Lessons in Collaboration: Insights from the Canadian Symposium of Scholarly Journals
Recognizing that scholarly journals and the libraries that support them are undergoing profound shifts in their environments and are facing increasingly complex challenges with the shift toward immediate open access and the adoption of related standards and best practices for persistent identifiers, licensing, and metadata, Coalition Publica and the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences joined forces to organize the Canadian Symposium of Scholarly Journals. This pan-Canadian event was a bilingual forum for the community to engage in open discussion, organized by a steering committee of journal editors, librarians and staff of the partner organizations. Originally envisioned as an in-person event through the lens of Congress 2024 with its theme Sustaining Shared Futures, and eventually offered as a virtual session in November 2024, the Symposium gathered over 150 journal editors, librarians, and scholarly communication stakeholders to ponder three questions around collaboration, community and knowledge sharing to chart possible solutions to common challenges as we look toward a diamond open access horizon.
This session will reflect and expound on the Symposium’s key insights including emerging themes of accessibility, multilingualism, shared capacity building, and a desire for sustained community connection. It also will be an opportunity to learn about the importance of collaboration across multiple stakeholders to create meaningful partnerships. Participants will be reminded that if we want to shift the system toward a more open, equitable, inclusive and bibliodiverse one, the adage holds true: if you want to go fast, go alone - if you want to go far, go together.