• OPEN REPOSITORIES REPORT SERIES

Advancing Open: Views from
Scholarly Communications
Practitioners
by Lindsey MacCallum, Ann Barrett,Leah Vanderjagt, and Amy Buckland(on behalf of the CARL Open Repositories Working Group’s Task
Group on Community Building and Engagement)

APRIL 2020

Advancing Open: Views from Scholarly Communications Practitioners was
written by members of the CARL Open Repositories Working Group’s
Task Group on Community Building and Engagement and is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Table of Contents
Preamble ......................................................................................................................................... 2
Intent of Event.............................................................................................................................................................. 2
Focus on Practitioners .............................................................................................................................................. 2

The State of Open Scholarship in Canada .............................................................................. 4
Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 6Open Scholarship Policy ............................................................................................................. 7
International Initiatives.............................................................................................................................................. 7
Relationships with Stakeholders ...........................................................................................................................8
Institutional Policy and Advocacy ........................................................................................................................9
Resources ..................................................................................................................................................................... 10Open Technological Infrastructure.......................................................................................... 11
Leadership in Advancing Open Source Infrastructure ................................................................................ 11
Sustainability ............................................................................................................................................................... 12
Investment ................................................................................................................................................................... 15

Open People: The Human Element ......................................................................................... 16
Centering Indigeneity .............................................................................................................................................. 16
Relationship Building ............................................................................................................................................... 18
Funding ......................................................................................................................................................................... 18
Workload and Scholarly Communications ...................................................................................................... 19
Collaboration and Support ................................................................................................................................... 20
Professional Development.................................................................................................................................... 20
Roles ............................................................................................................................................................................... 21

Open Outreach ............................................................................................................................ 21
Culture Change ......................................................................................................................................................... 22
Refocus ........................................................................................................................................................................ 23
Organizational Impediments ............................................................................................................................... 23
New Collaborations ................................................................................................................................................. 24
Journal Collections & the Big Deal .................................................................................................................... 24
Infrastructure ............................................................................................................................................................. 25

Open Workflows and Operations ...........................................................................................26
Scope of Practice and Core Competencies ................................................................................................... 26
Training and Professional Development ......................................................................................................... 27
Community of Practice .......................................................................................................................................... 28
Institutional Support ............................................................................................................................................... 29
Collaboration and Communication ................................................................................................................... 30
Reassessing Collections......................................................................................................................................... 30

Conclusion: Moving Forward ................................................................................................... 31
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 33

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

1Preamble
Intent of Event
Given the bold actions of our European counterparts in advancing open
scholarship at consortial, national, and regional levels — including Projekt
Deal1, Plan S2, and the Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy
Development3 — the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL)Open Repository Working Group (ORWG) Task Group for Community
Building & Engagement (CBE) prioritized creating an opportunity for the
Canadian academic library scholarly communication practitioner community
to convene, share best practices and expertise, and explore refreshedstrategies to foster open scholarship in Canada.
It is vital that the Canadian open scholarship community keep pace with the global
advancement of open and reusable research, and scholarly communication
practitioners — who have constant immersion in the open scholarship space — areuniquely positioned to consider current and potential activities, supports, andpriorities at local, regional, and national levels that will best advance open
scholarship across Canada. In order to provide a forum for practitioners to beheard, the CBE group organized Advancing Open, a 1.5-day event held in
Vancouver, British Columbia, May 6-7, 2019. This event provided a unique
opportunity for scholarly communications practitioners to convene and delve into
two key questions:
What is holding open scholarship back in Canada?
What actions and strategies will mobilize open initiatives and uptake in theacademic environment in Canada?

Focus on Practitioners
Advancing Open welcomed more than 70 participants from across Canada whoeither work directly in areas of open research such as open repository archiving,
research data management planning, and library and press publishing, or who workin other areas of the library (e.g. collections, systems, liaison with academic
departments) and whose work increasingly intersects with open scholarship.

1

Projekt Deal. (n.d.). About. https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/

2

Science Europe. (2018, September). cOAlition S for the realisation of full and immediate open access.
https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cOAlitionS.pdf

3Tennant, J., Beamer, J., Bosman, J., Brembs, B., Chung, N. C., Clement, G., Crick, T., Dugan, J., Dunning, A. Eccles, D.,
Enkhbayar, A., Graziotin, D., Harding, R., Havemann, J., Katz, D., Khanal, K., Kjaer, J. N., Koder, T., Macklin, P., & Turner,
A. (2019, January 30). Foundations for open scholarship strategy development. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/b4v8p

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

2

The event used an unconference approach through primarily small-group facilitated“breakout sessions” to discuss work done to date in specific areas related to open
scholarship and propose actions for moving forward; all discussions were led andfacilitated by members of the scholarly communication practitioner community.
Participants were welcome to move among the groups, or stay in one group they
were particularly interested in.
Discussion focused on five key themes that had been determined following preevent consultation with the open scholarship community:●

Open Policy (institutional, regional, national, and international policies)●

Open Workflow and Operations (e.g. day-to-day open scholarship work)●

Open Technology (software and/or infrastructure that supports open
scholarship)●

The Human Element — Open People (diversity and inclusion, workload, andcommunity support)●

Open Outreach (open scholarship advocacy)

Notes were taken by members of the CBE group and other planning committee
members in each discussion session in order to document the perspectives ofparticipants to the best of our ability, and it is thus the perspectives of theparticipants at Advancing Open that form the backbone of this document. This
document summarizes, analyzes, and proposes recommendations for future action.
Using the notes generated during the plenary sessions and themed sessions on
specific aspects of scholarly communication practice, a number of common
perspectives and themes were identified that the event participants felt are
essential to advancing open scholarship in Canada. This paper presents theperspectives of participants in these five specific themed discussions in noparticular order.
The event was a rare opportunity for the Canadian academic library scholarly
communication community to convene, critically reflect on the success of its efforts
to date in supporting open research practices, and chart a path toward sustainableinfrastructures for these practices. Advancing Open proved meaningful to thecommunity in several different ways:●

the transfer of knowledge from experienced practitioners to those new toscholarly communications or to the profession;●

the sharing of demonstrated best practices to increase engagement at the
local level (but also with a strategic eye to influencing provincial and national
policy);Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

3●

critical assessments of previous and current efforts to lower the economic
barriers to both the creation and dissemination of academic publications, andidentification of measures that have been most successful to date;●and, identifying aspects of open access scholarly communications andpublishing that require improvements, and proposing recommendations for
implementing those changes.

The Advancing Open event helped identify practitioner-led directions and solutions
designed to increase the uptake and commitment to open scholarship that will
support a future-ready and competitive Canada where citizens have full access totheir institutions’ world-class scholarly research. In turn, this report has been written
for the scholarly communications community in Canada to a) use as a discussion
instrument with academic library leaders and decision makers and b) strengthen
both vertical and peer-level strategic alignment for advancing open scholarship in
Canada. The report will also help the scholarly communications community set its
own priorities for grassroots action.

The State of Open Scholarship in Canada
The Library and Information Sciences (LIS) sector has been invested in open access(OA) since the very beginning of organized, collective efforts toward OA for all
peer-reviewed research.4 Seventeen years later, the LIS sector continues to work
toward and advocate for the now broader concept of open scholarship, which
encompasses open access, open data, open educational resources, and open
research practices. LIS professionals have consistently taken the position that open
scholarship is an essential public good that must be strengthened and supported by
all open scholarship stakeholders.5 Supporting open access initiatives at the local
level — via institutional repositories, open journals, and monographs, and by funding
open platforms and initiatives such as Érudit, the Federated Research Data
Repository (FRDR), and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) — is central to the
future of open scholarship that is conceived of as serving the public good.

