[GOAL] Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action

[Sarven Capadisli]

On 15/04/2020 16.52, Kathleen Shearer wrote:
> To that end, we are calling on researchers, policy makers, funders,
> service providers, universities and libraries from around the world to
> work together to address the issue of bibliodiversity in scholarly
> communication.
> 
> Read the blog post here
> <https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/fostering-bibliodiversity-in-scholarly-communications-a-call-for-action/> and full
> paper here <http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3752923>


That is a great goal, which has had my full support for years. I still
think a more fundamental shift in thinking in the community is required
to make real progress.

For instance, OA publishing in practice requires actors in the ecosystem
to go through third-party actors and systems.

It is hard to see the transition if we factor in the control dimension
and power dynamics. The question of what constitutes a contribution or
how people can participate quickly turns into understanding what works
for the third-parties as opposed to content creators. As I see it,
whether third-parties are non- or for-profit is not as significant as it
may seem for the "big picture".

If we genuinely want to realise a diverse and inclusive ecosystem, we
need to acknowledge and enable different entry points. That doesn't
happen by locking things down, whether that's done through using
specific kinds of identifiers, data shapes, or applications.

The fact of the matter is that at this point in time, the machinery and
policies underlying scholarly communication is mostly a soup of vendor
lock-in solutions.

Until "self-publishing" through open Web standards (which does *not*
preclude peer review etc) is acknowledged on equal grounds in the
ecosystem, we will continue to ask ourselves the same questions about OA
simply because we haven't addressed the core issues pertaining to
autonomy and universal access.

-Sarven
https://csarven.ca/#i