 could join us this afternoon. It is afternoon on the east coast at least and I guess on the west coast as well. For those in other time zones, forgive me the east coast centricness. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information and I will be fairly briefly introducing the session. This is one of the synchronous project briefing sessions that we've scheduled for the spring 2021 CNI virtual member meeting. We had a number of these on Monday and Tuesday of this week and there'll be two more on at 4 p.m. Eastern on Thursday and Friday. I do want to just remind you that we are relying considerably more heavily than in the past on pre-recorded project briefings as well as synchronous project briefings. The pre-recorded briefings are available on demand and we release the range of those recordings on Monday. I would invite you to take a look and enjoy those as your time and interest permits. Next week on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we will be doing some plenary day sessions and I hope you can join us for those as well. This session like all of the other synchronous sessions at CNI is being recorded and we will make the recording publicly available after the meeting. A couple of mechanical things. There is a chat box and please feel free to use that. There is a Q&A tool if you want to queue up questions for the panel and you will also have other ways of engaging the panel, which they will tell you about later. There is a closed captioning transcript available and please use that if it's helpful to you. I think that's all of the mechanics. I do want to just take a moment to very briefly introduce our speakers. Sarah Rui from the Public Library of Science will be sort of moderating and leading this conversation and she will be joined by Greg Yu from the Center for Research Libraries and Maurice York from the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The topic here is one that feels very timely to me. It's about really what are the key objectives in publishers and libraries trying to work together and find the right kinds of mission alliance and alignment and mutual support structures for their work. I think you'll hear some very interesting examples of that in this conversation. I want to note though that these kinds of conversations really are ongoing in many parts of our community. I mean in a very real sense, much of the talk of transformative agreements relates very strongly to these kinds of discussions, as does the growing emphasis on library publishing programs coming at the issue from another side. So I think you'll find this conversation very interesting and with this I'm going to shut up, disappear and turn it over to Sarah. I'll just take one more moment to thank our speakers for joining us today. It's much appreciated and thank you for visiting the session. Over to you Sarah. Thanks so much Cliff and thanks so much to both you and Diane for as usual organizing a really interesting and thoughtful set of sessions for all of us today and really nice to see so many familiar names on the attendee list. Morris and I were joking and Greg were joking before that we'd happily sit and listen to any of the people on the attendee list have this exact same talk. So our goal is really to just create a space today where you can join us in a conversation that the three of us have been having for some time that I know we've been having with many of you who are watching right now in sort of side conversations. So nothing new here but I think a nice space to kind of have the conversation in a larger context. So the way we're going to structure the conversation today is each of us are going to briefly introduce ourselves and again I think it's really nice that we many of us know each other already and then we want to dive into an open conversation amongst the three of us that we hope all of you will participate in as the prompts kind of come up on the screen. So Diane's going to go ahead and basically give everyone the ability to unmute and as you want to just jump in interrupt ask questions vigorously debate whatever whatever is coming to mind you'll all have the ability to do that and if you don't feel comfortable with that more overt form of participation feel free to throw things in the chat or in the Q&A and I'll try to emcee the whole thing. But our goal here is not a conversation amongst ourselves but a conversation with you. So with that I'll let Morris you want to introduce yourself first. Absolutely good afternoon everybody I'm Morris York from Big Ten Academic Alliance and I'm the director of library initiatives for the Big Ten Academic Alliance. I've been there since last May and previous to that was at the University of Michigan. So I've been in the Big Ten floor a long time and have taken up sort of this central perspective of what can we do together as an Alliance collective action and working for the common good. So great privilege to be here today and talking about this topic scholarly publishing open knowledge and open science is one of the central pillars of our strategic action together. So really looking forward to this conversation. Thanks Morris. Greg how about you? Sure well I'm just delighted to be here today. I am speaking from downtown Chicago. I am the president of the Center for Research Libraries here in Chicago and my interest in this topic really started when I was the associate director for collections at MIT and at MIT the MIT Press is part of the state administrative unit as the as the library and the library certainly was concerned about the its budget the press was concerned about their revenue model and I just saw so many opportunities for the library to work collaboratively with the University Press at MIT that now that I'm here at CRL which has been building this collective collection and building collections collectively and the research library community. As collections are not just what we procure and purchase but they're also increasingly what we subsidize and we produce. I'm really interested to see what CRL can do in that space to help the community create great great content. So I think very very interested in this topic. Great and my name is Sarah Ruhi. I'm the director of strategic partnerships at PLOS. I came to PLOS about two years ago given the remit to help us start thinking about diverse diversifying revenue streams and business models that would situate us well for the kind of paradigm