Roger C. Schonfeld is director of Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums for Ithaka S+R.
At Ithaka S+R, Roger leads a team of subject matter and methodological experts and analysts that conduct research and provide advisory services to drive evidence-based innovation and leadership among libraries, publishers, and museums to foster research, learning, and preservation. This has included extensive survey research of faculty members, students, and the directors of libraries and museums, as well as collaborative qualitative studies that have examined research and teaching practices and support needs in more than ten academic disciplines involving more than 100 universities. Additional research and policy projects have sought to bolster organizational leadership, diversity and community engagement, and collections management and preservation. The team provides strategic guidance and advisory services for content providers, software companies, university presses, and academic libraries on the transformation of scholarly communications and the research workflow. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also operates Artstor, JSTOR, and Portico, but the views shared here are solely Roger’s.
Roger currently serves on advisory and project committees for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, ARKS in the Open, the Center for Research Libraries (PAPR), and Toward a National Finding Aid Network. Previously, he has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative. Roger has testified before the US House of Representatives on government publishing, advocating for strong approaches to digital preservation. He has authored dozens of research reports, articles, and briefing papers.
Previously, Roger was a research associate at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. There, he collaborated on The Game of Life: College Sports and Academic Values with James Shulman and William G. Bowen (Princeton University Press, 2000). He also wrote JSTOR: A History (Princeton University Press, 2003), focusing on the development of a sustainable not-for-profit business model for the digitization and preservation of scholarly texts. He received degrees in library and information science from Syracuse University and in English Literature from Yale University.
Roger’s Ithaka S+R reports and blogposts are available online, and he is active on Twitter as @rschon.
An interview with Xiao-Li Meng, Professor of Statistics at Harvard University, about the increasingly central role data science is playing in research and teaching, – and how journals, publishers, societies, and librarians fit in this emerging ecosystem.
The structural transition wrought by the internet continues to transform the journal-centric model of scholarly publishing into a researcher-centric model of scholarly communication. Success requires engagement with researcher identity, which is a struggle even for most of the largest publishing houses. Who is competing to own researcher identity and how can other publishers engage this vital role?
Today, a group of leading publishers is announcing a major new service to plug leakage, improve discovery and access, fight piracy, compete with ResearchGate, and position their platform for the OA ecosystem. This new service shows that publishers are finally beginning to address digital strategy in an environment that has steadily eroded their ability to monetize the value they create. Does it go far enough to reset the competitive environment?
Elsevier’s new CEO Kumsal Bayazit’s debuted in front of a librarian audience at last week’s Charleston Conference. Analysis from Roger Schonfeld.
New today: In a crowded and confusing landscape for research data preservation and sharing, two fundamentally competing visions are emerging. Which will win?
Sharing research data is increasingly becoming a real business. Today, we provide an overview this landscape and highlight several recent announcements that may indicate future strategic prospects.
Breaking News Today: Following Clarivate’s public listing and a high level reorganization, Web of Science Group CEO Annette Thomas is departing
The value of the big deal has declined. Will libraries drive down its price — or help publishers prop up its value?
Today, the MIT Press is issuing a new research report, Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms. It provides an inventory of some 52 ongoing open source publishing initiatives and a thoughtful analysis of the open source community in publishing — tracking its development without shying away from its struggles.
Springer Nature is leading in the effort to preserve library subscriptions by syndicating its content and, in doing so, would establish ResearchGate as perhaps the foremost service for the distribution of scholarly content. Analysis by @lisalibrarian and @rschon.