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October 21, 2020

Next Generation Library Publishing Releases “Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field”

The Next Generation Library Publishing project team is excited to announce the publication of a report, Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field by Katherine Skinner and Sarah Wipperman.

This report explores “values and principles” statements, documents, proclamations, and manifestos that have been produced by scholarly communication stakeholders over the last 25 years. It highlights the gap between naming vs. living by values and principles, and it provides examples of how a variety of fields and sectors have built audit and assessment frameworks to measure adherence to values and principles documentation  

The report closes by recommending that academic stakeholders more concretely define their values and principles in terms of measurable actions, so these statements can be readily assessed and audited. The authors propose a methodology for auditing publishing service providers to ensure adherence to agreed-upon academic values and principles, with the dual goals of helping to guide values-informed decision making by academic stakeholders and encouraging values alignment efforts by infrastructure providers.

An early version of this work was issued for public comment in March 2020; many thanks to all who provided feedback and suggestions this spring! This report is also closely related to the Values and Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist developed by Katherine Skinner and Sarah Lippincott and released for public review in July 2020.

About the Next Generation Library Publishing Project

The Next Generation Library Publishing project is led by  Educopia Institute, California Digital Library (CDL), and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos), in close partnership with LYRASIS, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and Longleaf Services. The project is generously funded by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Its purpose is to improve publishing pathways and choices for authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructure to support library publishers. In addition to developing interoperable publishing tools and workflows, our team is exploring how to create community hosting models that align explicitly and demonstratively with academic values.