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.
Today, Joe and Roger analyze the variety of firms to which the academy can outsource scholarly communication and adjacent priorities: consortia, societies, and commercial enterprises.
Major scholarly publishers have made substantial investments in preprints in recent years, integrating preprint deposit into manuscript submission workflows.
As scholarly publishers reforecast and consider strategic directions, here is a primer on the US higher education market
Some libraries are seeking transformative agreements, others are unbundling the Big Deal. Can major publishers reestablish value without a major revenue sacrifice?
New findings from Ithaka S+R provide the most recent and comprehensive evidence for how academic library acquisitions and open access initiatives may proceed in light of the present disruptions
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The major US library consortium OhioLINK has created a vision for the systems that libraries use for acquiring content from publishers, managing collections, and enabling discovery. An interview about this vision with executive director Gwen Evans,
A university does not have to “sole source” procurement of publishing services — they could be bid. How might an RFP and bidding process affect transformative agreements and library strategy?