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, 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.
Several of the foremost enterprises in open source recently joined forces with a group of universities that direct funding to support open source, to call for greater resources to be invested in support. This Invest in Open Infrastructure initiative, though nascent, may be the best hope to date of some kind of common collective action in support of open infrastructure. Today, we interview one of its leaders, Dan Whaley.
Earlier this month, Cambridge University Press and the University of California announced a new Read & Publish (R&P) agreement, likely the largest such agreement to date in North America. Today, Roger Schonfeld interviews Cambridge’s Mandy Hill, Managing Director, and Chris Bennett, Global Sales Director, about this new agreement.
On Friday, Ithaka S+R released the latest cycle of our long-standing US Faculty Survey which has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000. Here we discuss the latest results.
Leakage has strengthened libraries’ negotiating position with respect to content providers. The emerging syndication model syndication offers libraries the opportunity to provide dramatically improve the research experience for their users — with a number of risks as well, including the prospect of substantially reducing their leverage at the negotiating table.
Last week, the University of California terminated its license with Elsevier. Today, Roger Schonfeld argues that leakage has reduced the value of the big deal — and publisher pricing power — while empowering library negotiators.
Publishers are losing online traffic on their own platforms. What does this mean for the future of the publisher site and the hosted platform companies?
Green open access, and in particular the role of institutional repositories in serving up preprints and other journal article artifacts, is going through some substantial transitions. Yesterday, news broke that DuraSpace and Lyrasis are merging. An important development for institutional repositories and related library systems, this is also yet another example of organizational consolidation among membership organizations in the library community in particular. Roger Schonfeld analyzes the merger.
Preservation is an imperative for our community, yet the Digital Preservation Network is disbanding. What lessons can we learn from its struggle?