7 Priority Four: Supporting Evolving Notions of Research and Scholarship
Rationale
Whereas libraries were once charged with lending the world’s knowledge to their local communities, the digital age has opened new opportunities to collect the works of one’s local community and share them with the world. Hand-in-hand with CUNY’s teaching and research activities, OLS is charged with helping CUNY Libraries provide platforms and services that support evolving notions of scholarship produced by its community. Supporting new modes and areas of inquiry is, like institutionalizing innovative practices, inherently a DEI issue, as our communities are committed to asking new questions that decolonize scholarly publishing.
Five-Year Actions by Goal
Goal 1 (Integration):
- Establish services that meet the growing demand for publication activities across CUNY, including CUNY-produced journals, monographs, textbooks, and digital projects.
- Support the full research enterprise by facilitating an active role in faculty research reporting, compliance with existing and emerging open access (OA) mandates, research information management, data governance initiatives and data management services.
Goal 2 (Innovation):
- Create mechanisms to support, preserve, and disseminate emerging forms of scholarship aligned with establishing CUNY as a hub of inclusive, innovative research and teaching, for example multi-media or digital scholarship and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
- Facilitate conversations that seek to redefine notions of scholarship and pedagogy, and amplify the voices of educators and researchers, from students to seasoned academics, from within and outside the CUNY community.
Goal 3 (Centralization):
- Rebrand existing centrally managed publishing platforms to create the CUNY Open Press and publishing services, with a particular focus on open textbooks, teaching and research activities, and other areas that directly support the University’s core mission.
- Resource CUNY’s institutional repository, Academic Works, to collect a wider range of works and disciplines in alignment with OLS’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, with a particular focus on interdisciplinary/intercampus content.
End States
We will know we are successful when:
- CUNY Libraries are fully embedded in the research enterprise, with CUNY librarians playing a role in data management, faculty reporting acitivties, and general data governance issues at CUNY.
- The number and types of items openly shared and downloaded through OLS platforms like CUNY Academic Works, Pressbooks, and Manifold increase.
- The CUNY Open Press and publishing services are established to support the open local and global distribution of CUNY’s research and pedagogical outputs.