Op Ed — Epistemology — Vision, Values and Making It Work

I’ve been thinking about how our values drive our decision making, how our decisions reflect those values, and how we get things done. What happens when our values are in conflict or lead us into blind alleys? Back in September of 2017, David Lewis, Dean of the IUPUI University Library, published “The 2.5% Commitment,” a think piece suggesting that libraries should “commit 2.5% of their total budgets to organizations and projects that contribute to the common digital infrastructure need to support the open scholarly commons.” The notion inspired Lewis and several of his colleagues to launch “Towards A Scholarly Commons,” an “immodest effort to reclaim the system of scholarly communication by encouraging investment in open technologies and open content, and through collective action, create the infrastructure, policies, and practices needed to effect this change."