Best of Core Forum: Organizing for Open; Aligning Organizational Structures with Open Values

Description: Many academic libraries have a strong commitment to open scholarship articulated in strategic planning goals, values statements, and policy documents. These ideals exist next to a scholarly communication landscape dominated by corporate publishers, paywalls and licensing agreements that center subscriptions and title lists. Our organizational structures, reflected in our budgets and org charts, are aligned to that closed world. In the last several years, the amount of open content in the scholarly publishing landscape has grown significantly. Most observers agree that this trend will accelerate in the near future. We are at a moment when we can consider significant change. How do we reorganize our structures to align with our goals for open? How do we organize ourselves for success when subscriptions and paywalls are de-centered? What positions do we need? What investments must we make? How can we work together as a profession to build the kind of open world we want? In our institution, we have been asking these questions and working towards answers.

This webinar was previously presented in-person as a session at the 2023 Core Forum. We are hosting this webinar, with the session adapted and presented live as a virtual event, to extend its reach.

Learning Outcomes:

Participants will be encouraged to think about how their institution is supporting open scholarship and what changes they could make at various levels of investment. Participants will take away strategies for starting local conversations about large organizational change.

Who Should Attend: This webinar is geared primarily toward folks in academic libraries and other research library settings who might be considering high-level strategies for collections, description, instruction, and scholarly communications.

Presenters:

As the Delpha and Donald Campbell Dean of Libraries at Oregon State University Libraries and Press (OSULP), Anne-Marie Deitering oversees OSU’s Valley Library in Corvallis, the Guin Library at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, the OSU-Cascades Library in Bend, and the OSU Press. As dean, she builds relationships and facilitates conversations across OSU’s academic, student affairs and central administration units about affordability, equitable and sustainable access to scholarly communication, and the essential role libraries play in the university’s teaching, research, and engagement missions.

Cara Key (she/her) is the Digital Repository Librarian in the Library Information Technology department at Oregon State University Libraries and Press (OSULP). Cara focuses on providing digital services and resources for the OSU community in its broadest sense, by supporting the repositories that hold university scholarship, unique cultural and historical collections, and open-access journals.

Diana J. Castillo is the Business/Social Science Data Librarian at Oregon State University. Prior to receiving her MLIS from Dalhousie University, she worked in nonprofit advocacy.