Virginia's Academic Library Consortium

Support for Small Publishers Task Force

Background

Small publishers face significant challenges in marketing, selling, and distributing their content to library consortia. They have small staffs and limited resources, and the scholarly communication ecosystem is changing at a rapid pace, with the shift to Open Access, increasing expectations for metadata and discovery, diversity of metrics for impact, and more. For many years, these publishers have been increasingly compelled to sell and distribute their content only through larger vendors, publishers, and aggregators, which compromises their flexibility and self-direction. The consolidation of increasing amounts of content in fewer large organizations is a risk to sustainability for both the content providers and libraries. Learning about and acting on the best way to support the independence of small publishers is critical to ensuring bibliodiversity both of the larger field of scholarly communication and of VIVA’s shared collections.

Charge

In an effort to increase the bibliodiversity of VIVA’s shared collections and helping to ensure that small publishers have sustainable and long-term models for partnership with libraries, this task force is charged with having deep discussions with these publishers about their challenges in marketing, selling, and distributing their content at scale. The task force should also conduct an environmental scan of other libraries and consortia conducting similar work. When there is consensus about shared needs (contractual, technological, and otherwise), the task force should investigate solutions for enabling and streamlining consortium-level acquisitions of content from these publishers, including opportunities for collective action with other consortia. Special attention should be given to minority-owned and led publishers that have diverse voices represented in their content.

Task Force Members

Dr. Kevin Farley (Chair)
Virginia Commonwealth University

Missy Comer
Tidewater Community College

Corinne Guimont
Virginia Tech

Greg Snyder
Eastern Virginia Medical School

Miguel A Valladares-Llata
University of Virginia

Malia Willey
James Madison University

Dr. Alicia Willson-Metzger
Christopher Newport University

Denise Woetzel
J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College

Genya O'Gara
VIVA