4

Chan, L., Cuplinskas, D., Eisen, M., Friend, F., Genova, Y., Guédon, J. C., Hagemann, M., Harnad, S., Johnson, R.,
Kupryte, R., La Manna, M., Rév, I., Segbert, M., de Souza, S., Suber, P., & Velterop, J. (2002). Budapest open accessinitiative. https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read5

Daniels, J., & Thistlethwaite, P. (2016). Being a scholar in the digital era: Transforming scholarly practice for the public
good. Policy Press; Roach, A., & Gainer, J. (2013). On open access to research: The green, the gold, and the public
good. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(7), 530-534. https://doi.org/10.1002/JAAL.177; Tennant, J. P.,
Waldner, F., Jacques, D. C., Masuzzo, P., Collister, L. B., & Hartgerink, C. H. (2016). The academic, economic and societal
impacts of open access: an evidence-based review. F1000Research, 5, 632.
https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.8460.3

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

4Researchers funded by Canada’s three federal research funding agencies are
required to comply with an open access policy on publications.6 Additionally, a
research data management policy has been drafted which — in its preamble — issituated within national declarations on openness, including the Action Plan on
Open Government and the Agencies’ own internal broad policy shift toward
openness.7 Other research-funding agencies have similar policies,8 and several postsecondary educational institutions have now adopted institutional open accesspolicies or mandates.9 Despite this progress at developing high-level mandates,
recent research into the current state of open scholarship in Canada has shownresearcher compliance rates with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on
Publications (that is, making scholarly articles openly available within 12 months ofpublication) is below 50%, a compliance rate that is well below other countries’
compliance rates in the United States and the United Kingdom.10 This indicates
there is a great deal of work that remains to be done in order to create a strong
foundation upon which to base a modern approach to open scholarship.
The Canadian scholarly communications landscape has grown in the nearly two
decades since organized efforts toward open access began: a study by Shearer in2003 on behalf of CARL identified 12 universities in the country which had already
implemented an institutional repository (IR).11 By 2019, there were approximately 67
academic institutional repositories in Canada.12 The vast majority of the IRs are
multi-disciplinary, and the most commonly used software used to support those IRs
is DSpace (48% of identified repositories).13

6

Government of Canada. (2015). Tri-Agency open access policy on publications.
http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F6765465.html?OpenDocument

7

Government of Canada. (2018). Draft Tri-Agency statement of principles on digital data management.
http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/vwapj/dmp_draft.pdf/$file/dmp_draft.pdf

8Genome Canada. (2008). Policy on access to research publications.
https://www.genomecanada.ca/sites/default/files/pdf/en/AccessResearchPublicationsPolicy.pdf; Heart and Stroke
Foundation of Canada. (n.d.). HSF open access to research outputs policy: Guidelines.
http://www.hsf.ca/research/en/hsf-open-access-research-outputs-policy-guidelines; Prostate Cancer Canada. (2016).
Policies for research grants and awards: open access. http://www.prostatecancer.ca/Research/Grants-and-AwardsGuide/Policies-for-Research-Grants-and-Awards#_Open_access

9

Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI). (2017, October 2). Canadian university open access statements. Open
Scholarship Policy Observatory. https://ospolicyobservatory.uvic.ca/canadian-university-open-access-statements/

10

Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). Do authors comply when funders enforce open access to research? Nature
562, 483-486. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07101-w

11

Shearer, K. (2003). Institutional repositories: Towards the identification of critical success factors. Canadian Journalof Information and Library Science, 27(3), 89-108. Preprint: http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/29084

12

Retrieved from Canadian Repository Platforms - Plateformes de dépôts canadiens
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LYaS1fbnYNEeWTN3ribt4j5whIfOIGIy-KXYgwfpspg/edit April 2020.

13

Retrieved from Canadian Repository Platforms - Plateformes de dépôts canadiens
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LYaS1fbnYNEeWTN3ribt4j5whIfOIGIy-KXYgwfpspg/edit April 2020.

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

5

Where once the establishment of an institutional repository was seen as
groundbreaking, the boundaries of open scholarship have grown immensely in
Canada and elsewhere, with considerations of OA/APC funds14, institutional open
access policies and mandates,15 open data requirements, open educational
resources,16 embedding open scholarship into tenure and promotion requirements,17
relationship-building among various stakeholders,18 and scholar-led community
publishing initiatives all equally essential to the current discussion of open
scholarship in Canada. This report will address many of the aforementioned issues
from the perspective of scholarly communications practitioners, a group which iswitness to the minutiae of implementing open scholarship policies and initiatives,
and who have a unique perspective on our current capacity — as individuals,
practitioners, institutions, regional consortia, and national agencies — to not only
support open scholarship, but ensure it grows to meet the needs of future
researchers, information professionals, and citizens alike.

Methodology
An unconference approach was chosen for this event as the participants attending
were generally anticipated to have a high level of expertise or knowledge in thefield. The goal was to have participant-driven discussions on key topics. The data
which forms the basis of this report is comprised of extensive notes taken during
discussions at every plenary and breakout session held at Advancing Open. These
notes were taken by members of the Advancing Open Planning Committee, and canbe viewed here. These notes attempted to capture the ideas, arguments,
challenges, and opportunities expressed by participants, at times recording direct
quotations.
After the Advancing Open event, Holly Pickering and Daniel Cockroft(MLIS/Humanities Computing research assistants at the University of Alberta)
performed text analysis to analyze the vast amount of text produced, synthesize
the notes into broader concepts, concerns, and proposals, and note divergent

14

Hampson, C. (2014). The adoption of open access funds among Canadian academic research libraries, 2008-2012.
Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 9(2).
https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/download/3115/3394/0

15Landry, C. (2017). OA policies in Canada: A quick and dirty environmental scan. Open Shelf. https://openshelf.ca/160201-ocula-oa-policy-in-canada-a-quick-and-dirty-environmental-scan/

16

Canadian Alliance of Student Associations. (2017). Building access, building canada: A strategy for the federal
government's role in post-secondary education. https://www.casa-acae.com/building_access_building_canada

17

Alperin, D., Pablo, J., & Yano, B. (2017). Advancing open at Simon Fraser University: The faculty and student
experience. Conference presentation at Digital Initiatives Symposium.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/symposium/2017/2017/16/

18

Greyson, D., Vezina, K., Morrison, H., Taylor, D., & Black, C. (2009). University supports for open access: A Canadiannational survey. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 39(3), 1-32.
http://journals.sfu.ca/cjhe/index.php/cjhe/article/view/472/499

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

6

opinions and comments. The CBE task group then analyzed these documents andused them to create this report as a reflection of the scholarly communications
practitioner community in Canada: its concerns, priorities, and goals for the futureof open scholarship.
We now present our findings representing the gathered perspectives of the 70
members of Canada’s open scholarship community in attendance at Advancing
Open.

Open Scholarship Policy
Three discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In theOpen Policy sessions, the questions were:
How should Canada prepare for upcoming changes in publishing broughton by Plan S and other international OA policies?
The stick vs. the carrot — should we be focusing our efforts on pushing for
OA policies or on ways to incentivize open (e.g. recognition of open
publishing in advancement and promotion guidelines)? How does this playout locally? Can both strategies effectively work together?
CARL and CRKN have stated recently that they are committed to working
with other stakeholders to develop a “made-in-Canada” approach tosustainable open scholarship. What do you think such an approach shouldlook like, and how can you contribute?

International Initiatives
The launch of international initiatives like Plan S19 shows that the information
landscape is shifting along with the culture of scholarly publishing, but participants
at Advancing Open expressed the view that Canada, unlike Europe which has beenworking toward OA202020 for some years, is not currently prepared to make amajor step toward a transformative open scholarship model of this kind. The
necessary foundation of funders and networks has not yet been established in
Canada, and participants cautioned that a simple duplication of existing
international initiatives is not sufficient, as many do not address the underlying

19
20

Plan S. https://www.coalition-s.org/
OA2020. https://oa2020.org/

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

7inequities and commercial interests at the heart of many “transformative” plans andagreements.
Reactions of participants to the draft Plan S implementation guidelines specificallyindicated that this initiative would be hard to enforce and the technicalrequirements for repositories and journals were excessive and difficult to implement(e.g. a mandatory requirement for JATS/XML). After the Advancing Open event,cOAlition S did release a revised implementation guide that lessened some of thetechnical requirements, but the now “strongly recommended” criteria is still
currently out of reach for many Canadian post-secondary libraries.21 Other concerns
included the heavy emphasis on Gold OA over other models; no mandate for open
source (OS) infrastructure, which will hinder progress in this area and may call into
question security of community investment in open22; and a lack of clarity regarding
how read and publish agreements will work in practice.
This initiative in its current iteration is not right for Canada, but it opens up dialogue
as demonstrated by the number of responses it has elicited, including from the
Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ)23 and the CARL Response to Plan
S24. While Plan S is not something that Canada can or should adopt at this time, itdoes open the conversation to consider different models for creating a “made in
Canada” approach. We need to evaluate international initiatives (e.g. Norway,
Germany, California) and learn from successful national Canadian initiatives (e.g.
Portage25).

Relationships with Stakeholders
Discussion of Plan S highlights the need for academic libraries to engage broadly
with academic associations and researchers. While national organizations like CARL
and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) have indicated they wish
to take a leadership role in open scholarship, there are multiple stakeholders and tobe effective, they cannot do this alone. Firstly, open scholarship must work forresearchers or it will not be successful — working with this group is key. Secondly, it
is necessary to build a more transparent, reciprocal relationship between scholarly

21

cOAlition S. (2019, May 31). Accelerating the transition to full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications:
Rationale for the revisions made to the Plan S Principles and Implementation Guidance. https://www.coalitions.org/wp-content/uploads/PlanS_Rationale_310519.pdf.

