On “From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication,” by Nicky Agate, Gail Clement, Danny Kingsley, Sam Searle, Leah Vanderjagt, and Jen Waller
“From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication” draws together the perspectives of six Editorial Board members from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. The contributors were asked to consider the following prompts:
- What do you see as the most pressing issue(s) in scholarly communication today?
- What are we doing that’s important?
- What aren’t we doing that we should be?
- Who should we be working with?
- What mountains should we try to move?
- Where do you see challenges to be met and opportunities to be addressed?
Responses ranged from the critical opposition of profit-making publishing to open access (Waller), to the value of working with non-traditional publication formats (Searle), to the “business problems” of current approaches to open access in libraries (Vanderjagt). Nicky Agate takes a marked stance, suggesting that “the encroachment of capital and profit on all of our labor” (5) is one of the greatest challenges to scholarly communication; whereas Danny Kingsley provides an introspective response on the lack of recognition that scholarly communication gets as a field unto itself. Gail Clement argues that a more mindful approach to collaborating with authors would improve scholarly communication.
Overall, the contributors provide a concise, multi-perspective meditation on challenges to scholarly communication in the 21st century. Although skewed toward library perspectives, given the venue, the issues raised affect all roles in the scholarly communication cycle, and draw necessary attention to needed actions for successful change.
Work cited
Agate, Nicky, Gail Clement, Danny Kingsley, Sam Searle, Leah Vanderjagt, and Jen Waller. 2017. “From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 5(General Issue): n.p. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2196