Just to get things rolling, this is our mission statement.
The mission of the Scholarly Communications Roundtable (SCRT) is to promote throughout CUNY libraries and the larger community awareness and understanding of the major issues facing scholarly communications. The LACUNY SCRT embraces the definition of Scholarly Communications as described by the Association of College and Research Libraries which states that “scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.” The LACUNY SCRT will achieve its mission through informal conversations with its members and others in LACUNY as well as through formal presentations by members or invited presenters to a broader audience. Topics covered might include: peer review, institutional repositories, open access publishing, copyright, Creative Commons, an examination of the so-called “Big Deal” journal package, the Long Tail theory, pay-per-use purchasing, the free/open culture movement, and the rights of the reader. The SCRT will welcome partnership opportunities within LACUNY, throughout CUNY and with other institutions and organizations that will help it promote the goals of scholarly communications.