21 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 292 2017 Lesson # 2: If you want to achieve a shared vision, you should take a collaborative /partnership approach from the outset. One of the reasons Canadian university press directors were reluctant to participate in the survey was that they had not been involved as partners in the creation of the survey. Building on lesson 1, a second lesson that may be drawn from this is that we could have taken a collaborative approach with our core stakeholders by designing the research study as a balanced partnership, including proportional representation from each core segment, including university presses and library presses. The original research group was made up principally of academic librarians. As a result we failed to give those who justifiably claim an overarching stake in this industry—university press directors—an equal and proportional voice in determining the tenets of any future-scape study. Affirming this, in a recent statement in response to the Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group Final Report, ACUP’s support in principle to the working group’s recommendation to “establish a shared vision, principles and goals that can act as a framework for advanced, robust, sustainable, collaborative models for the widest dissemination of the Canadian scholarly record.”5 They also state that: a move towards increased openness for monograph publishing requires a full recognition of the status of publishers as necessary scholarly infrastructure fulfilling a public mandate, which will require substantive, continuing investment to support high quality publishing.6 What we might do differently next time: Develop the research project as a thoroughly joint and proportionally representative undertaking between academic libraries and university presses.
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