Intended Audience and Actual Distribution: A Growing Mismatch?
Researchers write articles for a primary audience of peers. Open access has expanded the actual distribution. What to do about the growing mismatch?
Roger C. Schonfeld is the vice president of organizational strategy for ITHAKA and of Ithaka S+R’s libraries, scholarly communication, and museums program.
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.
Researchers write articles for a primary audience of peers. Open access has expanded the actual distribution. What to do about the growing mismatch?
At Ithaka S+R, we are examining the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. Today, we provide background about the project and announce the publication this week of a landscape review on shared infrastructure.
Today, Clarivate has installed Bar Veinstein as president for Academic and Government, a move that should bring renewed focus to the product portfolio, writes Roger C. Schonfeld.
In this moment of success for open access advocacy, Roger C. Schonfeld proposes that the academic library not take responsibility for implementing open access mandates. The first of several scenarios we will consider.
On Friday, the Internet Archive lost its “controlled digital lending” case on summary judgment. Reactions today from our Chefs Rick Anderson, Joseph Esposito, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Roy Kaufman, Roger C. Schonfeld, and Karin Wulf.
Much of the scholarly publishing sector has already experienced a flight to scale. Today, Roger Schonfeld asks: Is a major consolidation among humanities and social sciences publishers coming next?
The OSTP Nelson Memo has caused quite a stir in scholarly communication circles. Today, Roger Schonfeld asks, how will academia handle the zero embargo?
Silverchair, which provides vital digital infrastructure for the publishing sector, will remain independent (for now, at least) as a result of new majority ownership by private equity.
Revisiting a 2017 post looking at how, due to the slowing growth of content licensing, sophisticated content providers are building businesses supporting researcher workflow and university business processes.
In the light of CCCs acquisition of Ringgold last week, three Chefs, Phill Jones, Roger Schonfeld, and Todd Carpenter reflect on the motivations for the move and its implications for PIDs and organisational identifiers.