22

For more information on this point, see: Joseph, H. (2018). Securing community-controlled infrastructure SPARC’splan of action. College & Research Libraries News, 79(8).
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/17246/18986

23

Canadian Association of Learned Journals. (n.d.) Plan S: A Perspective from Canadian journals. https://www.caljacrs.ca/sites/default/files/calj_response_to_plans.pdf

24

Canadian Association of Research Libraries. (2018). Response from CARL to the Plan S Implementation Guidance.
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CARL_Response_to_PlanS_2019.02.08.pdf

25

Portage Network. https://portagenetwork.ca/

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

8communications practitioners and national organizations that represent and/or
provide insight to the perspectives and interests of researchers, including Canada’sfederal granting agencies and learned societies.
We need to strengthen leadership/practitioner communications through deliberate,planned information-sharing strategies and events. Clarification of open scholarshiproles and goals of leadership organizations like CRKN, CARL, Library and Archives
Canada (LAC), and Canada’s federal granting agencies are key to this discussion. It
is clear that the current means of working toward adoption of open scholarship are
not adequate, and “encouragement” to practise open scholarship is not sufficient.26
Participants posed questions on how to define the roles among national
stakeholders, and what their relationships to practitioners should encompass.
Clarification from national stakeholders on their capacity to lead open scholarshipinitiatives and areas of support they can offer is an important part of these
discussions in order to better identify and define opportunities for collaboration andmeaningful progress.

Institutional Policy and Advocacy
Institutional OA policies at Canadian universities27 are not, in themselves, thesolution. However, an OA policy is an indicator that open scholarship is officiallyendorsed by the institution, that there has been a stronger degree of open
scholarship socialization among administrators and faculty at those institutions, andit couples with the Tri-Agency requirements for open access. Institutional OA
policies vary widely from statements of “encouragement” to establishment of
mandatory practice, but wherever they are on the spectrum, they have the potential
to influence and motivate researchers to consider open scholarship options. While it
has yet to be determined if an institutional OA policy alone can translate to action,
it does open up an opportunity for discussion and education.28
An OA policy is a tool that must be partnered with additional resources in order toincrease impact. One essential resource is extensive training of staff in libraries andresearch offices who are on the frontlines of offering ongoing open scholarshipoutreach and advocacy. The United Kingdom is an example of established training

26

Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). Do authors comply when funders enforce open access to research? Nature
562, 483-486. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07101-w

27

Open Scholarship Policy Observatory. https://ospolicyobservatory.uvic.ca/category/policy/

28

Landry, C. (2017). OA policies in Canada: A quick and dirty environmental scan. https://open-shelf.ca/160201-oculaoa-policy-in-canada-a-quick-and-dirty-environmental-scan/

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

9and support models (e.g. UKRG, Jisc, RLUK, SCONUL) that correlate with an uptakeof open scholarship that is much greater than in Canada.29
Participants of Advancing Open viewed integrating open scholarship into tenure
and promotion regulations and in collective agreements as an essential component
to furthering open scholarship and changing the culture of academic publishing.
Questions posed by participants included how such conversations get started
within institutions, and how advocacy from the academic library could play a role inthose conversations. Some institutions in North America have already undertaken
this work, and their experience can provide guidance on how the library can
advocate through OA policy and influence promotion and tenure guidelines topromote a more equitable and accurate evaluation of scholarship.30
Impediments exist in the form of academic values of individualism andcompetitiveness in publishing and research, combined with a complicated approachto academic freedom and publishing. Faculty are also constrained by institutional
and/or departmental evaluation criteria, which often rely on ideas of prestige andrelated metrics like the Journal Impact Factor, and often do not fight as hard fortheir copyright as they do for their academic freedom.31 In addition, somedisciplinary practices prescribe specific journals in which faculty should publish,
which effectively blocks participation in open scholarship publishing.32
Despite these challenges, the aforementioned examples of combined top-down(policy) and bottom-up (advocacy) approach can shift institutional inertia.

Resources
Article Processing Charges (APCs) were seen by many participants as anunsustainable and inequitable model, but it is documented that several Canadian
institutions have OA funds in place that help pay for APCs.33 Open scholarship

29

Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). Do authors comply when funders enforce open access to research? Nature
562, 483-486. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07101-w

30

Hilstob, K. (2018). Rewarding open access: The power of promotion and tenure. University of British Colombia
Library (Vancouver), https://doi.org/doi:10.14288/1.0367401; Odell, J. D., Coates, H. L., & Palmer, K. L. (2016).
Rewarding open access scholarship in promotion and tenure: Driving institutional change. College & Research Libraries
News July/August 2016. https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/10343/322.full.pdf

31

Niles, M. T., Schimanski, L. A., McKiernan, E. C., & Alperin, J. P. (2019). Why we publish where we do: Faculty
publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations. BioRxiv, 706622.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/07/21/706622.full.pdf; Wical, S. H., & Kocken, G. J. (2017). Open
access and promotion and tenure evaluation plans at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Serials Review, 43(2), 111119. https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2017.1313024

32

Australian Business Deans Council. (2019). 2019 journal quality list review final report. https://abdc.edu.au/wpcontent/uploads/2019/12/abdc-2019-journal-quality-list-review-report-6-dec-2019.pdf

33

Yates, E., Hampson, C., Hatherill, J., Lavigne, J., Nariani, R., Paterson, J., Shires, M., &.Tiessen, R. (2016). Library open
access funds in Canada: Review and recommendations. Canadian Association of Research Libraries. http://www.carlabrc.ca/doc/CARLOAWGLibraryOAFundsFinalReport-Jan 2016.pdf; Fernandez, L., & Nariani, R. (2011). Open Access

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

10needs consistent infusions of funding, but many event participants felt funding
should be directed not at APC funds but to alternative and more sustainablemodels, open scholarship initiatives, education, and outreach. If universities
redirected their APC funds to open scholarship initiatives, those cumulative funds
could support staff to develop more intuitive processes and systems to integrate
open scholarship into faculty workflows, and shift energy to advocating,discovering and collecting content that complies with green OA.

Open Technological Infrastructure
Two discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In theOpen Technological Infrastructure groups the questions were:
How should academic libraries approach investments in the technical andcomputing services that underlie open scholarship to ensure a sustainable, lean
yet versatile, ecosystem?
How can the open community move away from institutions operating their open
services in isolation and instead help foster communal expertise and guidance on
essential open software functionalities?

Leadership in Advancing Open Source Infrastructure
Many Advancing Open participants expressed a desire to reduce duplication ofeffort and focus on collaborative initiatives, but current open technologicalinfrastructure requires significantly increased support from the federal level in
Canada. While the infrastructure discussions occasionally focused on specificsoftware, the real concern was the lack of coordination within the country fortechnology-based initiatives when it comes to people and time resources. Canada
has the tools to do this work, but no coordinated plan to do it together. An oftheard question was the following:“Canada is small, why do we each needto run our own repository?”
Support and leadership specifically pertaining to digital preservation is unclear at anational level; institutions are trying to do this work on their own, and yet gaps still

Funds: A Canadian Library Survey. Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research,6(1). https://doi.org/10.21083/partnership.v6i1.1424

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

11remain in the funding landscape for which no one has taken responsibility.34 Digitalpreservation is a core functionality of the library; it differentiates the library from apublisher as logical content steward of institutional knowledge production.
Potential national leaders already invested in knowledge dissemination in thislandscape include Portage, Library and Archives Canada, and Canada’s federal
granting agencies — with the latter organization close to having mandates for both
open access and open research data, the life-cycle of research outputs in its
entirety must be considered and supported at each step in that cycle. At the
moment, a Canada-wide preservation infrastructure does not currently have a final“home” with any national body.
A common vision leads to the type of impactful leadership found in other countries
by creating a long-term sustainable approach to infrastructure. An example of thisleadership is demonstrated by CRKN and CARL joining the Global Sustainability
Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and supporting global initiatives like
DOAJ and SHERPA-RoMEO.35 Further collaboration and partnerships like this are
essential to growing Canadian capacity to support open scholarship domesticallyand internationally. Increased connections with Library and Archives Canada andCanada’s federal granting agencies are seen as important developments in fosteringa national approach to open source infrastructure that supports open scholarship.