the big paradigm shift we're all in the midst of right now particularly with an eye to equity and ensuring that our business models were aligning with our mission and one of the reasons I was really keen to get just to have this conversation and it's a conversation I've been having with many of you as well who are attending is that that kind of where the intersection of mission alignment and partnership happens. When I first reached out to Morris about partnering in 2019 you know Morris I don't actually weren't there you weren't there yet so it was before Morris came Rob was holding down the fort and I was thinking big 10 like these schools are never going to coordinate like there's no way there's too many you know giant research institutions where is a place of alignment and in trying to discuss what PLOS was trying to do in this case with our collective action model which is the agreement that we moved forward with Morris it became clear oh Morris has a thing he's trying to get all of you know he's trying to get the group to do and so alignment made sense in terms of both but we're both organizations missions were going and I and this is exactly the conversation we're having with Greg this is a conversation we're having with Daniel at Yale with Robin at JHU so with many of you already and it's it peaked this question in me which is why are certain libraries keen to partner when a place like PLOS is asking for new money asking you to go out on a limb and try something new asking you to make a bet on a different kind of model that other people aren't doing why is that happening and that was kind of the genesis for wanting to have this conversation so with that throwing these questions really out to everybody on the call feel free to unmute or jump into the chat if you want to make a comment or a question but I'll just throw this both out then to Morris and to Greg how is the current crisis informing your thinking on the role that your organizations are playing oh sorry Morris do you want to go ahead I'll jump in real quick I mean so this question of how we bring equity and sustainability to the scholarly publishing environment to forward open science to forward open knowledge and this has been really a global movement for 20 years so say how do we move towards open knowledge and the business models put in place and that we have right now you know that work with things like article processing charges that work with other ways that have been developed over the last 20 years have served well to to move towards open knowledge we can see that just looking at the global trends over the last 20 years say within the Big 10 for instance among our 15 research libraries fully half of the content that is published now is open the question is is that the kind of open that we want right are those are is it the accessibility to knowledge what we want does it suit the way that we do scholarship and what we'd like to see in a sustainable open knowledge ecosystem going forward and what the pandemic did as it did with so many conversations was it just rapidly accelerate the both the urgency the need we're going to look at a number of the different elements that the pandemic brought to the fore I mean cost is clearly one of those right so the constraints on our budgets the constraints on both institutional as well as library budgets and things like that but there's many many others as well perhaps dive into the different aspects of that but the current crisis just asks us to I think calls us to action to say we must act now in order to find the proper models both the business models as well as the models for open scholarship that are going to sustain us into the future and what is happening right now is just dramatic shifts just to mention a couple of you know questions that come to the fore with the pandemic did research and publishing output go up or did it go down right we're just starting to get some of the the data around that and to see it but the current question I think calls forward is what are the right models to move forward with and there are there's lots of good thinking on this lots of good perspectives but nobody's figured it out right and so that's where I think I'm coming from and and the big 10 is really motivated towards is let's start to seed experiments let's try to find the ways you know get given the current context given what we've all been trying to work for for a very long time to try and find those sustainable models for open knowledge and and what is happening all around us right now what we're living through kind of calls forward the urgency of that moment to to find those and to really seed at scale what we can do to transform the way that scholarly communication is working so you know that's such a great answer Amoris and you know like many of you like all of you I've been doing a lot of reflection over the last year and a half on on crisis in what is crisis and you know leading you know CRL over the last you know over the last year through COVID you know had to shut down a building partially reopen a building apply for CARES Act to avoid staff furloughs you know we're all wrestling with with racial reckoning and campaigns for racial justice and be you know fighting against systemic racism so like everyone I've been really thinking about crisis and what's the nature of crisis and as I've been doing this thinking over the last year I realized that I'm probably about halfway you know through my career I've never had a moment in my career that hasn't been defined by crisis I'm a historian by training my whole career 20 years plus has played out in the background of the crisis in the humanities as a librarian my entire career has played out in the skull-com crisis and the serials crisis and over the last year as I've been thinking about a real immediate crisis that will have the beginning and an end COVID will end I think we see the the ending in sight I've been really thinking back on my use in framing of crisis when it comes to my work as a librarian and as an historian and I realized that those aren't crisis I actually see that more as condition and the condition I see it is really one of post-coloniality when I think of the breakdown of the monograph publishing system when I see a questioning models of how journals are being published those are all units those are all units institutional models business models that have been framed by western european modernity