June 2019 329 C&RL News

Kristen Ratan, Leslie Chan, Ashley Farley, and Heather Joseph

ACRL-SPARC Forum
What we learned about community alignment and equity  
for emerging scholarly infrastructure

Kristen Ratan is cofounder of Collaborative Knowledge 
Foundation, email: kristen@coko.foundation, Leslie 
Chan is associate professor and associate director of the 
Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University 
of Toronto-Scarborough, email: chan@utsc.utoronto.ca, 
Ashley Farley is associate officer of knowledge and 
research services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 
email: ashley.farley@gatesfoundation.org, and Heather 
Joseph is executive director of SPARC, email: heather@
sparcopen.org

© 2019 Kristen Ratan, Leslie Chan, Ashley Farley, and Heather Joseph

scholarly communication

During ALA’s 2019 Midwinter Meeting hosted in Seattle, ACRL, in partner-
ship with SPARC, hosted a panel explor-
ing emerging models for supporting open 
scholarly infrastructure that places an 
emphasis on alignment with community 
values, considerations of equity, and why 
this is important. 

Heather Joseph from SPARC moderated 
the forum, highlighting the work and per-
spective of the panelists: Kristen Ratan, co-
founder of Collaborative Knowledge (Coko) 
Foundation; Leslie Chan, associate professor, 
University of Toronto-Scarborough Centre 
for Critical Development Studies; and Ashley 
Farley, associate officer of knowledge and 
research services, Bill and Melinda Gates 
Foundation.

The panelists provided an overview of 
how their work addresses existing inequi-
ties in the traditional academic publishing 
system, and highlighted strategies for 
ensuring that these inequities are not rep-
licated in new, open systems. The aim of 
this session was to encourage librarians to 
proactively and intentionally address these 
inequities to build a more community- and 
mission-driven ecosystem for the dissemi-
nation of knowledge. These actions will 
play a central role in shaping libraries’ 
role in the scholarly enterprise, now and 
for the future.

The conversation included both the per-
spective of people who are actively working 
to build open, community-aligned infrastruc-
ture and research funders who are committed 

to supporting an open system for scholar-
ship that prioritizes equity and the needs 
of researchers. The session contextualized 
these models within the broader market for 
scholarly infrastructure and highlighted the 
role of libraries in creating a future where 
values are prioritized over vendors. 

Kristen Ratan: Creating community-
owned infrastructure 
The promise of open science is that re-
search is communicated in its entirety, with 
all of the data, code, protocols, media, and 
contributors forming a constellation of ob-
jects that represents the full body of work. 
But, mired in print paradigms, proprietary 
infrastructure, and subscription business 
models, scholarly communication is slow, 
incomplete, and often closed. As research 
results begin to be clear, they are saved up 
so that researchers can get the best publica-
tion out of them. Publishing hasn’t evolved 
much since the print days. The infrastruc-
ture is old and largely proprietary and in-

mailto:kristen%40coko.foundation?subject=
mailto:chan%40utsc.utoronto.ca?subject=
mailto:ashley.farley%40gatesfoundation.org?subject=
mailto:heather%40sparcopen.org?subject=
mailto:heather%40sparcopen.org?subject=


C&RL News June 2019 330

creasingly commercially owned. Much of 
the content remains behind paywalls. The 
growing trend in mergers and acquisitions 
of scholarly infrastructure is a concerning 
trend. 

The path to get to rapid, complete, and 
open research communication requires an 
investment in the foundation, the digital 
roads, bridges, and buildings that we need to 
evolve research and research communication 
practice. And to secure the rights of everyone 
to produce knowledge and to collectively 
benefit from its outputs. This is the mission 
of the Coko Foundation, to establish founda-
tions for a shared investment in scholarship to 
be in the commons. For digital infrastructure 
to be in the commons, most agree that it 
must be open source. And not just licensed 
as open at some point, but built in the open 
and locked open in perpetuity. 

To be intentional about securing and 
sustaining open projects from the out-
set, it is important to leverage commu-
nity engagement and start mandating the 
implementation of open source practices 
and open standards in ways that blunt 
the ability of companies to strangle entire 
market segments. 

In addition, open source technolo-
gies must offer complete and end-to-end 
solutions. To compete with slickly mar-
keted corporate offerings, open source 
infrastructures must be knit together to 
create wholecloth solutions that adopting 
organizations can recognize as meeting 
their needs and rely on. We need a range 
of services to customize, host, operate, 
and maintain infrastructures. And we need 
sustainability models that can assure the 
adopting marketplace that these solutions 
will last.

Open source is people. It’s about ac-
tively soliciting the participation and lead-
ership of those currently outside of open 
source. It’s about leveling the playing field 
for open science and open access to have a 
chance to truly thrive. It’s all of us coming 
together to use the power of technology 
to bring about greater good. 