Sustainability
There is debate among the community regarding the best approach to sustainablediscoverability and interoperability infrastructure for open content: some
practitioners propose a universal national infrastructure,36 while others are in favourof a distributed, coordinated system. An example of shared infrastructure is Arca37
from BC, which is a shared repository run by BC Electronic Network serving 14
institutions. Some public libraries are also participating. In addition, Arca has a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Council of Prairie and Pacific University
Libraries (COPPUL) which allows those member libraries to have access to the Arca
services.38 Arca addresses concerns of institutions wanting to brand themselves by
allowing for customized sites; a similar project using Islandora is the Council of

34

Neugebauer, T., Lasou, P., Kosavic, A., and Walsh, T. (2019). Digital preservation functionality in Canadian
repositories. Canadian Association of Research Libraries. http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2019/12/orwg_report2_preservation_repos_en.pdf

35

Canadian Research Knowledge Network. (2019, March 19). CRKN and CARL join SCOSS, the Global Sustainability
Coalition for Open Science Services. https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/crkn-and-carl-join-scoss-global-sustainabilitycoalition-open-science-services

36
37
38

OpenAIRE. https://www.openaire.eu/
Arca. https://arcabc.ca/
Arca. (n.d.) COPPUL website. https://coppul.ca/resources/1431

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

12

Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL) CAIRN initiative.39 DSpace may also be used tohouse more than one repository in a shared instance, as seen by the VIURRSpace
example on Vancouver Island.40 Shared services are also a possibility for digitalpreservation: COPPUL has an MOU in place to provide access to digitalpreservation services for Arca (via Archivematica-as-a-service, a hosted service).
While these examples are encouraging, they demonstrate effective provincial orregional collaboration and highlight a lack of opportunity for making intentional
connections that could be the foundation for a coordinated national approach.
Regardless of the approach, collaboration and shared resources have been
identified as essential at all levels — regional, consortial, and national. Existingmodels in Canada have proven successful, including the Public Knowledge Project
and the Federated Research Data Repository. Immediate first steps offered bypractitioners include shared services based on function rather than each institution
having local teams do all the work of scholarly communications. In this scenario,
expertise of those practitioners in metadata, for instance, can be harnessed in acollaborative manner across regions and nationally rather than our current system
which often silos practitioners within their own institution.41 Other common
functional areas identified include development of open source infrastructure,
improved indexing of institutional repositories, and a “one place to look”
discoverability layer for repositories.42
In order to expand the scope of work that’s currently being done, removing
inequality between regional consortia is needed in order to build a federated
system. For example, COPPUL and OCUL currently work together on selectinitiatives,43 and the scholarly communications community should prioritize
expanding that collaboration to CAUL and the Bureau de coopérationinteruniversitaire (BCI). This again speaks to issues of underinvestment by
provincial and federal bodies, as the resources available to each region to build
those regional infrastructures are quite different — national funding is needed tobring each region up to a common standard, and then sustained funding is required
to ensure regions can build their infrastructure together so that no region is left
behind.

39
40

CAUL-CBUA Atlantic Islandora Repository Network. https://www.cairnrepo.org/
VIURRSpace. https://viurrspace.ca/

41

Garnett, A., Leahey, A., Savard, D., Towell, B., & Wilson, L. (2017). Open metadata for research data discovery in
Canada. Journal of Library Metadata, 17(3-4), 201-217. https://doi.org/10.1080/19386389.2018.1443698

42

Sifton, D. and Barry, M. (2017). Towards a cross-Canadian digital library platform. Conference poster presented at
the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Toronto, ON, June 19-23, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.25316/IR-5.

43

OCUL. (2019). OCUL/COPPUL digital preservation management workshop. https://ocul.on.ca/OCUL-COPPULPreservation-Workshop-Registration-2019

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

13In a related fashion, the open scholarship community can leverage the expertise andconnections we already have. For example, CARL institutions could commit toproviding one day a week from their technical and scholarly communications
experts’ time to work on national development issues. This type of collaboration
would benefit the community as a whole and connect scholarly communications
and information technology in a meaningful and sustainable method, as wellensuring that labour is working in a coordinated way. Another suggestion fromparticipants was for all institutions to fund a national service, similar to the
Dataverse model.44
Practitioners also identified the importance of consulting with disciplinary
communities and associations to understand their needs. While Open Science has astrong foundation,45 the publication process within humanities is quite different with
an emphasis on monographs. Open monographs are a growing field, with digitalpublishers such as Open Book Publishers, OA university presses like Athabasca
University Press, and software like Pressbooks offering new options for open
publishing of books, but there still exist challenges in terms of funding and humanresources to grow these possibilities.46 This growth should be done withresearchers’ voices centred in our planning and implementation. The scholarly
publishing ecosystem is changing; preprint servers are an indication from specificdisciplines that their needs are not well served by traditional publishing. All
stakeholders in scholarly communications need to be at the forefront of discussions
that are trying to build an ecosystem that does serve disciplinary needs while
ensuring open content is discoverable.47
One key factor to ensuring sustainability is understanding that access is notequality, and open is not the same as visible. Barriers exist, and are built into,current open scholarship infrastructure.48 Barriers encompass a wide spectrum ofissues, one example being specific content format and language: many publishingand content platforms do not currently support Indigenous languages. We mustensure barriers to equity in OS infrastructure are removed in new and existing

44
45

Dataverse. (2019). Dataverse institutions. https://dataverse.org/institutions
Centre for Open Science. (2019). https://osf.io/

46

Kwan, A. (2010). Open access and Canadian university presses: A white paper.
http://blogs.ubc.ca/universitypublishing/files/2010/03/ACUP-White-Paper-Open-Access_Kwan.pdf; Horava, T. (2016).
Making OA monographs happen: Library-press collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Insights, 29(1), 5763. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.278; Adema, J. (2019). Towards a roadmap for open access monographs. Knowledge
Exchange. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2644997

47

McCollough, A. (2017). Does it make a sound: Are open access monographs discoverable in library catalogs? portal:
Libraries and the Academy, 17(1), 179-194. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645358

48

Okune, A., Hillyer, R., Albornoz, D., Posada, A., & Chan, L. (2018, June). Whose infrastructure? Towards inclusive andcollaborative knowledge infrastructures in Open Science. ELPUB 2018, Jun 2018, Toronto, Canada.
https://dx.doi.org/10.4000/proceedings.elpub.2018.31

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

14systems by recognizing the asymmetrical power dynamics and inequality inherent
in the open scholarship community as extensions of deep structural inequalities
found within academia.49 Canada is a diverse nation so building and updating
national infrastructure to centre a flexible, nuanced, diverse community ofpractitioners and researchers is an important goal to meet.

Investment
Training and expertise in OS software is essential, but university hiring practices andstructure often do not accommodate the technical skills required to effectively
maintain OS software, the workflow and work schedule commonly used by skilled
developers, nor the fundamental costs inherent to running the software. Training for
OS software technical and management staff is crucial and part of any funding
should go to that ongoing training.
Practitioners also felt that university investment in infrastructure needs
improvement; the lack of funds for dedicated digital preservation storage is a primeexample of underinvestment50. Practitioners discussed the issue of universities
underinvesting in the technical infrastructure required to adequately support open
scholarship, as well as an overall underinvestment by national bodies. Institutional
cost for setting up individual preservation structures, and the fundamental costs ofrunning software, are often hidden. Individual institutional IT departments may beable to provide additional and/or more robust support with these issues, though
not all institutions have access to that service.
Institutional users of open source software should support those foundations (e.g.
Islandora Foundation, Lyrasis, etc.) to ensure sustainable development. Communitybased approaches to software development is time-intensive and requires
contributions from many stakeholders to ensure it happens in a timely manner.
However, it’s also essential to recognize that support from OS users will lookdifferent depending on the resources available to users; one Advancing Openparticipant remarked, “The Big Fix often comes with a big price,” and noted thatconsideration should be given to what constitutes sustainable contributions fromsmall and/or under-resourced institutions, as they are typically less able tocontribute at the same scale as larger institutions to open source initiatives.

49

Ratan, K., Chan, L., Farley, A., & Joseph, H. (2019). ACRL-SPARC Forum: What we learned about communityalignment and equity for emerging scholarly infrastructure. College & Research Libraries News, 80(6), 329.
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/download/17782/19605.
50This finding was echoed in: Hurley, G., & Shearer, K. (2019). Final report of the survey on digital preservation
capacity and needs at Canadian memory institutions, 2017-18 (2019) Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Digital_preservation_capacity_finalreport_EN-1.pdf

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

15

Open People: The Human Element
Two discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In theOpen People groups the questions were:
Can open scholarship address structural inequities in academia? Whose voices
are missing in the scholarly communications conversation and what can be done
to include these? How can respect for Indigenous ways of knowing be ensured
within the open scholarship landscape?
What supports are needed to ensure open practitioners can achieve a balanced
workload? What are reasonable expectations when dealing with minimal
resources?