the modernity project and so as we're in a post-colonial space and we're all trying to navigate a post-colonial space which is which is not just theoretical it's it's temporally and geographically time bound as we're all trying to navigate this post-colonial condition of course it makes sense that disciplinary boundaries are being problematized of course business models are being are being disrupted of course you know they're all of these these these stresses and strains and and our knowledge our knowledge institutions and and and and then I'm like and I start thinking about this condition of post-coloniality and I think all right well how do we navigate this and and and move forward it seems to me that with this topic um by by by centering professional values and mission being committed to research-based knowledge production academic publishing when you really get down to first principles and values then you really can start to define who's your community and mission-driven publishers and mission-driven you know scholarly societies uh and mission-driven research libraries were all part of the same community that dedicated to research-based knowledge production and so redefining those institutional boundaries between mission-driven publisher research library author those those professional boundaries and institutional boundaries are all problematized right now but I think it's more than any single crisis I think this is part of a condition of post-coloniality and I think that that is uh a framing that could be super generative and powerful so that's what I've been thinking about as I navigate a real crisis I think I have a new perspective on the old crisis that's really that's a really helpful framing um to to to bring your framing helps just with with my thinking around this you know prior to 2020 I was definitely not engaged in these questions in the way that I am now um so it's it's interesting how the past year has kind of forced everyone to have a sort of personal reckoning um with themselves about about how they engage with these questions and certainly at plus there's been a real um sort of period of self-reflection at the executive level about what are we trying to do as an organization and where are we underscoring systems of inequity that we don't intentionally want to to undergird but by virtue of being born um a certain way we can't help but do given the way that we've historically done business um and so you know depending on who you talk to when I sort of speak to the the work that we're doing around models you know being predicated on equity and social justice depending on who you talk to there's you know various levels of eye-rolling um but there is a a there's some deep work we're trying to do to to understand what are the things that we've taken as a given that are are really holdovers from a kind of like academic colonialism or academic imperialism that that really does need to be problematized the way that you're talking about um so I was participating um research I think was it R to R was like just last month I researched a research conference again time is a flat circle so I've sort of lost track one of all these things were happening but we were doing a session there on um kind of the gatekeepers of knowledge right and just the fact that there's a very small um sort of elite group of institutions and stakeholders who hand out money to do research right who deem what what research is worthy and what research is not what research should have a platform and be funded and and be supported and what shouldn't be and how much time are any of us really spending to unpick well why is it that way and why do we keep funding this and not that and why are we privileging certain forms of of knowledge over others um and and how much of that unpicking can you do before it sort of becomes untenable um so there's a there's a tension there that we're trying to address um on a sort of philosophical level and then we're also trying to practically apply it um in the work that we do and there's obviously tons of work to do there but um that's kind of kind of what the the pandemic has forced us sort of on a personal and professional plane to consider um Tara Tara had a just a comment um Tara if you want to unmute yourself or raise your hand um just just say so in the chat um that you're you are exploring movement in a certain direction but I missed what part of the conversation you type this in so I'm not sure what direction you meant so if you want to unmute yourself to to kind of jump in on that um that would be helpful questions to to Greg into um Morris and this might be different for both of you but what what what kind of change management has this strategy required on your end are your groups are your organizations so aligned that it was more of um ever oh there's a question I'm I'll stop then let me um Dale if you want to go ahead uh I'll come back to my question yeah sure I wasn't sure how this is going to work so I just put my hand up we're just we're just guessing as we go here so perfect no I like I like the experimentation um clearly clearly I came to the right room today if we were in a hotel and I would be sitting in the back thinking good choice good choice just for some context so at the University of Alberta that the press is as part of my portfolio and actually is is functionally part of the library but it operates sort of somewhat separately within the library so we have a we have a you know I'll call that a fairly traditional university press the library also has a an activity that we give the elegant name of library publishing to where we have a list of about 70 journals and have been doing that forever for over a decade um pretty consistently so one my big concern and to these questions you're asking and to the questions of what you know Greg's question only about what can CRL do I may have a partial challenge for that which is I'm thinking a lot these days about what we can sustain from the institutional side in terms of the of course the investment we're all worried about what we spend on this that's the crisis to which Greg was referring but also what can we sustain in terms of work levels what what are we going to recreate if we create a thousand little bespoke arrangements that we then have to maintain so just just to bring this to a point I got a I got an email the other day from a colleague in Canada who's the editor of a journal in the