The ninth webinar in the De Gruyter Brill series “Challenging the Status Quo: Taking Libraries into the Future” took place on Thursday 6th March. It was the first of the series to be presented in 2025. The speakers were Mimi Calter, Vice Provost and University Librarian, Washington University in St. Louis, USA, Aleksandra Trtovac, Library Advisor, University Library “Svetozar Marković”, University of Belgrade, Serbia and Dr. Sarah Kaddu, Senior Lecturer and Dean, East African School of Library and Information Science, Makerere University, Uganda. It was the series’ most international group of speakers ever – each one from a different continent – and the De Gruyter Brill host was Lervinia Swee, who is based in Singapore, representing yet another continent.
Mimi Calter, who is also the Chair of the Academic & Research Libraries Committee for IFLA, gave the first presentation, taking an international perspective. She offered a comprehensive definition of bibliodiversity: “Bibliodiversity, a term derived from ‘biblio’, meaning books and ‘diversity,’ refers to the diversity of books and publications that represent a wide range of cultures, languages, genres, and perspectives. It encompasses the idea that a healthy and vibrant literary ecosystem should include a variety of voices and viewpoints, thus promoting cultural diversity, pluralism, and intellectual freedom. This concept is akin to biodiversity in the natural world, highlighting the importance of a diverse literary landscape for the health and sustainability of intellectual and cultural ecosystems.” She focused on the storytelling aspect of bibliodiversity, saying that it emphasises the diversification of voices, languages, funding models, acts of research, and publishing formats considered to comprise scholarly activity, while at the same time lowering barriers to participating in scholarly conversation and promoting equity among different ways of knowing and communicating that knowledge. She described the many areas of librarianship that are influenced by a bibliodiversity-aware strategy – for example, the types of material curated, linguistic representation, recognition of historic collections practices and support for different publishing models. Trends that IFLA has noted among ARL libraries include ever-increasing support for open access and open science; improved ways of enhancing electronic resource management; resource-sharing consortial arrangements; and cultural and social initiatives, such as decolonisation and indigenisation.
Aleksandra focused on the Serbian national perspective. She called her presentation “Bibliodiversity and Open Access in Serbia: Mission Impossible?” Despite this acknowledgement that addressing bibliodiversity means taking on a significant challenge, she went on to describe an impressing number of initiatives that are happening in Serbia. Among the most interesting of these is the development of the eNauka portal. It contains data on scientific research organisations in the Republic of Serbia (NIO),affiliated researchers and their research results. The eScience portal opened to all active researchers in Serbia in July 2023. Aleksandra said that the key barriers to achieving bibliodiversity in Serbia are the financial instability of publishers; the [lack of] quality and professionalism of publishing; that there is insufficient infrastructure to support digital publishing; and that Serbian academics are only able to gain limited access to international funds and multinational collaboration. An important tool for mitigating these problems has been the widespread adoption of the OJS open journal platform. OJS has become a significant tool for the support of scientific publishing in Serbia. About 250 scientific journals in the country now use the OJS platform. To improve expertise in its use, national and regional workshops have been set up. Training sessions are organised for both journal editors and publishers and a key benefit is the ability OJS confers in the integration of Serbian journals into international scientific networks.
Aleksandra continued by highlighting the importance of librarians in promoting bibliodiversity. As well as being instrumental in the development of the National Open Science platform, Serbian librarians have been responsible for the development and implementation of institutional repositories; have provided education and support for researchers; have participated in the development of open science policies; have managed all the associated metadata; and engaged in advocacy for open access. She concluded by adding that librarians have also been heavily involved in the setting up of a national fund to support open access; strengthened visibility of OA works by training publishers and editors and promoting OA databases; improving the OA infrastructure more generally; and connecting researchers with international initiatives and EU projects.
Sarah talked about the challenges that bibliodiversity presents to countries in Africa. She said that traditionally growth in academic spaces has been mostly focused on international publication, with established publishing houses using a standard language disseminated through standard publishing processes. The result has been the development of an elitist publishing industry that promotes limited works of limited scope to a limited section of the population in a limited language (mostly English). Bibliodiversity offers a contrasting approach to academic publishing and scholarly communication. She identified three main reasons for librarians to promote bibliodiversity: equality of cultural and linguistic representation; intellectual pluralism; and the democratisation of knowledge. She concluded that Bibliodiversity is a tool for knowledge equity and cultural preservation that cannot be achieved and sustained without the combined efforts of policy changes and advocacy, which together can ensure a plurality of voices. She added that webinars such as this one promote advocacy among stakeholders.
A lively discussion followed which explored inequalities caused by better funder support for STEM over AHSS subjects; the importance of authentication; and the dilemmas academics experience when required to publish in high impact journals, whether or not these support an open access model.
To catch up with the whole event, please find the video recording here.
This blog post was written by Linda Bennett and first published on the De Gruyter Brill “Conversations” blog.
Gold Leaf 