Leslie Chan: Invisible in the open–Why 
we need to reframe discourse on 
infrastructure 
It is a common assumption that as scholarly 
publications are made “open,” their visibil-
ity will automatically increase as they will be 
more easily discoverable and subsequently 
cited. This was thought to be particularly im-
portant for scholarship that has historically 
been marginalized by the dominant main-
stream knowledge production system and 
for scholarship from the Global South. 

However, while we have been putting 
much of our attention on the visible problem 
of “access,” namely the barriers created by 
paywalls and licensing restrictions, we have 
not been sufficiently thoughtful about the 
many hidden and invisible barriers that are 
deeply embedded in the global system of 
scholarly publishing, which is largely owned 
and controlled by a small handful of for-profit 
multinational publishers. 

We should be rightly concerned with the 
concentration of market power these firms 
possess, but we should be far more concerned 
with the hidden and invisible powers that 
they are able to exercise. These powers mean 
that a few publishers extract and accumulate 
resources at scale and stifle competition, set 
technical standards and social norms (e.g., the 
journal impact factor and the incentive struc-
ture it engendered), determine the criteria of 
participation in knowledge production (e.g., 
who gets to publish and in what language), 
influence public agenda and policy decisions, 
and invent new rent-seeking regimes. Indeed, 
in the last few years, we have been witnessing 
an accelerated pace of acquisition of scholarly 
communication infrastructure by the same 
dominant multinational publishers. They are 
busy integrating their acquisitions into end-
to-end platforms and creating new ways of 
locking in researchers and their institutions 
who are increasingly addicted to the university 
ranking games, as higher education itself is 
also a global big business. 

To be sure, the consolidation of power by 
publishers would not be possible if not for 
the fact that far from being an egalitarian and 



June 2019 331 C&RL News

meritocratic system, academia is already in-
grained with deep structural and epistemic in-
equalities. Racism, sexism, and other forms of 
discrimination are still common. Nowhere are 
these forms of inequities more pronounced 
than in scholarly publishing, as it remains a 
stronghold for maintaining the status quo, 
and this is one of the main reasons why 
many from around the world are calling for 
the decolonization of academia. 

It is increasingly clear that simply impos-
ing “openness” on top of this closed knowl-
edge system will not lead to meaningful 
and lasting change. Transformation means 
acknowledging the culture of discrimination 
and exclusion first, both within academia and 
within academic publishing, and then moving 
towards an inclusive system that values the 
diverse traditions of knowledge systems and 
ways of knowing. 

Tackling such a complicated challenge 
calls for collective actions and the alignment 
of core values as the starting point. Libraries, 
funders, developers, and the research com-
munities are actively rethinking how to build 
and control our own scholarly communica-
tion infrastructure, along with the services, 
processes, and outputs that best support 
scholarly communication needs in diverse 
social and intellectual contexts. At the same 
time, we need to look to our colleagues from 
the Global South, and the AmeliCA1 (Open 
Knowledge for Latin America and the Global 
South) initiative is an instructive example of 
how to think about and build community-
based infrastructure. They begin with the 
crucial question of open for whom and by 
whom, a question that we often overlook. 
Being able to frame the problem from the 
perspective of the community is crucial, as 
it strongly determines the kind of solutions 
we can imagine. 

A key invisible power of the oligarch pub-
lishers is their ability to frame the problem 
as one of market and economics. We need 
to reclaim the power to frame the problem 
for ourselves, with our collective value of 
knowledge as the public good and commu-
nity well-being at the core. 

Ashley Farley: Lesson’s learned from 
advocating for openness
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 
views its open access policy as an example 
of its commitment to information sharing and 
transparency. By freely sharing high-quality 
research as soon as it is available, the foun-
dation and its partners can develop more ef-
ficient and effective strategies to tackle the 
problems we are trying to solve. The values 
of open practices fit well into the mission of 
the foundation and have the potential to spur 
innovation and help the foundation more 
quickly and collaboratively solve the world’s 
toughest problems. 

Much of the scholarly communication 
ecosystem is built around relationships 
that require a lot of trust. Librarians and 
researchers trust that producers and pub-
lishers of information are truthful and 
accurate. The general public is trusting 
that researchers, the government, and 
academic institutions are acting in their 
best interests. Organizations, particularly 
funders, that create policies or mandates, 
especially radical ones, need the trust of 
their constituents. Trust is an important 
tool to combat fear, and the research can 
be rife with fear—fear of failure, fear of 
not establishing a career, fear of being 
open, fear of losing control. These fears 
aren’t necessarily unfounded, but it can 
be argued that they do present obstacles 
to reaching a fully open access ecosystem. 
Open infrastructure can help build trust in 
the system, as well as empower research-
ers to build trust within their communities. 