library and information science space and they want to build a sustainable business model for an open access publication and they said you know they were the survey was basically asking is your institution willing to pay a I think they called it a sponsorship although they asked us what they should call it to which I thought was interesting to help them hit a target where they could sustain their journal and I felt a bit odd because despite being fully supportive of open access I said no to all of their questions and said no we're not willing to do that because if we go back down the road of creating what would it functionally from a from a labor perspective be like subscribing to a thousand society journals and maintaining these one to one relationships for for small journals we can't sustain that from a labor perspective we are not funded a level to have that level of staffing that we can maintain that plus it's just it's kind of a nightmare and in modern financial systems to do it that way so what I was thinking is I was filling that out is that we need scaled models and we have some of this parts and bits and pieces of it where journals that want to do this can be part of a larger group that's preferably not a publisher that can do this for them so we as institutions could give money to an institution who can then give it to journals and what I see they're coming and this is a long comment I apologize I'll bring it to a point is that we get the benefit of scale as an institution because we don't have to have a thousand small relationships with a thousand small vendors in our in our financial systems we can't do that but it also would maybe perhaps also assure that the subsidies journals would be getting or the sponsorships whatever you want to call them would be tied to I want to say almost performance metrics that those journals are operating as efficiently as possible that they are getting what they need but not funding opulent business models are funding other purposes you know societies use the journals to sort of fund other operations no I want to fund journals so I think there could be guarantees in both directions and benefits of scale in both directions and I've seen some of these models that work in places but there are others where that they haven't necessarily had the benefits of making things sustainably open access that we might have wanted so I think there's room in this space for scale action I just don't know who controls it and how it how we put sort of quality and and integral control on it I have any thoughts but I've talked too much already so I want to let Sopranos go Dale there's so much good stuff embedded in the in the comments made there and just maybe pick up a couple and we'll probably move between a lot of these as we go in the conversation but I'm like Greg tie back to the very good framing you were making about the postcolonial condition that we're moving through and I think Dale this is exactly part of is we have to bring great attention to how we design these business models and how we create the sustainable ecosystem that we want to see and that we don't exactly accidentally fall back into models of the past or think we're going in a new direction and accidentally fall back into old models that are really not what we wanted to see not just in terms of the economic sustainability but that don't follow our intention to bring equity and and principles of social justice and and inclusion that to the kind of scholarship we're creating there's this and spark has done just outstanding research on this just the gross inequity between the global north and the global south and the voices that get heard and who gets published and what research emerges right and as we are creating a more open and sustainable ecosystem to slip back into some of the things that have brought about the current condition you know accidentally would be it would not only be very sad but would be grossly unjust right and we have to be able to have these exact kind of conversations so that we can create not just the economic sustainability but the kind of scholarship that we want to see the kind that has the kind of equity that we want to see that's opening up new kinds of opportunities and including new voices that simply have been suppressed or just not present in the in the current ecosystem of academic publishing. Yeah and Dale to build on your point you know one of the reasons why I'm so excited to be in this conversation I'm representing CRL being on this conversation you know talking with you know Sarah plus and and and talking with Morris. Morris and I have just been having a ball having having these wonderful conversations about how it weighs that you know CRL and the big 10 can work together and this is what I'm thinking about when I look at the consortial space when I look at when I look at libraries working together at that network level I think that there is a lot of opportunity to rationalize that space and so CRL being a national organization or binational with you know across Canada in the US I want CRL to do what CRL can uniquely do and no more and I wanted to help big 10 do what big 10 can uniquely do and really creating these wonderful more rational partnerships of aligning consortia to consortia will be really really helpful and the other thing I think that we can do CRL big 10 otherwise is really serving as a platform to align workflows not just budgets but workflows the work of liaison librarians and the work of acquisition editors in a journal these skill sets map very very very well together there are opportunities to start sharing staff and and really start combining workflows I think those are huge opportunities and right now that's a real gap because library workflows are designed to buy so if you're going to sell something to us we are optimized to procure it we negotiate hard well we're procurement systems we're procurement machines at scale but when you change the model and you're like all right well now you're partnering with a mission-aligned organization and it's not about you know driving the hardest bargain right you're not negotiating with Elsevier Sage Wiley or commercial publisher you're actually working with a colleague in the academic research enterprise well then well then you're trying to be sort of as a patron to support that support that model so I think that using our consortial arrangements and aligning things at the level of