Variety Is the Spice of Life: Bibliodiversity, Scholarly Publishing and the Inexact Science of Making Ends Meet
What does bibliodiversity mean for libraries and academia today? Last month, an international panel explored how diverse voices, open access and local publishing initiatives can transform scholarly communication and advance equity worldwide.
Click here to catch-up with De Gruyter and Gold Leaf’s quarterly webinar series.
The ninth webinar in the De Gruyter Brill series “Challenging the Status Quo: Taking Libraries into the Future” took place last month, the first of the series to be presented in 2025. The speakers were: Mimi Calter, Vice Provost and University Librarian Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri; Aleksandra Trtovac, Library Advisor, University Library “Svetozar Marković” in Belgrade, Serbia; and Dr. Sarah Kaddu, Senior Lecturer and Dean, East African School of Library and Information Science at Makerere University, Uganda. It was the series’ most international group of speakers ever – each one from a different continent – and the De Gruyter Brill host was Lervinia Swee, who is based in Singapore, representing yet another continent.
You are currently viewing a placeholder content from YouTube. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
Mimi Calter, who is also the Chair of the Academic & Research Libraries Committee for IFLA, gave the first presentation, taking an international perspective. She offered a comprehensive definition of bibliodiversity: “Bibliodiversity, a term derived from ‘biblio,’ meaning books, and ‘diversity,’ refers to the diversity of books and publications that represent a wide range of cultures, languages, genres and perspectives. It encompasses the idea that a healthy and vibrant literary ecosystem should include a variety of voices and viewpoints, thus promoting cultural diversity, pluralism and intellectual freedom.”
“This concept is akin to biodiversity in the natural world, highlighting the importance of a diverse literary landscape for the health and sustainability of intellectual and cultural ecosystems.” She focused on the storytelling aspect of bibliodiversity and its emphasis on the diversification of voices, languages, funding models, acts of research and publishing formats encompassed by scholarly activity. At the same time, it means lowering barriers to participating in scholarly conversation and promoting equity among different ways of knowing and communicating in academia.
She described the many areas of librarianship that are influenced by a bibliodiverse strategy – for example, the types of material curated, linguistic representation, recognition of historic collections practices and support for different publishing models. IFLA has noted complementary trends among institutions in the Association of Research Libraries: ever-increasing support for open access and open science; enhanced electronic resource management; resource-sharing consortial arrangements; and cultural and social initiatives, such as decolonization and indigenization.
“A healthy and vibrant literary ecosystem should include a variety of voices and viewpoints.”
Aleksandra Trtovac focused on the Serbian national perspective. “Bibliodiversity and Open Access in Serbia: Mission Impossible?” acknowledged the significant challenge of addressing bibliodiversity, but nonetheless she went on to describe an impressing number of initiatives that are happening in Serbia. Among the most interesting of these is the development of the eNauka portal. It contains data on scientific research organizations in Serbia, affiliated researchers and their research results. The eScience portal opened to all active researchers in Serbia in July 2023.
Aleksandra said that the key barriers to achieving bibliodiversity in Serbia are the financial instability of publishers; the quality and professionalism of publishing, or lack thereof; that there is insufficient infrastructure to support digital publishing; and that Serbian academics are only able to gain limited access to international funds and multinational collaboration.
An important tool for mitigating these problems has been the widespread adoption of Open Journal Systems (OJS). OJS has become a significant tool for the support of scientific publishing in Serbia, with around 250 scientific journals in the country now using the platform. To improve expertise in its use, national and regional workshops have been set up, and training sessions are organized for both journal editors and publishers. A key benefit of OJS is its capacity to integrate Serbian journals into international scientific networks.
Aleksandra continued by highlighting the importance of librarians in promoting bibliodiversity. As well as being instrumental in the development of the National Open Science platform, Serbian librarians have been responsible for the development and implementation of institutional repositories. They have provided education and support for researchers, participated in the development of open science policies, managed all the associated metadata, and engaged in advocacy for open access.
In case you missed it: “Embracing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Social Justice and the Modern University.” Click here to read.
Librarians have also been heavily involved in the setting up of a national fund to support open access, Aleksandra concluded. They have strengthened the visibility of OA works by training publishers and editors and promoting OA databases; they’ve also improved the OA infrastructure more generally, connecting researchers with international initiatives and EU projects.
Sarah Kaddu talked about the challenges that bibliodiversity presents to countries in Africa. She said that traditionally, growth in academic spaces has been mostly focused on international publication, with established publishing houses using a standard language disseminated through standard publishing processes. The result has been the development of an elitist publishing industry that promotes limited works of limited scope to a limited section of the population in a limited language (mostly English).
Bibliodiversity offers a contrasting approach to academic publishing and scholarly communication. She identified three main reasons for librarians to promote bibliodiversity: equality of cultural and linguistic representation, intellectual pluralism and the democratisation of knowledge. She concluded that bibliodiversity is a tool for knowledge equity and cultural preservation that cannot be achieved and sustained without the combined efforts of policy changes and advocacy, which together can ensure a plurality of voices. She added that webinars such as this one promote advocacy among stakeholders.
A lively discussion followed which explored inequalities caused by better funder support for STEM over the arts, humanities and social sciences; the importance of authentication; and the dilemmas academics face when required to publish in high impact journals, whether or not these support an open access model.
To catch up with the whole event, please find the video recording here.
You might also be interested in this blog series
[Title image by mik38/iStock/Getty Images]