All pre-conference workshops are open to those registered for FORCE2018 (limited space, first come first serve). Sign-up for workshops here.Elsevier's 2017 acquisition of bepress shocked the library community, many of whom used bepress' institutional repository (IR) platform, and sparked questions about who owns scholarly communications infrastructure. The University of Pennsylvania Libraries responded to this news by making a public, values-based decision to embark on a learning phase to explore alternatives to bepress. This work led us to start questioning not only our own IR but also our entire scholarly communications foundation - because what is an IR, really? While most might center the conversation around library stewardship of materials, everyone's answer is different, depending on what they collect, their mission, supporting scholarly communications services they provide, etc.
Penn Libraries, in partnership with SPARC, is creating a new initiative, Scholarly Communications UnBoxed Activities (SCUBA), hoping to help communities start conversations about their IRs and other scholarly communications services. Participants will be asked to then share those findings with the larger schol comm community in the hopes that if we can all find a shared understanding of our scholarly communications infrastructures, we might be able to better support each other in library-owned/community-aligned endeavors.
This talk would present several activities to the group, asking them to have a conversation, to engage with one another in re-imagining their own infrastructures and services, and to think outside of the scholarly communications box.