workflow and budgets is a real real path forward to end that all the churn and confusion and unintentional overlap but I think you're referencing Dale I think there's an opportunity well a need to to rationalize the ecosystem Bo-Yun had a great question that I wanted to tag on to this that she she raised earlier she asked and Bo-Yun if you want to unmute please feel free what do you have in mind as different modes of knowledge production in constraint to what you call post-colonial can you say a bit more if you have thoughts on alternative different varieties of knowledge production and how they relate to libraries yeah sure I'll jump right in and and this is a topic that I'm really I'm really excited about and I want to explore more fully but so of course there's indigenous knowledge situated knowledge and centering that and knowledge production frameworks it's also adopting a different posture with colleagues in the global south the open access problem is not one of just of just removing barriers to reading content research produced by the global north it's about giving a giving voice and learning you know learning from the knowledge production from scholars in the global south and elsewhere but here's something that's really interesting about the post-colonial framework right because we could talk about it in terms of global north global south we can do that but another interesting flip on it is you could actually look at it and look at western europe right and you say well let's look at let's look at a pre-colonial western europe and so if you look at if you look at if you look at knowledge production in early modern europe or or you know before before the before before the you know the rise of you know printed books or whatnot if you look at the work of anthony graffton you saw these these these book production industries where scholars and academic publishers and libraries were all working cheek by jowl in the same administrative space so so it's interesting taking a post-colonial framework actually allows us to appreciate some some models in western european knowledge production that have been obfuscated by the modernity project so i think that the post-colonial framing is actually incredibly generative sorry i'm trying to tweet as we go here other comments or questions from the audience so far i think uh carl had a had a comment oh he's he's put it in the chat there he he writes relating to dei and openness the question of how we redefine authority and how we establish it is foundational absolutely and the the challenge that i've found here um is sort of how do you shift that conversation and maybe that is getting maybe that relates a bit to the question of you know what are the priorities of your member libraries and also that question of change management it's really interesting you know when i go to what i would consider an activist consortium or or library there's there's an under you know i'm i try to be as transparent as i can about process priorities what we can do what we can't do our financial constraints you know where we're trying to go strategically and usually because it's an activist library right there's already you know we identify alignment really quickly and then it's just about as as greg said just figuring out how do we co-create in a way that you know as many people win as possible and and um there's nothing adversarial about that engagement for for libraries that aren't in that headspace which is more of them than not it's really interesting how and you know this is maybe this is decades of trauma given you know historically how the serials crisis is gone right but the they'll just instantly be a shift to like you know show me a price and show me a discount and i'll be like wait wait wait like no like i don't i don't want to start the conversation there i want to start the conversation kind of with what we can achieve together and it's bridging that gap is a really long is a really can be a really big gap and so i want to pose that question to both of you in terms of how does the what kind of change management is required to sort of get everyone moving in the same direction i mean morris the decision to get you know 15 institutions of that size and magnitude to act together is like not a small feat what what was that like in terms of that process and i know you're you have you know members on the call here so if folks want to speak to that i'd be really interested to hear yeah it's a great question and like tithe threads from a couple of the really good comments and questions that i had so far as well one of the things for the big 10 academic alliance that it has going for it is over 60 years of building trust networks and successful collaboration it's not just the libraries of the big 10 it's all academic is library academic research programs across the universities and the libraries fit into that landscape as a key part of the activity so it's closely mission and we're talking about mission alignment closely mission aligned to the missions of the university universities to the reason that the alliance was created over 60 years ago and forwarding the scholarship and and research of the universities as as a whole so the sort of change management and getting everyone to act in the libraries to move together in this direction is about the record of success that we have so far in the strength that we've built though this specific there was a moment in the fall of 2019 when all 15 of the library directors signed a sheet of paper that said we will we are committed to an interdependent future we are committed to linking our the futures of our organizations together deeply to serve the academic mission of our universities so then what we're in now is a long process of and long i mean we're this is putting feet on the ground right putting wheels on the ground figuring out what this looks like to say how do we bring that into action right that's an incredible momentous commitment to make how do we live that and how do we bring it into action and the answer in this field as in many others is that models exist out there the pieces and parts that we want to see exist but we can't pick anything there's nothing we can pick up wholesale and say oh that's exactly what we want to do just put that you know economic model in place put that system in place you know put this you know workflow right in place and we're done it's about seeding of experiments seeding