Centering Indigeneity
The community is seeking strategies to decolonize open scholarship and ensurethat respect for, and inclusion of, Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Knowledge isprioritized in our work.
The systems and institutions we work with now are built on colonialist ideals, andwe should not expect Indigenous and other minority peoples to be served well by
those systems. We must build relationships with marginalized communities andcentre their needs in our work if they are to participate fully. Our systems do notcurrently have sufficient capability to serve Traditional Knowledge, and metadata
standards are not inclusive of historically marginalized groups. Even basic
multilingualism within our software systems is not well supported.
It must be acknowledged that open practices may not always be appropriate for all
forms of knowledge and we must recognize the needs of Traditional Knowledge
and advocate alongside communities for appropriate cultural nuance in open
scholarship policies. Standards developed by OCAP®51 establish how First Nations
data should be collected, protected, used, or shared and these should be applied in
all open initiatives at our institutions, as well as those being developed by the
Canadian Federation of Library Associations' Indigenous Matters group.52 Making
this transition requires considerable resources, including sustained funding, humanresources, and extensive training.

51

First Nations Information Governance Centre. (n.d.) OCAP®. https://fnigc.ca/ocap

52

Canadian Federation of Library Assocations. (n.d.) CFLA Committee on Indigenous Matters. http://cflafcab.ca/en/about/committees/indigenous_matters_committee/

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

16

Indigenous publishers need to be included in our community of practitioners andmethods to help with discoverability of this content should be configured to ensure
they can be found in the same venues as traditional publications. Advancing Openparticipants expressed concern that open scholarship doesn’t line up with different
forms of knowledge production and that we may need parallel structures — open
scholarship as it’s broadly conceived of now might not work with how knowledge iscreated and shared in different cultural communities.
The academy needs to embrace and seek out Indigenous community engagementwith academic research, ideally reflecting this in promotion and tenure guidelines
by bringing the Western European academic way of thinking together with otherways of thinking.53
It is the duty of those with privilege to hold others with privilege accountable andto decolonize the systems we already have in place. It is also the duty of those withprivilege to actively include those without that same privilege to ensure their needs
are met and given priority. Transparent work is of utmost importance.54 Of
particular concern is appropriate dissemination of research based upon Indigenous
Peoples, and reconsidering the library’s role in ensuring access for groups for whom
published material exists. As one participant stated:“Accountability to the communities who were studied/were
the source of the research requires making that researchavailable to those communities.”

Incorporating small and thoughtful steps can be a foundation upon which scholarly
communications practitioners can build a decolonized approach to our work, likethe APA LibGuide from NorQuest College Library which has a section on how tocite Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers55 or incorporating advice fromresources like Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About
Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging.56

53

Canadian Research Knowledge Network. (2017). Institution mobilization toolkit — sustainability challenges.
https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/sites/crkn/files/2017-11/5-IMTG-V2-Sustainability%20Challenges_EN.pdf

54

Maron, N., Kennison, R., Bracke, P., Hall, N., Gilman, I., Malenfant, K., ... & Shorish, Y. (2019). Open and equitablescholarly communications: Creating a more inclusive future. ACRL. https://doi.org/10.5860/acrl.1

55

Norquest College Library. (n.d.) Indigenous elders and knowledge keepers. APA 6th ed. LibGuide.
https://libguides.norquest.ca/apa6/miscellaneous

56

Younging, G. (2018). Elements of Indigenous style: A guide for writing by and about Indigenous Peoples. Brush
Education.

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

17

Relationship Building
Advancing Open participants expressed a desire to build relationships with
Indigenous librarians and community members but were unsure about how to makethose contacts. The Library Indigenous community is small, “and yes, we all knoweach other,” but they are also stretched thin. Participants echoed similar questions:“How can we build connections with communities who havebeen marginalized and excluded?”“How can we […] create environments that respect their
protocols?”

There is work to be done by non-Indigenous people in engaging with Indigenous
Peoples and we must be accountable for changing the scholarly communications
ecosystem to ensure it is a welcoming place. The challenges are numerous when
striving to involve communities while also not forcing them to participate instructures that don’t suit their ways of being/knowing; we are currently asking
people to work within a system that does not represent them and that is
unacceptable. Participants discussed what meaningful invitations to collaborate
entail, if there are ways to work within our current structures, and being prepared toreconsider commonly held ideals about open access. Ultimately we recognize that
settlers can never ‘own’ the open domain for Indigenous Peoples, communities, andTraditional Knowledge.

Funding
Open scholarship needs to be funded adequately to accomplish the necessary work
toward decolonization and equity. One proposal suggested at Advancing Open was
to look at opportunities available through initiatives like SCOSS57 and funding basedon anti-racist and inclusive guidelines.
Funding and investment in open scholarship must include decolonization of theacademic publishing ecosystem and equity-focused disbursement of resources.
“What kind of system would we build if we started overanew, with respect for indigeneity at the centre of ourwork?”

57

Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS). https://scoss.org/

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

18

Workload and Scholarly Communications
The open scholarship community in Canada continues to raise questions of labour
practices and expectations of their work. A number of participants expressed
concerns about the lack of sustainability of scholarly communications activities inmany institutions, due to overwhelming workloads, insufficient cash resources, anda lack of goal clarity to support the endeavour. A reported perception was that
open scholarship work was often undertaken “from the side of the desk”, and more
responsibilities are continuously added as the scope of scholarly communications
work expands. The prominence of open scholarship issues has risen to the Provost
and Vice-President Research level, is integrated into Tri-Agency policy, and indeed
the federal government has funded large digital research initiatives with a focus on
making that research publicly available, but most organizations have notsignificantly changed their staffing/funding models for open work.
While it seems like more people have responsibilities in scholarly communications
at multiple points of the library,58 the workload is still high. Coupled with this is alack of clarity about job roles and high expectations for scholarly communications
staff to enact institutional change, but a lack of meaningful institutional support toachieve this. Perhaps unsurprisingly given these circumstances, many participants
observed and reported experiencing feelings of burnout.59
Participants related that being designated as the “open” person means everythingeven vaguely “open” comes to you, which is an overwhelming labour circumstance.
Working more closely with colleagues has advantages but can create more strain,
particularly around communication roles, responsibilities, and accountability. Thereis also a cross-functional component to scholarly communications that requires
workers be informed of actions initiated from different departments, butorganizational structures do not foster the necessary cross-structuralcommunication to ease the formation and promotion of a cohesive organizational
program, as opposed to current structures which position a “point person” as theone individual to handle everything relation to open scholarship.
The CARL Scholarly Communications Roadmap60 outlines many possible new
directions and initiatives but makes no mention of the fiscal resources and thelabour force that must be brought to bear to make new initiatives sustainable in58

Hurrell, C., & Murphy, J. E. (2019). An evidence based approach to supporting library staff scholarly communicationcompetencies. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 14(2), 100-105. https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29570

59

Agate, N., Clement, G., Kingsley, D., Searle, S., Vanderjagt, L., Waller, J. (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), eP2196. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2196

60

Canadian Association of Research Libraries. (2017). CARL scholarly communication roadmap. http://www.carlabrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CARL_ScholComm_Roadmap_EN.pdf

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

19

Canada. Investment in financial and human resources, as well as consistentprofessional development, is needed to build and maintain a sustainable ecosystem.

Collaboration and Support
Enhanced, meaningful collaboration with library colleagues in collections,acquisitions, e-resources and liaison work should be developed to achieve the goalof integration of open scholarship issues into all library functions.61 This would foster
initiatives like working with collections librarians to advocate for investment in open
scholarship publishing resources, or working with e-resources librarians to build
awareness of APC procedures, or liaising with partners (writing centres, research
offices, Centres for Teaching & Learning, etc.) to try to collaborate and share
workload.
It is important to recognize that much of scholarly communications practitioners’
work involves performing emotional labour, which is often not recognized by formal
tenure and promotion processes or job descriptions.62 Developing and maintaining
effective relationships with colleagues, faculty, administration, and students isessential to scholarly communications, a field which is centred around advocacy
and outreach. Greater support for and recognition of this type of labour isimportant to scholarly communications practitioners.

Professional Development
Participants expressed difficulty keeping up to date in an area that is constantly
evolving. Keeping abreast of a changing scholarly communications landscape isoften “invisible work” but takes up a great deal of time to sustain a professional
level of awareness. Reliance on organizations like the Scholarly Publishing andAcademic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to communicate changes and updates
within the open scholarship realm could help with the feeling of not being able tokeep up to date and alleviate some of the burden of professional development.
A sense of isolation was also expressed by a number of participants. While some
aspects of scholarly communications come up at almost every academic library
event, practitioners often feel like they are working in a silo, and find it difficult toconnect with other practitioners. There are listservs available to the scholarly
communications community, including REPOS-L and SCHOLCOMM-CARL-L, as wellas the Scholarly Communications in Canada Slack Channel (which is helpful but is61

Krier, L., Premo, R., & Wegmann, M. (2019). The future is wide open: Sustainable scholarly communications andaffordable learning in libraries. Collection Management, 44:2-4, 164-175.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2019.1582392

62

Matteson, M. L., & Miller, S. S. (2013). A study of emotional labor in librarianship. Library & Information Science
Research, 35(1), 54-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2012.07.005

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

20

not formalized or funded).63 However, these environments are not well promoted
and practitioners are sometimes slow to find spaces designed for scholarly
communications library workers to communicate within Canada.

