Vandegrift generator of open scholarship

Open Knowledge Librarian Micah Vandegrift has returned from a Fulbright-Schuman Innovation fellowship project that began last fall in the Netherlands and Denmark. His Fulbright project, titled “Open Scholarship Policies and Technologies: The European Research Library as a Model for Advancing Global Scholarly Communication,” was to study information policy shifts in the European Union toward an open scholarship model.

Working at the Maastricht University Libraries Research Support Programme and the Royal Danish Library, Vandegrift examined the effects of those policy shifts on both the role of research librarians and on the global library community’s ability to develop models to push toward a more socially just research ecosystem. And he found substantial differences between the European and American educational communities.

“Generally, in the European research library and higher education industry, they are thinking a little more progressively than we are in the U.S.,” Vandegrift says. “Some of it has to do with the fact that it’s just a small area. The countries are all small and close together. I was mostly in the Netherlands and there’s just 14 universities in the country. So it's just easier to make decisions and easier to get consensus, easier to be on the same page even across country lines. Geography plays a much bigger role than how it looks to us on this side of the Atlantic. They're moving pretty quickly toward a continent-wide open science agenda..” 

Since returning, Vandegrift has been thinking about what a national strategy for open science or open or public access in the United States could look like. “I realize we may never get there because it’s a gigantic country, but it may be much more possible to approach this strategy at a state level,” he says. “Or, in the instance of regional consortia, what would it look like if the TRLN and its institutions made some kind of a decision about the type and flavor of open research that we wanted to invest in?”

Learn more about Micah's work: 

Micah Vandegrift’s final report,Faculty Excellence event

Our news item on his Fulbright