensure barriers to equity in OS infrastructure are removed in new and existing systems by recognizing the asymmetrical power dynamics and inequality inherent in the open scholarship community as extensions of deep structural inequalities found within academia. Canada is a diverse nation so building and updating national infrastructure to centre a flexible, nuanced, diverse community of practitioners and researchers is an important goal to meet.

Investment

Training and expertise in OS software is essential, but university hiring practices and structure often do not accommodate the technical skills required to effectively maintain OS software, the workflow and work schedule commonly used by skilled developers, nor the fundamental costs inherent to running the software. Training for OS software technical and management staff is crucial and part of any funding should go to that ongoing training.

Practitioners also felt that university investment in infrastructure needs improvement; the lack of funds for dedicated digital preservation storage is a prime example of underinvestment. Practitioners discussed the issue of universities underinvesting in the technical infrastructure required to adequately support open scholarship, as well as an overall underinvestment by national bodies. Institutional cost for setting up individual preservation structures, and the fundamental costs of running software, are often hidden. Individual institutional IT departments may be able to provide additional and/or more robust support with these issues, though not all institutions have access to that service.

Institutional users of open source software should support those foundations (e.g. Islandora Foundation, Lyrasis, etc.) to ensure sustainable development. Communitybased approaches to software development is time-intensive and requires contributions from many stakeholders to ensure it happens in a timely manner. However, it’s also essential to recognize that support from OS users will look different depending on the resources available to users; one Advancing Open participant remarked, “The Big Fix often comes with a big price,” and noted that consideration should be given to what constitutes sustainable contributions from small and/or under-resourced institutions, as they are typically less able to contribute at the same scale as larger institutions to open source initiatives.

Open People: The Human Element

Two discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In the Open People groups the questions were:

How should academic libraries approach investments in the technical and computing services that underlie open scholarship to ensure a sustainable, lean yet versatile, ecosystem?

How can the open community move away from institutions operating their open services in isolation and instead help foster communal expertise and guidance on essential open software functionalities?

Centering Indigeneity

The community is seeking strategies to decolonize open scholarship and ensure that respect for, and inclusion of, Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Knowledge is prioritized in our work.

The systems and institutions we work with now are built on colonialist ideals, and we should not expect Indigenous and other minority peoples to be served well by those systems. We must build relationships with marginalized communities and centre their needs in our work if they are to participate fully. Our systems do not currently have sufficient capability to serve Traditional Knowledge, and metadata standards are not inclusive of historically marginalized groups. Even basic multilingualism within our software systems is not well supported.

It must be acknowledged that open practices may not always be appropriate for all forms of knowledge and we must recognize the needs of Traditional Knowledge and advocate alongside communities for appropriate cultural nuance in open scholarship policies. Standards developed by OCAP® establish how First Nations data should be collected, protected, used, or shared and these should be applied in all open initiatives at our institutions, as well as those being developed by the Canadian Federation of Library Associations' Indigenous Matters group. Making this transition requires considerable resources, including sustained funding, human resources, and extensive training.

Indigenous publishers need to be included in our community of practitioners and methods to help with discoverability of this content should be configured to ensure they can be found in the same venues as traditional publications. Advancing Open participants expressed concern that open scholarship doesn’t line up with different forms of knowledge production and that we may need parallel structures — open scholarship as it’s broadly conceived of now might not work with how knowledge is created and shared in different cultural communities.

The academy needs to embrace and seek out Indigenous community engagement with academic research, ideally reflecting this in promotion and tenure guidelines by bringing the Western European academic way of thinking together with other ways of thinking.

It is the duty of those with privilege to hold others with privilege accountable and to decolonize the systems we already have in place. It is also the duty of those with privilege to actively include those without that same privilege to ensure their needs are met and given priority. Transparent work is of utmost importance. Of particular concern is appropriate dissemination of research based upon Indigenous Peoples, and reconsidering the library’s role in ensuring access for groups for whom published material exists. As one participant stated:

“Accountability to the communities who were studied/were the source of the research requires making that research available to those communities.”

Incorporating small and thoughtful steps can be a foundation upon which scholarly communications practitioners can build a decolonized approach to our work, like the APA LibGuide from NorQuest College Library which has a section on how to cite Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers or incorporating advice from resources like Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging.

Relationship Building

Advancing Open participants expressed a desire to build relationships with Indigenous librarians and community members but were unsure about how to make those contacts. The Library Indigenous community is small, “and yes, we all know each other,” but they are also stretched thin. Participants echoed similar questions:

“How can we build connections with communities who have been marginalized and excluded?”

“How can we […] create environments that respect their protocols?”

There is work to be done by non-Indigenous people in engaging with Indigenous Peoples and we must be accountable for changing the scholarly communications ecosystem to ensure it is a welcoming place. The challenges are numerous when striving to involve communities while also not forcing them to participate in structures that don’t suit their ways of being/knowing; we are currently asking people to work within a system that does not represent them and that is unacceptable. Participants discussed what meaningful invitations to collaborate entail, if there are ways to work within our current structures, and being prepared to reconsider commonly held ideals about open access. Ultimately we recognize that settlers can never ‘own’ the open domain for Indigenous Peoples, communities, and Traditional Knowledge.