1. How Collaborative Networks Can Support and Sustain Scholarly Publishing
Action & Alignment
Dr. Katherine Skinner, Executive Director
Futures of Academic Publishing
Dallas, Texas, May 30, 2013

2. Overview Digital publishing as a new field
In a new field, need new models
How can libraries help to build and sustain a more effective academic publishing field?
How can libraries help to sustain digital publications with networked approaches?
Skinner 2013

3. The Frontier
So, let’s start with a very SouthWestern concept: the Frontier.
When I started working on digital scholarship and digital library projects, this is a pretty accurate representation of what the “field” looked like. Uncharted territory. Empty space. Lots of possibility. The promise of the frontier—all is possible. This is the innovator’s dream.
Skinner 2013

4. Settlement
It’s also a microcosm of something sociologists have been studying for more than a century: how do new fields form? How do we develop from that open frontier to a thriving city?
Dallas Elks parade, National Reunion, 1908, Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library
Skinner 2013

5. Field formation principles
Beware changes in the modes of communication…
Innovations don’t come from the center, they come from unexpected locations
Cultural processes of production, distribution, and reception depend upon networks of people
Sociology tells us that when modes of communication change, so does society—from business infrastructures to the scholarly apparatus.
Sociological studies have demonstrated that industries, including scholarly publishing, do not organize in permanent manners, but adopt different strategies in response to cultural contexts, technological advances, market circumstances, and policy changes. In times of technological advances (e.g., the printing press and the broadcast medium), innovators at the fringes of the field often have the capacity to redefine the operations of that field.
In a similar way, new digital environments for the humanities and social sciences are transforming the intellectual landscape. The ensuing hum of activities in digital library initiatives, digital history centers, and various individual ventures into internet publishing leaves open such questions as: what does digital scholarship look like? How is it peer reviewed? Who publishes it? Will it be validated by the scholarly community? And who has access to it, and under what circumstances? And how will it persist??
Changes in the modes of communication are a specific trigger
Innovation isn’t easy for well established players. Usually, others from the periphery of the field are most likely to develop new practices
None of this happens in a deterministic fashion, and the medium does not define its own use. That’s done by networks of people, as we’ve seen in the first two decades of evolution in the World Wide Web.
Skinner 2013

6. NOW what?
What can we do with/in networks and communities to support new forms of scholarship AND to help the academy transition in ways that ultimately supports the spread of knowledge?
Need for neutral center for collaborative initiatives, not to broker services, but to actualize and sustain library-led endeavors
Most of us have relied upon grants and limited-term endeavors for our collaborative efforts in the digital library realm
Examples: DLF Aquifer, ARL Scholarly Communication Portal
Once the funding is gone, the collaborative initiatives often falter. Some are led forward by one institution with minor participation by other institutions (e.g., Voyages, Aquifer). Some are essentially archived, run with very limited development work (e.g., Valley of the Shadow). Some become state-based initiatives that one institution leads on behalf of others, taking the lion’s share of the work (e.g., UNT’s Portal to TX History). But unless these initiatives find a way to stabilize financially and administratively, they are terribly hard to carry forward.
In 2006, a group of southeastern institutions that had worked together well on several projects began studying how best to sustain good collaboratives, namely because we were starting to run one with great promise--MetaArchive. We asked ourselves a series of questions—
Why do we need to collaborate?
Who is collaborating and how?
What are some core principles of Collaboration?
How can we better support our long-term engagements with each other?
Skinner 2013

7. Educopia Institute Skinner 2012
What we needed was a catalytic entity that could ignite collaboration. We wanted an organizational structure that was designed, not take over the work with its own staff, but to energize a community to do its own work in concert with each other.
That was the core principle upon which we founded Educopia.
Skinner 2012

8. Founding Principles Lightweight, catalytic entity Neutral core
Facilitate, not “do”
Neutral core
Broker agreements, maintain funding
Decentralized staffing
Build members’ local expertise, infrastructure
Collaborative network building
Community of engagement
Skinner 2013

9. Alignment activities
MetaArchive Cooperative
Skinner 2013

10. Skinner 2013

11. Katherine Skinner 404 783 2534 katherine@educopia.org
Thank you!
Katherine Skinner
Skinner 2013