ID: 33942
MIT has a storied history of hacking, born of a culture of creative problem-solving, boundary-pushing, and building the system you believe in if it doesn’t yet exist. The MIT Libraries bring that same spirit of hacking to the open scholarship ecosystem, in service of our vision of “a world where enduring, abundant, equitable, and meaningful access to information serves to empower and inspire humanity." This panel explores the conditions that enabled MIT Libraries to embed open scholarship not as a single program or role, but as an institutional commitment woven through every aspect of our work.
Central to the MIT Libraries’ vision is a clear strategic principle: to be relentless in the pursuit of a more open and equitable scholarly landscape. This relentlessness requires intentional structural decision-making to invest in open scholarship, strong cultural emphasis on open scholarship as a tool for “working wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind” and courage as a leadership imperative.
Through a moderated discussion, our panelists will speak to each of these conditions from their own areas of responsibility, and engage with the audience in reflective discussion on what moves the needle in their own organizational environments:
- Director of Libraries Chris Bourg will briefly set the stage by describing how MIT's strategic priorities — open scholarship, data and computation, digital-first libraries — are deeply interdependent, and how open scholarship is inseparable from MIT's institutional identity and values. She will then moderate a panel discussion and open a conversation with the audience.
- Erin Stalberg, Associate Director for Knowledge Strategy and Access, will focus on how MIT’s collections strategy operationalizes these values and how we navigate our goals for openness within a publishing ecosystem that, while changing, still remains heavily influenced by profit motives.
- Sue Kriegsman, Deputy Director for the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, will focus on how research informs the development of policies and funding models, to ensure institutional practices for open scholarship are built on a foundation of data and rigorous analysis.
- Heather Sardis, Associate Director for Data, Discovery, and Technology Solutions will will describe how openness is built into the Libraries' technology infrastructure, from open APIs enabling computational access to research, to repositories as platforms for open scholarship, to a discovery strategy designed to make it easy to choose open resources.
After framing the MIT example of a successful ecosystem (that is still and always evolving), the moderator will open the conversation to the room: through the lenses of scholarly communications, research, data and technology, what conditions have made it possible (or challenging) to infuse open scholarship through your own organization? What advice, alternatives, and tools have been successful or challenging?
The goal is a collective conversation about what it takes to move from open as aspiration to open as embedded practice.
