Project: Research and the Scholarly Communications Process

Partner: Mark Ware Consulting

Commissioner: Research Information Network

Searchlighter has been commissioned in March 2009 to work as a partner on the Research and the Scholarly Communications Process project set up by the Research Information Network (RIN) to create an online resource to enhance the development of scholarly communications policy and practice.

The broad aim of the project is to support effective scholarly communications by challenging and supporting key stakeholders (especially funders, higher education institutions, libraries and publishers) to apply the common principles set out in the RIN’s Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: towards strategic goals for public policy.

The objective is to provide a means of achieving the broad aim through the production, promotion and dissemination of a resource that is:

• useful to stakeholders open to developing their institutional or corporate policy and practice in line with the principles set out in the RIN statement;
• the product of a process of research and consultation, developed with and tested by stakeholders;
• a user-friendly tool, accessible through the web (i.e. available from the RIN website);
• designed with a view to being dynamic and easily updatable, possibly featuring collaborative user-generated elements to promote usage and user interactivity.

The RIN has commissioned Searchlighter and Mark Ware Consulting to produce the online resource, which the RIN will take the lead in promoting and disseminating. In producing the resource, we will also be looking to devise and run a process to develop the resource’s content in concert with potential users, then devise and produce an appropriate format for delivering the content to users.

The chief purpose of the resource will be to provide guidance for relevant stakeholders in relation to each of seven identified principles constituting the Statement of Principles within RIN's Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: towards strategic goals for public policy, and their roles in applying them. This may include information on the state of current practice or the legacy of experience, and may focus particularly on examples of innovative and effective practice. It may take the form of a tool to enable self-auditing, for which users compare their current practice against defined benchmarks. It will seek to provide information not just for discrete groups of stakeholders but also try to encourage reflection on how the agendas of different stakeholders might be aligned behind common goals and conflicts of interests resolved.

Background

In 2007, the RIN produced Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: towards strategic goals for public policy referred to above as a statement of principles that was endorsed by a range of research funders as well as the key UK representative bodies for the library and publishing communities.This document built on discussions which the RIN initiated with a range of stakeholders, notably from the library, publishing and research funding communities, with the purpose of identifying the fundamental goals for public policy in relation to the scholarly communications process.

The project will be based on a belief that an articulation of these goals is important to enable the key players to develop a clear policy framework to support effective scholarly communications as an essential underpinning of effective high-impact research and knowledge transfer. The project feels that agreement from those bodies to a common statement of principles was a notable step forward. This project addresses the tougher challenge of the application of those principles.