Research Infrastructure and the Strategic Decisions of Universities

Roger C. Schonfeld

For the past several years, I have been writing about the turn to research workflow tools. These tools reach deeply into the laboratory and are increasingly important to scientists and other scholars, and they impact the university research office and scholarly communications programs. Scholars need seamless end-to-end research solutions. Major publishers are making substantial investments in this area as they seek to pivot their businesses beyond content licensing.

The strategic choices that universities make today will determine whether they are able to realize the economic & technical advantages in shared infrastructure that scales across institutional boundaries — or whether they will find themselves locked in to outsourced solutions no less pernicious than so many libraries have come to find the Big Deal. My latest issue brief addresses this topic from the perspective of academia and how universities can organize themselves to ensure that they provide research workflow tools in ways that benefit the values and interests of scientists and the university itself.