pilot projects seeing what works and what doesn't and then deepen the investment on on what works and that is going to be a dynamic process changes change right and it's and it's challenging but that is basically the method we've put in place as an innovation model to move forward and this is exploratory as much in the in the scholarly communication space and in journal publishing and in partnerships as it is in many other spaces that we need to work forward in so and working in partnership with publishers I think is absolutely essential here right there's there is too much of a momentum towards being on one side or the other of being the buyer or the seller or you know this is not an economic I mean there's an economic part of it that's incredibly important but the challenge of how we reimagine it and what we create together is the exploratory field right and we need the partnerships and the conversations to move back and forth and say what should this look like how should we approach it so as as Dale as you were asking that we don't accidentally fall into old patterns or things that we've learned are really not where we want to be there's a lot that we can observe that is wrong with the current system and we don't want to accidentally recreate that so it's a process of constant analysis constant learning and I the you know Dale one of the other questions you brought up is about the point of metrics or about observing how say for a journal publisher or for an individual journal for how a society is using a journal for example I just wanted to point really quickly to the humetrics project and if you google humetrics HSS which is basically saying how do we reimagine a metric system based in values rather than just economic metrics or you know KPIs or however that may exist right now and things like equity in openness in collegiality soundness in community are there are there five principles thanks Sarah for that putting that link in there and bringing those very human values that that those human goals and which are the goals fundamentally of the academy of how we want to work with knowledge into the center of what we're doing is absolutely essential and that's how we're going to work properly with change and holding these values and these goals in front of us constantly right we can never let them become hidden we have to always bring them to the floor and keep them constantly in view. Greg I want you to take a stab at what I think Monica and Tara are trying to synthesize and I we've been commenting in the chat that they're they're kind of on the same wavelength and it reminds me the the questions that they're both raising kind of remind me of the the kind of approach we're having in a lot of discussions around climate change but I'll we'll keep it in the context of you know Greg how your historical framing around these sort of the close coloniality that we're trying to to to walk through here and then Tara's concern that both Tara and Monica's comments are really speaking to this feeling of like it really feels like a big lift right like undoing centuries of of ingrained structures of oppression is really overwhelming and something I think we all want to commit to in principle but when the rubber hits the road and I open my desktop every day and look into my email I'm not sure how to translate the kind of work that I do day to day to unpacking that piece so there's that and then if you so that's that's kind of the macro and then Monica Tara takes Monica's point and kind of and I think gets a little more detailed in the question of particularly when it comes to thinking about how libraries can use their power to inform and make and change the the paradigm we're working in it can feel really hard because you've got these you know capitalist imperatives driving how you decide you know questions about budget whilst knowing that if we worked as to collectives we could probably achieve a bit more but those two things are really at tension so if I were to to to drill all of that down there's there's a sense of how do you deal with the it feels like such a big lift on both sides and what are what are iterative ways to start hacking away at this where you feel like you're making progress but you're not trying to put your arms around the entire iceberg sure it's a great question well I think that the appreciating the the the stresses of you know of research based knowledge production as as a condition rather than a crisis is helpful because it's not a crisis that we're gonna you know with a beginning and an end it's something we're gonna solve these are institutional frameworks that will evolve organically over over time and so our the challenge before us isn't to solve the crisis the challenge is to center our values and and our first principles into into move into make progress move the needle on our institutional frameworks and our staffing models and our workflows and just move things in the right in the right direction and I think what feels like progress to me is rethinking the the line the professional boundaries that that that we've inherited rethinking the the institutional frameworks that we've inherited publisher library scholarly society and really and really being willing to reframe them in a way so it's those so that those of us that inhabit different parts of the the academic publishing ecosystem can can work more fruitfully together one of the most challenging things for me to say just to boil it down to an example when I was at MIT I was I was stewarding a collections budget and we were really concerned about how do we use this collection budget to best effect and then I would go to the MIT Press again part of the same organization I served on the editorial board and we're really thinking about well what kind of revenue model is going to allow us to continue to produce really high quality scholarship right and because the because the the workflows weren't weren't weren't dialed in you know with different the different fund management systems different staffing models staff oftentimes didn't even know each other for the MIT Press to sell to produce content if they would they would they would contemplate using a a job or a vendor that would take a take a percentage upfront and then come across campus and sell the content to the library right and so that that's that that's an example of the institutional frameworks that we've inherited needing to rethink those and right