Roles
There is a lack of clarity around scholarly communications job roles andexpectations of staff. Participants proposed a repository of job ads for scholarly
communications to help define the work of practitioners. This would allow for amore informed discussion about workload, required skills, and expectations.64
Increased support for scholarly communications workers at all levels is essential if
we are going to continue to increase services and initiatives at our institutions.
There were a variety of opinions discussed as to whether scholarly communications
is a role for specialists, separate from other librarian work, or if it should be a core
part of librarianship — this is a debate that requires greater exploration andengagement with diverse perspectives.
The issues of workload, burnout and uncertainty of roles by those who are tasked
with scholarly communications work are serious and they undermine local andcollaborative open scholarship efforts. These issues must be addressed across alllevels of stakeholders in open scholarship, as scholarly communications
practitioners are at the centre of enacting open scholarship.

Open OutreachThree discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In theOpen Outreach groups the questions were:How can we generate support for principle-based negotiations across
campus?
Do we need to rethink our approach to discussions with library colleagues(collections, liaisons, administration) around serials cancellations and defining
institutional strategies?

63

Swanepoel, M., Kehoe, I., Hohner, M., Shepstone, C., Vanderjagt, L., Wakaruk, A., Waller, A., & Winter, C. (2015).
Developing a community of practice: Report on a survey to determine the scholarly communication landscape inWestern Canada. https://hdl.handle.net/10133/4784

64

Calarco, P., Shearer, K., Schmidt, B., & Tate, D. (2016). Librarians’ competencies profile for scholarly communicationand open access. Joint Task Force on Librarian’s Competencies in Support of E-research and Scholarly Communication.
https://www.coar-repositories.org/files/Competencies-for-ScholComm-and-OA_June-2016.pdf

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

21

Where is our energy best spent when it comes to education and outreach on
campus?

Culture Change
Open scholarship has not yet become embedded into the culture of academia; it isfrequently an afterthought within institutions and greater integration of open
scholarship into the Canadian academy still needs to be done. There is still a lack ofunderstanding and a perceived lack of interest among researchers of the benefits ofopen scholarship and the process of participating.65
A cultural shift is necessary to centre open scholarship within academia, and thisshift will only come about with a multi-pronged approach. This will include
increased resources allocated to open scholarship (including staff, time, andmoney); open policies at the institutional level to socialize and normalize open
scholarship across the institution and acknowledge the value of open scholarship;and embedding open scholarship in the tenure and promotion process to build
open scholarship into academic reward systems.
Education and outreach around open scholarship would be strengthened byorganizational leadership, wide participation and engagement in promoting openmodels of scholarly discourse, and a means of determining local education andoutreach strategies that will be most impactful.66 National collaboration is key toshare the labour of education and outreach. Participants felt that now is the time tohave a broad-level discussion with our faculty, administrations, and nationalorganizations on approaches like the “University of California model”67. The
strength of this model is that it has a clear rubric for investing in open scholarship.
Institutional and regional working groups supporting open scholarship or open
educational resources are a place to start in developing and describing sustainablemodels, and these models should be discussed within any conversations aroundnational strategies.

65

Narayan, B., & Luca, E. (2017). Issues and challenges in researchers’ adoption of open access and institutional
repositories: A contextual study of a university repository. Information Research: An International Electronic Journal,(22)2. http://InformationR.net/ir/22-4/rails/rails1608.html

66

Niles, M. T., Schimanski, L. A., McKiernan, E. C., & Alperin, J. P. (2019). Why we publish where we do: Faculty
publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations. BioRxiv, 706622.
https://doi.org/10.1101/706622

67

Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California. (n.d.). Open access (OA) and scholarly communication
at the University of California. https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

22

Refocus
Most academic libraries focus considerable outreach effort into OA Week, butparticipants questioned if this an effective use of time and resources. OA Week is atime-intensive activity that often does not result in change at the institution level. It
has become a “one and done” branding exercise. It was suggested that time andresources would be better spent focusing on bringing about institutional changesuch as building OA compliance into institutional research applications/grants,
developing OA policy, and lobbying to bring about change in promotion and tenure
processes to value open scholarship.
Scholarly communications workers feel disconnected from broad decisions being
made outside of their library and it is possible faculty/researchers feel even more
removed — if they are even aware of changes in open scholarship and library efforts
to create change. Strategies should be developed to engage faculty and university
administration into the bigger conversions around scholarship, not just when there
are “Big Deals” to be cancelled.
Beyond the institution, many open scholarship librarians feel a profound disconnect
from the work being done in other open scholarship stakeholder groups like CRKN
and Canada’s federal granting agencies; practitioners feel that they are not being
engaged with as a stakeholder group with valuable tactical experience andextensive experience — some now approaching a decade or more — talking tofaculty about open access. The current relationship between practitioners andnational open scholarship stakeholders as a whole feels counter-productive to thegoals of those invested in community-led open scholarship efforts, and is arelationship that practitioners would like to improve.

Organizational Impediments
Many academic libraries have undergone organizational restructuring in the past
decade, but few have made the necessary connections between resource
acquisition units/staff cohorts and scholarly communications staff that would fostera cohesive institutional approach toward open scholarship. Collections, acquisitions
and liaison librarians could all be more closely connected with scholarly
communications; there was a sense of working in isolation but not tandem, anddefinitely not in a state of integration. Many participants communicated thattraditional models of collections and resource discovery work need to bebroadened to include open scholarship content and initiatives.68

68

Bulock, C., Hosburgh, N., & Mann, S. (2015) OA in the library collection: The challenges of identifying andmaintaining open access resources. The Serials Librarian, 68:1-4, 79-86.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2015.1023690; Antelman, K. (2017). Leveraging the growth of open access in librarycollection decision making. ACRL Conference Proceedings. http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/
conferences/confsandpreconfs/2017/LeveragingtheGrowthofOpenAccess.pdf

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23

Together there should be discussions in academic libraries on the balance between
collections and support for open scholarship initiatives, and if the current balanceshould be changing. Academic libraries should also think outside the box for new
approaches like providing graduate student open scholarship-based opportunities;
sending students and staff to OpenCon; or assigning library support staff to assist
faculty with Green OA.

New Collaborations
Collaborations can work to the benefit of open scholarship and we observe
successes such as Arca in British Columbia. However, not every province has theresources or other organizational environment preconditions to achieve this. Who
provides the leadership that will nurture the relationships and ideas to enablesimilar successes in other provinces and territories? The conversations on thisshould include key national, provincial and territorial organizations. Local input andinstitutional branding needs are also very important to some institutions, and while
this is something to consider, collaboration should be focused on making the mostof contributors' unique strengths for greater effectiveness and the greater benefitof the collective.

Journal Collections & the Big Deal
Most academic libraries are struggling with the issue of “Big Deals.”69 There areoften confusing messages for faculty and university administration regarding thereasons for leaving the Big Deal: is it to save money or are we trying to encourage
faculty to publish open access? Those are different goals but we observe thatsomehow, these often get enmeshed in the same outreach message, which cancreate confusion.
Practitioners suggested that the underlying principles of collections development
and open scholarship be considered and agreed upon before making the decision
to cancel deals. Framing the message is central to engaging users, conveying it not
as a cut but as a well-thought-out decision based on clear principles. In considering
cancellation of Big Deals, Advancing Open participants suggested focusing on how
the money saved from those deals will be reinvested, and that unsustainable
licensing costs are only a small part of the problems within academic publishing.
Librarians should seek to involve our users more in the entire conversation around69

Shearer, K. (2018). Responding to unsustainable journal costs: A CARL brief. Canadian Association of Research
Libraries. http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CARL_Brief_Subscription_Costs_en.pdf

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

24

academic publishing and the challenges this component of our academic worldpresents to both university budgets and access to research.
“This [cancellation] is not because we mismanaged ourbudget.”“Germany is able to do it because they aren’t trying to savemoney and because of the funders mandate. Their
principle is based on open access — that is their goal.”

