About

With a recent grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation (see press release) over the next 18 months, we will be focusing our efforts on mapping out the range of infrastructure that comprises the system of scholarly communication, and surveying colleges and universities to understand their current investment practices in this infrastructure.

Team

Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute
David Lewis, IUPUI (Emeritus)
Mike Roy, Middlebury College

Advisors

Our Scholarly Commons Advisory Committee helps us in the following ways: 

  • Provide input and feedback on the definition of infrastructure
  • Identify  infrastructure providers to include in our census
  • Provide input and feedback on our case studies, including identifying promises projects to study
  • Provide input and feedback on design of our campus survey
  • Identify networks of schools to recruit to participate in survey, and encouraging participation
  • Provide input and feedback on the identification of an institutional home for the project
  • Assist with outreach and communication to various scholarly communication networks

They are:

John Dove, Independent consultant
Greg Eow, Center for Research Libraries
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University
Rachel Frick, OCLC
Mike Furlough, HathiTrust
Robert Miller, Lyrasis
Heather Piwowar, Impactstory
Vanessa Proudman, SCOSS/ SPARC Europe
Judy Ruttenberg, Association of Research Libraries
Roger Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R
Brian Schottlaender, re:work library consulting
Yasmeen Shorish,  James Madison University
Kevin Stranack, Public Knowledge Project/Simon Fraser University
Greg Tananbaum, SPARC
Kaitlin Thaney, Invest in Open Infrastructure
Dan Whaley, Hypothesis & JROST

Brief History

This all got started when David Lewis declared as something of a thought experiment that all libraries should contribute at least 2.5% of their budgets to create an open scholarly commons. The original idea is in his article “The 2.5% Commitment“. From there, a small group of us thought the idea important enough to explore what it might look like in the real world, including taking on the task of defining what would count as a valid investment in Open, and creating a tool to allow colleges and universities to record over time how their investments in Open have changed.

We are part of the Invest in Open Infrastructure initiative.

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