so I used to often say here's a metric for the Skullcom crisis if you're a research librarian and you steward a collections budget you know raise your hand if you have a personal relationship with a vendor from a from a commercial publisher right I think most of us would raise our hand and then I would say well raise your hand if you have a personal relationship with a staff member of a university press I'm guessing a lot of those hands would go down right so moving the needle forward for me is to is to is to bring different parts of the the research based you know knowledge production framework together in new ways and so that brings us back to this topic here how can research libraries partner with mission-driven publishers in new ways and not and you know that that's that's the problem before us oh and one thing I'll say because I didn't answer Monica's um a question this is a perfect example where Monica I'd like to hear her answer that question Monica Monica I have here just as my as my uh as luck has it uh propping up my laptop this book here which I think is probably one of the most brilliant uh expositions on framing what colonialism is it's the uh Frederick Cooper book colonialism in question this book exists because Monica McCormick so Monica you tell me what we should do with the colonial model I'm not going to answer that sorry my inner um uh Dairy Dauphin is getting excited by that book I'm sort of making a mental note of uh of that text oh yeah Diane I don't know can you unmute Monica there might be a ding thing I just I just got that um well I'm I'm touched because that may be among the top five books I'm most proud to have ever published because Fred Cooper is like you know a god to me but um it's I don't I don't know I mean I think having worked as a history editor for many years before I became a librarian I really think about the way these things developed and that you know that little example from Anthony Grafton is a great is a great example it's like we're not in that moment anymore we've developed deep structural ways of working that have good reasons and and important you know it goes way beyond you know the funds we use and the the technologies we use it's like these are professional identity there's just a lot at stake for people in changing these things so it's I think for me to sit here as a library manager and think okay this institution took 400 years to develop and I'm trying to change it in my own career time or in the next 10 years or whatever it is it just feels a little bit it's just overwhelming so how the the stuff Morris was talking about a few minutes ago how do we hold in our minds those big essential questions even as we go through our email every day I mean I think that's really the the painful struggle um because it it just feels one thing the other thing I'll say and then I'll stop is we keep using the metaphor of an ecosystem and you know things are going to evolve and I feel like that's that's a very very slow process for one thing and it's also one that humans aren't doing right this is a social political policy these are human issues that humans have to resolve I'm not leaving this to nature right we've got to make these choices we've got to make these decisions so that for me the ecosystem isn't it's the society it's the choices we're going to make as human beings and where we're going to put our time and our money it's not natural selection and I realize ecosystem can mean a lot of things but I I don't want it to be left to biology this is a human problem no monica I'm really glad you flagged that because yeah there's a there's a there's a it's tempting to say like the uh the the the system will always write itself and so you know I can wait for that to happen and I know that's not what you mean I don't think that's what any of us mean but I appreciate your flagging the the the flip side of that metaphor um one of the things that really helps me when I'm thinking about this particular question that you're asking is you know I can't take how do I take a bite out of the iceberg whilst not going crazy having kids running around at home because school's not open and we're in a pandemic and you know someone I know is a loved one has is sick with COVID and someone I know has died from like you're doing all that and like tackling 400 years of systemic whatever like that's a lot so how do you sort of make it something that's manageable and the approach the approach that I've been empowered to take applause to I'm very grateful for is one of iterative small experimentation where is a place where I know I have I have a dedicated amount of money time resources partnerships collaborations whatever that that thing is that I know I have the ability to go and find Morris or find Greg and say it's not a lot but I have this little sphere that I can do what I want with and work with you to do what you want can we find something knowing that these are the principles I hang above my computer every day can we do something aligned with that and so in a way as you're navigating the the the kind of madness that we're all in right now you know that I have at least one space that I have dedicated to starting chipping away at what feels like a very very big set of questions and issues and that's personally and that's that's what I've done and that's what PLOS has really that's the approach that we've taken as a way to start addressing this so you know Daniel might might still be on the call when when we announced the partnership with Yale and people were like on Twitter well that's nice for Yale you know Yale's rich of course they can come up with a deal and I was like you know I would tweet direct I mean I was happy to engage with people to explain you know we have to start somewhere we have to start small and and frankly when rich institutions are willing to go out on a limb and try something new it gives us the space to start working with institutions that have a different set of circumstances right so it even just just just the smirky tweets opened an opportunity to have an engagement that made people sort of step back and think so that was a very long way of saying I don't think it's that but we can maintain both at the same time but I think we're also allowed to encase them in a space that feels manageable there's a lot of comments let me see what's going on here oh while you're looking through that Sarah there's just one other thing I'd like