Accomplishing this will require time and 
proper resourcing, coupled with buy-in from 
the community. Alongside with changes in 
technology, changes in behavior will be re-
quired. Reinventing the scholarly communi-
cation ecosystem creates an opportunity for 
more collaboration, especially in launching 
and sustaining radical new infrastructure. 
Change is hard, and often it feels that the 
system is taking forever to see a different 
outcome. Open access advocates have 
paved the way for building trust and infra-



C&RL News June 2019 332

structure for new open practices and plat-
forms. It is their work that has encouraged 
funders and institutions to begin signaling 
change in incentives and research priorities. 

Conclusion 
The future holds radical changes for the 
scholarly landscape, and libraries can play 
a critical role in the new paradigm shift. 
Librarians have the established trust of re-
searchers and can help them progress be-
yond thinking of open as merely access to 
information. 

If open source is people, then librarians 
are the leaders, helping everyone navigate 
the bridges and roads to find the route that 
best fits their needs. The decisions that librar-
ies make individually and collectively about 
what tools to use and what infrastructure 
to support—and under what terms—will 
determine whether we meaningfully ad-
dress inequities created by legacy academic 
publishing systems or simply recreate them 
in new ways. These decisions will shape li-
braries’ role in the scholarly enterprise, now 
and for the future.

For example, the discovery tools most 
commonly used by libraries tend to be 
licensed from commercial vendors, and so 
are the databases of content they search. 

They reflect the inherent biases of those 
organizations, prioritizing content from the 
Global North, and rendering invisible a large 
swath of scholarship not considered to be 
“mainstream.” This is an important reminder 
that decisions about collections, tools, and 
metadata are not neutral and have conse-
quences. Libraries should be much more 
deliberate in questioning these decisions, 
and challenge existing assumptions before 
deciding what to buy.

Similarly, infrastructure is often something 
we notice only when it is broken; and when 
this happens, we find we don’t know who to 
call. Rather than continuing this dependency, 
libraries should take on a more active role 
in creating, supporting, and sustaining the 
infrastructure we use, to ensure that it truly 
reflects and supports the values our institu-
tions hold. As library partnerships with pub-
lishers, open source platform creators, and 
discovery tools become more common, we 
have a unique opportunity to influence the 
emerging scholarly communication system 
during the design process, and build an 
equitable and inclusive system—one that is 
truly open for all. 

Note
1. http://www.amelica.org/en/. 

3. Visit http://library.temple.edu/textbook 
-affordability. 

4. See more at https://www.arl.org 
/focus-areas/arl-academy/communities-of 
-practice/reimagining-the-library-liaison. 

5. Association of Research Libraries, 
“Talking So Faculty Will Listen, Listening 
So Faculty Will Talk: Engagement Strategies 
for Library Liaisons,” ALA Annual Confer-
ence, June 26, 2017, accessed January 14, 
2019, https://www.arl.org/events/upcoming 
-events/event/238#.WfzXXmhyLcs.

6. Martin Tsang, “Faculty Conversation 
Project Tips,” accessed January 14, 2019, 

https://www.arl.org/storage/documents 
/Faculty-Conversation-Project-Tips.pdf.

7. Steven J. Bell, “Academic Librar-
ians Have Something to Sell,” Library 
Jour nal, July 13, 2107, accessed Janu-
ary 14, 2019, https://www.libraryjour-
nal.com/?detailStory=academic-librarians 
-have-something-to-sell-from-the-bell-tower.

8. The full report, with our ques-
tion set, is available at https://docs.google.
c o m / d o c u m e n t / d / 1 P 5 K n 7 O G Yq E H 
-jFK4FsSZlomCM6HCsxbO2L_zEzT_E4U/edit.

9. Merchant, “To Change Someone’s 
Mind, Stop Talking and Listen.” 

(“We’re listening,” continues from page 320)

http://www.amelica.org/en/
http://library.temple.edu/textbook-affordability
http://library.temple.edu/textbook-affordability
https://www.arl.org/focus-areas/arl-academy/communities-of-practice/reimagining-the-library-liaison
https://www.arl.org/focus-areas/arl-academy/communities-of-practice/reimagining-the-library-liaison
https://www.arl.org/focus-areas/arl-academy/communities-of-practice/reimagining-the-library-liaison
https://www.arl.org/events/upcoming-events/event/238#.WfzXXmhyLcs
https://www.arl.org/events/upcoming-events/event/238#.WfzXXmhyLcs
https://www.arl.org/storage/documents/Faculty-Conversation-Project-Tips.pdf
https://www.arl.org/storage/documents/Faculty-Conversation-Project-Tips.pdf
https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=academic-librarians-have-something-to-sell-from-the-bel
https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=academic-librarians-have-something-to-sell-from-the-bel
https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=academic-librarians-have-something-to-sell-from-the-bel
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P5Kn7OGYqEH-jFK4FsSZlomCM6HCsxbO2L_zEzT_E4U/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P5Kn7OGYqEH-jFK4FsSZlomCM6HCsxbO2L_zEzT_E4U/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P5Kn7OGYqEH-jFK4FsSZlomCM6HCsxbO2L_zEzT_E4U/edit