Infrastructure
Within the discussions surrounding open scholarship outreach, the challenge ofbalancing between outreach and managing infrastructure to support open
scholarship is significant. Most academic libraries offer institutional repository
infrastructure aimed at faculty, but have significant challenges due to lack of time,
expertise, financial resources, and a strategy for the support and sustainability of
the repository. At this juncture most institutions are creating and managing theirown IR, and the task of technical management often also falls to the scholarly
communications librarian. This model is inefficient, not particularly realistic, and inmany cases holds back both user focused developments and outreach efforts
because staff are often focused on technical maintenance.
Both the technical work managing infrastructure and advocacy and outreach areequally essential in sustaining a robust scholarly communications environment.
Therefore, collaborative sharing of resources for outreach and education as well as
for infrastructure management is desired. Collaboration on all areas of the scholarly
communications spectrum of work would result in advancement of repository
systems that are more outward facing and easier to use for faculty researchers whowant to participate more fully in open scholarship, and more robust education andoutreach services to ensure researchers are supported at every step of the researchand publishing process.

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

25

Open Workflows and Operations
Two discussion points were posed to each small-group facilitated session. In theOpen Workflows and Operations groups the questions were:
What supports are needed to ensure open work is a priority in the library andthe institution? What happens when there is little support for open initiatives?
How can we sustainably manage multiple open resources (journals,
monographs, IRs, etc)? Should we be managing multiple open resources?

The discussion questions posed led into a number of broader areas especiallyaround the support for scholarly communications with appropriate staffing,technical and institutional support.

Scope of Practice and Core Competencies
What is the role and scope of the scholarly communications librarian? This question
came up frequently in discussion during this section of the event. There is a general
feeling that the scholarly communications field is changing quickly and the scope of
responsibilities for practitioners is growing correspondingly. There are concernsthat the current resources for support of the range of scholarly communications
activities are precarious at best, and unsustainable at worst. There is no consistentdefinition of the work of scholarly communications librarians, but it is clear that thepractice of this emerging field requires a growing range of knowledge, technicalskills, and literacy in the areas of open access, repository management, publishing
advice, copyright awareness, bibliometrics, and research data management.
The need for identified core competencies was mentioned in discussion, and while
they have begun to be defined70,71 they do serve to highlight skills gaps that exist
for those currently in scholarly communications roles or new graduates moving into
these roles for the first time. As one participant noted:“It feels like we’re making up things as [we] go.”Frustration was expressed regarding lack of time for staff to adequately address
the diverse range of areas involved in scholarly communications. Resources,

70

NASIG. (2017). NASIG core competencies.
https://www.nasig.org/resources/Documents/competencies/CompetenciesforScholCommLibrarians_final_ver_201708-11.pdf

71

Calarco, P., Shearer, K., Schmidt, B., & Tate, D. (2016). Librarians’ competencies profile for scholarly communicationand open access. https://www.coar-repositories.org /files/Competencies-for-ScholComm-and-OA_June-2016.pdf

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staffing, time, institutional buy-in and technical needs are all identified as key tosuccess, but participants felt that these were not currently in place in many
locations, and most particularly in smaller institutions. Scholarly communication is
so diverse that even with a reasonable amount of resources, gaps in service andoperations still exist. Scholarly communications practitioners at many institutions,most particularly smaller ones, wear many hats, and time is a scarce resource toprovide support to all areas of scholarly communications.
It was also felt that the scope of activities encompassed by scholarly
communications has not finished evolving, and new roles will continue to emerge.

Training and Professional Development
Training and professional development to acquire specialized scholarly
communications skills is needed to support current and incoming staff. Some
practitioners expressed concerns that new graduates from LIS programs are notarmed with the necessary scholarly communications skill set, with many new staff
not having the competencies to support research. Are library schools talking about
these issues, or are they still teaching traditional models?72 Students say they are
not learning about open models of dissemination.
There are more scholarly communications librarians being hired but to besustainable, all librarians have to have some level of knowledge as potential ‘firstpoints of contact.’ The development of training materials to facilitate entry into thefield would be a step in the right direction. It also should be recognized that
support staff need a level of understanding of these emerging areas and theirtraining should not be overlooked.
There is a lack of clarity regarding the roles of liaison and scholarly communications
librarians and where they intersect. Boundaries are not clear, and many in bothareas are feeling stretched thin with many competencies expected of them.73 A
reconception of liaison roles has started but no real clear direction has emerged.74
Liaison librarians report feeling they must be all things to all people. Creating
specialized positions like Scholarly Communications (RDM, copyright etc)72

Ducas, A., Michaud-Oystryk, N., & Speare, M. (2020). Reinventing ourselves: New and emerging roles of academic
librarians in Canadian research-intensive universities. College & Research Libraries, 81(1), 43.
https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/download/17113/32058; Raju, J., 2019. Embracing new trends in scholarly
communication: From competency requirements in the workplace to LIS curriculum presence. Journal of Librarianshipand Scholarly Communication, 7(1). http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2291

73

Johnson, A. M. (2019). Connections, conversations, and visibility: How the work of academic reference and liaison
librarians is evolving. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 58(2), 91-102.
https://journals.ala.org/index.php/rusq/article/download/6929/9382

74

Burpee, K. J., & Fernandez, L. (2014). Scholarly communication at Canadian research libraries: Conversations withlibrarians. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2(2), eP1121/1- 21. https://doi.org/10.7710/21623309.1121

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establishes separation of skill sets and collaboration as a natural element of daily
work with liaison librarians is hampered. Does the institution set a priority on one or
the other, or expect all liaison librarians to become scholarly communications
librarians? Where a sense of divide between librarians exists as a result of “team ofone” staffing strategies, there can be an increase in isolation, stress,
discouragement, and low morale.

Community of Practice
The discussion turned to the development of a community of practice or external
network to help mitigate some of those challenges — can the community ofscholarly communications practitioners be leveraged? More formality in how thecommunity operates and structure around sustaining the community would help
with what is a very grassroots approach currently. An association may be a way tofoster greater options for professional development, communication, training, andresource-sharing initiatives. There are a number of umbrella organizations who
could sponsor a more formal group. One issue was clear with all attendees at
Advancing Open: membership in such a group must be open to all practitioners, notjust those at research-intensive institutions.

Infrastructure and Workflow
Participants reflected on the differing technical needs and limitations acrossinstitutions and how that impacts their ability to create unified systems. The
participants felt that in particular the fragmented nature of repositories means
practitioners are often isolated, and duplication of work is common.
While participants were interested in workflows, there was no way to come to acommon understanding of what exactly is meant by workflows and how the workof scholarly communications, especially with respect to IRs, plays out in day to day
environments. These are deeply operational questions; also, the differences
between small, medium, and large institutions poses a challenge in transferring
workflow strategies. It would help small to mid-sized libraries to see developed
documentation be widely shared which identifies common workflows andoperational guidelines that they could reuse or repurpose.
Interconnectedness of institutions is desirable so small institutions do not have toattempt to manage alone. Some larger institutions are hosting journals for smaller
institutions so the latter don’t have to invest in infrastructure and staffing an IT
department. Local librarians are then free to focus on local support, vetting of users,
copyright and other service elements of library publishing without being required tocreate and/or maintain technical infrastructure.
We need to move away from localized initiatives running so many different
repository solutions. We need to seek out models that allow us to share solutions

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while still emphasizing our unique collections. For example, the University ofAlberta Library has forgone bespoke existing solutions and built a very basic web
application IR with an emphasis on maintainability and simple stack infrastructure.
This is coupled with core user needs, e.g. accessibility, discoverability, andpreservation. The IRs we currently run often don’t meet the requirements of ourresearchers on many levels including ease of use and discovery. Can a solution likethis be shared with a large institution as host repository?
A centralized repository — working with OpenAIRE — has the potential to bring
together different software and offer an approach that is more sustainable.
Participants discussed the potential of supporting a partial national service, withaggregation and a single metadata schema that can crosswalk to other systems.
Most likely we as a community need to aim for a mixed model in order toaccommodate flexibility, sustainability and interoperability.
We need to be conscious of the open systems environment and be willing tocontribute back to the open community; e.g. documentation for OJS, using open
sources when possible and contributing to the support and development ofcommunity-led open solutions.

