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 as a member of the Board of Director of the Center for Research Libraries. He has previously served on advisory and project committees for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, ARKS in the Open, the Center for Research Libraries (PAPR), the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative, and Toward a National Finding Aid Network. 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.
Acquisitions are always designed to benefit business owners, sometimes at the expense of customers. But , as Joe Esposito and Roger Schonfeld argue, acquisitions can provide benefits to customers and end-users as well.
Danielle Cooper and Roger Schonfeld analyze OverDrive’s purchase of the streaming video platform Kanopy.
Clarivate to Acquire ProQuest: analysis by Roger Schonfeld
The sudden virtualization of conferences sparked a flurry of experimentation. It is now time to build the future of the scholarly meeting.
The digital services provided by scholarly publishers and academic libraries still do not meet researchers’ needs. Roger Schonfeld notes that doing so would require far more profound change, not just at the level of user experience but in terms of rethinking existing businesses and organizational models.
How to address lies in the political life of a democracy? Education, information literacy, gatekeeping, and dialogue are not enough. Lisa Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld examine the issue.
The journal brand has proven to be the great intangible asset of the scholarly publisher. Can publishers extend the reach and value of journal brands by supporting research materials beyond the version of record?
The latest from Ithaka S+R on the academic research enterprise — how it is managed by universities, their strategic priorities for it, and the pandemic’s disruptions to it. A video of a CNI presentation by Jane Radecki, Oya Y. Rieger, and Roger C. Schonfeld.
In periods of disruption, commercial publishers have traditionally found opportunities to make capital investments that ultimately strengthen their relative position in the market — opportunities that are not necessarily available to their not-for-profit counterparts. With this in mind, we offer up the beginnings of an analysis of the state of not-for-profit publishing today.
The pandemic has wrought profound disruption on the academic sector. Today, we share findings from a major research project about the budget situation in US academic libraries.