to sort of bring forward in the conversation is that there is as we seek to bring intention to do this to transform the ecosystem the landscape that's in front of us there is an equal relationship between the content to between the research that is produced in the knowledge and the infrastructure that it sits in and one of the things that is incredibly exciting and encouraging to me is the global community is working in both of these areas to say how do we approach this and hold these equally but if we want to have open and public knowledge and open content we need to have open infrastructure as well and ask deep questions about who built these systems what were they built for you know why were they built and maybe and it and not maybe definitely we need to have the open infrastructure and and the systems the repositories there's a number of ways to do with the software the technology that holds and supports the knowledge that we're creating and a sustainable way in for it is knowledge for the future not just knowledge for now as a monetized thing to sell and it's communities like you know the invest in open infrastructure community like SCOS like the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative out of Curtin University in Australia that are picking up these questions saying we need to call together a community to figure out the relationships between these and how we understand them and how we bring attention to what we're creating and that's a really important dimension so that we don't accidentally end up creating the you know open knowledge that we want to see but it's incompletely proprietary and closed systems and then we start asking questions like well who controls the knowledge who decides who sees what right and on what terms you know so that the aspects of the terms and the licensing and the access and the infrastructure of the equal importance if we're really going to change how what we see and what we would like to create just to to tag on to that Roslyn made a comment in the comments that I think really are another way of chipping at this iceberg that I that plus Greg Greg and Monica's reading materials I think are very relevant here there's a tremendous amount of education we need to do ourselves right there's a tremendous amount of of of learning that I certainly had never started to do prior to the discussions around social justice right now that that I think will bring a lot of perspective when we start to examine with new eyes the structures that we're supporting through the the the systems we buy into the collections we purchase the the systems we're building ourselves so I really appreciate Monica Monica sharing well Greg and Monica sharing the book and then Roslyn I'm sharing that particular article from from all of the New York Times work that's been going on here because it's just knowing that framing gives you a different lens when you're looking at what may feel like very quotidian decisions that we make every day like do I renew with this platform vendor or do I renew with this one so I really appreciate your flagging that Roslyn um Heather's got a question um thoughts on the challenges around preserving knowledge so we've been talking about creating it and accessing it um thoughts around dynamic content web content digital humanities happen we cooperate to do a more efficient and thoughtful job in this thanks for that question Heather yeah so I'll jump in because you know Heather's question really highlights the need to rethink how we build collections and how collection budgets and how collection staffing and operations run within within research libraries like I said before you know oftentimes our collection budgets and our related workflows are designed to optimize procurement we buy things so if publishers are going to sell things to libraries boy we are super efficient at buying it we can do big deals we can do approval plans for books we are optimized to buy then you throw in something like hey that website shouldn't we be archiving that what's the web archiving what's the collection development policy for that what's the acquisition department policy for that what's the preservation policy for that locally what's the consortium collection development you know method for web archiving don't know how to do that so well yet right but if but if something is sold to us boy we can we can we can buy and bulk and we have that automated so the challenge before us is rethinking well how is our collection budget designed how our selector is trained how you know what what what what would collection development look like if the new stacks is just a series of open repositories and who's selecting content and what and who's putting content on those repositories right so I think that that's that's what we're that's what we need to rethink and well and that's what we are rethinking we've been rethinking this for decades now and we're moving forward but Heather's question really brings to the floor this idea that collection building and stewardship and dissemination uh isn't must be much more than just procurement so we're coming to time um Diane um flagged that I'm certainly more than willing to stay on after the recording stops at the top of the hour to continue this conversation and I just I feel like we again this is a case where you'd you know you'd be sitting in a hotel lobby you have a drink you've eaten some food and then we'd all wander to dinner or somewhere together since we can't do that I'm more than happy to stick around I don't want to speak for Greg and Morris though I don't I want to make sure um if you're unable to stay no pressure if anyone um can't stay are you two able to stay a little longer I can stay a little bit longer yes yeah I'm good yeah I think we can do another 10 or 15 um but that's yeah Heather if you want to um uh follow up on that please feel free and for those of you that have to head out thank you so much uh for joining us this afternoon this was exactly the kind of conversation I was hoping we'd have so I'm delighted thank you yeah thank and thanks so much to our panelists too this has been a really tremendous uh conversation thanks for everyone who chimed in and who joined us uh as Cliff said we'll resume our C&I synchronous live um sessions tomorrow afternoon four p.m eastern time and we look forward to seeing you then thanks so much everybody just stick around if you want to keep the conversation going