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Drinking our own champagne: a toast to the success of LISSA!

Last Updated on June 12, 2017, 1:02 pm ET

*This is a guest blog post by Judy Ruttenberg,Program Director at the Association of Research Libraries and the co-director of SHARE. She serves on the SocArXiv Steering Committee and the OSF Preprints Advisory Board*

In early May, a group of information professionals and leaders announced the launch of the LIS Scholarship Archive, or LISSA. Co-directed by April Hathcock and Vicky Steeves (NYU Libraries), LISSA joins a growing list of scholarly communities building open “preprint” services in partnership with the Center for Open Science (COS) and using COS’s flagship product, the Open Science Framework (OSF), as a platform. LISSA’s mission is more expansive than open preprint publishing, however. It acknowledges that LIS professionals produce a wide range of scholarly materials worthy of preservation, open dissemination, and community evaluation. Here’s where the OSF is a terrific platform: when a paper is deposited in an OSF Preprints service, an OSF project is automatically created, with all the collaborative tools, versioning, storage, file-rendering, and other features supporting the scholarly life cycle.

That LISSA enters an active space—including a spate of arXiv descendants in social science, psychology, engineering, agriculture, paleontology and more—doesn’t diminish the unique opportunity that the library and archives community now has to “drink our own champagne” and embrace rapid, open publication, and retool tenure and promotion processes in our own organizations so that they recognize open scholarship deposited in LISSA.

Tenure and promotion committees within academic libraries will doubtless ask the same questions our colleagues throughout academia have asked us as librarians have advocated for open access: What is the role of peer evaluation and review in an OA model? How will I know the work is good work? What new metrics can I use to understand the impact of non-traditional publications? With the groundswell of interest in preprints across many disciplines, and an open source, public goods technology partner (COS) building the infrastructure, we in LIS organizations can work with LISSA (in parallel with other disciplines and services) to participate in building new, mission-aligned editorial and review processes that support this public good.

Having created a basic service—OSF Preprints—and its hosted, branded communities (SocArXiv, PsyArXiv, etc.), COS is now working on the critical features of moderation and evaluation, or peer review. You can see their public requirements and roadmap on the OSF Preprints page. To see this community infrastructure catch up to our policy and advocacy for open scholarship is incredibly exciting, and I hope academic libraries as individuals and as organizations see both opportunity in, and responsibility for, LISSA’s success by working through the hard issues of the moderation and evaluation of our own work.

So, a toast to LISSA! If you need a reviewer, you can find me at judy@arl.org.

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