Institutional Support
Institutions need to find worth in open scholarship resources and activities in orderto provide more support. Knowledge of how administration values work, and howthat impacts scholarly communications reporting is important; there is an
expectation of return on investment among administration.
Participants discussed the idea of success in scholarly communications: how it canbe defined, what it can look like, and how success can be reportable in bothquantitative (metrics) and qualitative perspectives (user feedback, anecdotes).
Communicating use is important, though participants noted that a lack of time toquantify and identify some type of metric tool for tracking is a challenge.
A recent CARL survey to determine the resources (financial, staffing, etc.) put
toward open initiatives (PKP, IRs, etc.) at Canadian institutions may prove very
informative when it is released; results will hopefully reveal some measure of how
institutions currently direct their support to open scholarship.
Canada does not have a unifying national mandate and vision for open access, so
there is no concomitant investment at that level.75 The lack of a national mandate
makes it all the more important, though more difficult, to establish an institutional

75

CARL Scholarly Publishing Working Group. (2017). Final report. Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CSPWG_final_report_EN.pdf

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mandate informed by scholarly communications practitioners’ expertise. This often
needs to build over time until it becomes a critical mass for the institution. Open
resources are beginning to be elevated in provincial mandates, such as dedicatedfunds for Open Educational Resources programs in BC76 and Ontario,77 but suchprograms can be negatively impacted by changing government priorities, asevidenced by the recent budget cuts made by the Alberta provincial government.78

Collaboration and Communication
There was a general feeling among Advancing Open participants that we need topush toward opening communication lines and collaboration within and between
institutions as an essential precursor to growth of open scholarship. They notedthat we need collaborative sharing of workflows, infrastructure, expertise, andmore. Silos are so easily created when communication is absent.
Librarians need to work beyond the libraries, be strategic in finding the rightpeople, and find allies with Associate Vice Presidents, curriculum directors,
researchers, and more. Scholarly communications work spans across theorganization and thus needs support from the institution, library, and libraryadministration to work freely across the institution. Senior administration is wherechange decisions are made and where librarians need to be.
Scholarly communications must be a priority for library directors/senior leadership,
and they must be able to identify opportunities within open scholarship —addressing publishing and research dissemination needs is an opportunity to fill a
gap on campus.

Reassessing Collections
There was a sense among practitioners that academic libraries have been slow tochange collection strategies and there is a need to review traditional practices tomake way for new initiatives that reflect open scholarship strategies. The traditional
goal of “excellence in collections” is often tied to the amount of money that libraries
spend on their collections; this measurement is somewhat opposed to the principleof open scholarship which strives to make the collection entirely open. Is the
traditional collection becoming superfluous?

76

B.C. Open Textbook Collection. https://open.bccampus.ca/

77

eCampus Ontario. (n.d.) Supporting open educational resources in Ontario. https://www.ecampusontario.ca/openeducation-resources/

78

Government of Alberta. (2019). Fiscal plan: A plan for jobs and the economy 2019-23.
https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/3d732c88-68b0-4328-9e52-5d3273527204/resource/2b82a075-f8c2-4586-a2d83ce8528a24e1/download/budget-2019-fiscal-plan-2019-23.pdf

Advancing Open: Views from the CARL Workshop

30Faculty members are sharing information in new ways, but libraries sometimes
harbour a reluctance to move to new ways. Participants expressed the sense that a“stay in your lane” mentality still exists in libraries, offering the example that thecollection budget does not reflect the change in scholarly publishing and there isoften no “fund” to pursue initiatives or innovation in this area. Academic libraries
have to challenge the practice of buying material “just in case” and instead focus
efforts on buying or supporting tools and resources that faculty and students
actually need and use.79 This is especially the case for a library that is not a heavy
research library; as a few participants noted, “We are not all the University ofToronto or University of British Columbia,” making the point that many institutions
do not all have access to large collections budgets. All post-secondary libraries
purchase similar resources that support foundational learning in post-secondary
institutions; how much time and resources do we spend on resources that make ourinstitutions unique, such as special collections or archives, or our institutions’
intellectual output?

Conclusion: Moving Forward
The Advancing Open event brought together 70+ scholarly communications
practitioners from across the country to discuss a range of open scholarship issues.
The fact that so many made the effort to attend attests to the level of interest,
concern, and commitment that exists for an open future in Canada. The majority ofparticipants had a high level of expertise and knowledge in the field and this unconference provided an opportunity to voice concerns, discuss issues withcounterparts, and propose possible solutions that could meaningfully advance a
community-led vision of open scholarship in Canada.
Participants brought enthusiasm and engagement to match their knowledge andexpertise. The result was a free-wheeling exchange of information and ideas basedaround five main themes. The event offered a respectful and safe place to express
ideas on issues that in many cases participants deal with on their own on a day-today basis.
The small-group breakout sessions were all led and facilitated by members of thescholarly communications practitioner community, and this resulted in discussions
that were insightful, informed, and focused on finding ways forward.

79

Shorley, D. (2008). Past its shelve by date? United Kingdom Research Reserve (UKRR): A twenty-first-century
strategy to protect our research information for the future. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 14(1/2), 115-120.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13614530802519246; Knievel, J. E., Wicht, H., & Connaway, L. S. (2006). Use of circulation
statistics and interlibrary loan data in collection management. College & Research Libraries, 67(1), 35-49.
https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.67.1.35

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While this loosely structured unconference emphasized the informal exchange of
information and ideas between participants, at the end of the event there wereenough commonalities that coalesced to allow some conclusions to be drawn andsome key areas of emphasis identified.
The following areas of focus identified by this large grassroots group ofpractitioners deserve consideration by open scholarship leaders, decision-makers,
scholars, and other stakeholders in the domain of open scholarship work in the
Canadian academic library sector, and the practitioner community invites all suchgroups to review this report. Our collective goal is the advancement of open
scholarship, and we look forward to debate and discussion around these proposed
actions (or any other matter raised in this report). Feedback should be provided c/oLise Brin (lise.brin@carl-abrc.ca), Program Officer at CARL, who will share it with
the CARL Open Repositories Working Group’s Task Group on Community Building
and Engagement for consideration.
Areas of focus:
1.

Explore a national approach to institutional repositories similar to what has
been established for research data as exemplified by the Portage Network
initiative.

2. Advocate for federal funding to support shared infrastructure, discoverability
and interoperability of institutional repositories. Include small post-secondary
institutions in this conversation to determine their capacity to be active
participants in, and supporters of, developing this infrastructure.
3. Convene a group of interested and knowledgeable individuals to develop
guidelines, toolkits, and workshops to inform scholarly communications
practitioners on best practices to decolonize open scholarship and ensurethat Traditional Knowledge is served appropriately. This work must be done
collaboratively and driven by the expressed needs of Indigenous Peoples andcommunities and in constant, persistent consultation.
4. Bring together key stakeholders (libraries, scholarly communications
practitioners, researchers, funders) to develop a Made in Canada plan foropen scholarship in order to build a community-led, non-commercial
scholarly communications ecosystem.
5. Convene a wide variety of low-cost and free training opportunities for librarystaff to help develop scholarly communications skills, with particularemphasis on advocacy and policy approaches to changing institutional
culture toward open scholarship, as well as the development of technicalskills.
6. Open a dialogue on the role and scope of scholarly communications work.
Expand the conversation beyond scholarly communications practitioners to

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include library staff in resources, collections, liaison roles, copyright, archives,and IT specialties.
7. Devote institutional funds to collaborative open scholarship efforts (regionaland national) and bring leaders and practitioners together in these efforts.
Prioritize cross-institution resource, expertise and knowledge-sharing.
8. Invigorate the discussion on transitioning funding from supporting traditional
collections development to supporting open scholarship — and open
collections — at our academic institutions
9. Further nurture the scholarly communications community of practice tofoster the exchange of ideas and professional development to support
practitioners in the expanding range of open scholarship endeavors.
10. Ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion form the foundation of any future open
scholarship initiatives, systems, and developments.
In order to truly advance open access in Canada, it is necessary to clearly establish
the roles of national open scholarship stakeholders — including CARL, CRKN,
Canada’s federal granting agencies, and Library and Archives Canada. Leadership at
the national level is necessary for many of the aforementioned areas of focus to be
moved forward. The scholarly communications practitioner community encourages
these national stakeholders to clarify their current capacity to support these areasof focus, thus allowing the community to identify potential areas where formal
leadership is needed and pursue alternative collective action.

Acknowledgements
The Open Repositories Working Group’s (ORWG) Community-Building andEngagement Task Group (CBE) would like to thank the Canadian Association of
Research Libraries (CARL), the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN),
the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), University ofAlberta Libraries, Dalhousie University Libraries, University of Guelph Library, Mount
Saint Vincent University Library, University of Ottawa Library, and the University of
Saskatchewan Library for their sponsorship of Advancing Open.
We thank Lise Brin, Program Officer with CARL, for her immense support andexpertise in helping the CBE task group organize Advancing Open. We thankRebecca Ross (CRKN) and Nick Shockey (SPARC) for their time and efforts as partof the Advancing Open planning committee. The CBE also thanks Holly Pickeringand Daniel Cockroft, University of Alberta MLIS/Humanities Computing students,
for their help with text analysis and synthesis of documents.
Finally, we thank the participants of Advancing Open for their willingness to shareexperiences, ideas, and concerns about scholarly communications in Canada.

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