Tag: values-based practice

OpenAlex and values-aligned tools

It is within our sphere of influence to learn about and use values-aligned infrastructure and leverage our positions as information professionals to teach and encourage others to use values-aligned infrastructure as well.

Two different kinds of bridges crossing a river. Photo by Katelyn G on Unsplash

Academia needs to untangle from corporate entities our ability to understand and evaluate scholarly activity. Companies like Elsevier and Clarivate have effectively embedded evaluation methods into academia that rely on their proprietary tools (Scopus and SciVal; Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports and InCites, respectively). Conveniently, these products also cast judgement on the “legitimacy” of scholarly publication venues and whether they are valuable as lines in a tenure portfolio and/or in library subscription decisions, which raises questions about conflict of interest. One would assume journals owned by Elsevier are rarely excluded from the Scopus corpus, for example.

The need to sever indexing and evaluation of scholarly activity from corporate control dovetails with the need to regain a degree of control over the entire scholarly publishing enterprise. One path might look like a significant shift toward venues that are owned-and-operated by academic institutions or scholarly societies or academic alliances as opposed to for-profit publishers, but a basic barrier to this shift is the inconsistent and incomplete indexing of such venues in scientific knowledge graphs like Scopus and Web of Science. In their recent article on the subject, Nazarovets et al. (2026) conclude with this suggestion: “…the uneven visibility of UJs [university journals] highlights a structural blind spot in global research assessment: unless more inclusive infrastructures like DOAJ and OpenAlex are more widely recognized and further improved in terms of comprehensiveness in coverage and metadata reliability, large parts of scholarly production will remain invisible even if a move is made away from using WoS [Web of Science] and Scopus.” This is just one possible benefit of investing in open infrastructure like OpenAlex (as recommended by UNESCO). Open infrastructure can be defined as free, foundational tools and resources upon which open science/scholarship can be conducted, shared, and explored.

For those unfamiliar with OpenAlex, it is essentially a large database of scholarly works and related metadata. OpenAlex focuses on comprehensive inclusion of scholarly works as opposed to “curation” of legitimate sources as practiced by proprietary services. It has a web interface and can be queried using an API, but at its core, it is a piece of infrastructure dedicated to the public domain via CC0 and actively maintained by a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Of course, relying on publisher-reported citation data may be a dubious proposition to begin with, but in the meantime, as we work to recognize and reward other types of research impact evidence, let’s at least try to use comprehensive citation data.

Is OpenAlex as good as its competitors? In my experience, it has usually been as good or better for most purposes, like generating a list of an authors’ publications inclusive of preprints, or charting an institution’s open access publishing trends over time. Most folks who have taken a deep dive seem to agree. Culbert et al. (2024) analyzed OpenAlex reference coverage in comparison to Web of Science and Scopus and found it to be “comparable” even before OpenAlex’s recent improvements, which included an addition of over 50 million new works. In a Katina review, Ho (2025) called OpenAlex “…a promising and reliable alternative to traditional subscription-based citation databases for researchers, university administrators, research institutions, and government funding bodies that are interested in research activities and potential collaborations.” Other scholarly discovery tools like Overton are using OpenAlex for foundational data.

Folks will need to try it for themselves to see if the usability holds up to their standards, but for those on the fence, consider how simply using such tools might be a tiny contribution to a different future for research infrastructure. Coordinators involved in the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information had this to say about the declaration’s commitment to supporting infrastructures for open research information:

“What we think is important for organizations is to take seriously their responsibility for supporting these infrastructures—which can only continue to exist, and develop further, if they are both used and supported. That includes financial support but could also involve participating in governance and in-kind efforts, e.g., contributing data and helping improve data quality. Regarding financial contributions, here again Sorbonne University is a great example—when they unsubscribed from Web of Science, they redirected part of that budget to supporting OpenAlex. In general, we advocate making investments in open infrastructure an integral part of institutional budgets.”

For many of us in academic libraries, we don’t have significant resources to invest or divest, although voting with our money is still worth considering if we have authorization to do so. However, what is certainly within our sphere of influence is to learn about and use values-aligned infrastructure and leverage our positions as information professionals to teach and encourage others to use values-aligned infrastructure as well. At my institution, we’ve begun with small projects like integrating OpenAlex into our local scholarly profile platform and working to add our institutional repository as a source of OpenAlex data. Whether it be OpenAlex or another values-aligned tool, we can vote with our usage as a small daily act of support and/or resistance. By teaching about these tools, separate small acts become collective power.

Joy is at the Heart of All Meaningful Work: Finding Meaning in Academic Librarianship

“Joy is at the heart of all meaningful work.”
Christopher P. Long

I read this quotation by Christopher P. Long in early Spring 2022 and it stuck with me. Long is the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University. He’s an advocate of what he calls ethical candor (“the cultivated disposition to be honest with yourself”) and values-based practice (“aligning our core values with the practices that shape academic life”). And the line quoted above struck me because I’ve been thinking about meaningful work as an academic librarian recently.

My friend Mary Greenshields gave a presentation with Sandra Cowan at the 2022 CAPAL (Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians) Conference on compassion and love in academic librarianship, which Mary later published with Sarah Polkinghorne in Library Trends’ special issue on the joy of information (‘Love is a lens: Locating love in library and information studies’). They’re not talking about romantic love, but filial love, or a love of connectedness, of friends, of family.And for me, this forms part of why I find my work as an academic librarian meaningful: there’s so many connections! I think about all of the coworkers that I genuinely care about, and the brief yet meaningful interactions with students and faculty.

I say brief interactions as I’m fairly new in my current role as a science liaison librarian, having worked in the position for just over a year. This is an area where I’m developing, cultivating meaningful relationships with faculty and students. It takes time, I know, to grow as a liaison librarian in your subject areas. It’s something I’m actively working on, trying different avenues to establish myself, and get to know the people in my subjects. For me I find those connections some of the most joyful and meaningful work that academic librarians engage in. Even though it can seem daunting at times to establish myself in my departments, I look ahead to not only what I could accomplish, but that makes me content in my role at my library.

But putting aside liaising, for others, there might be other things that are meaningful for you in academic librarianship and related fields – a well-organized and developed library collection, preserving individuals’ archival records, nailing that meeting that you’re chairing, teaching to hundreds about a topic you’re passionate about, giving your time to a library association you care deeply about, and on, and on.

Take time to identify areas of your work that bring you joy; get as much as you can out of these moments. I think it’s important to find your work meaningful in some way – even if that’s just one aspect of your role (but hopefully it’s more than that) – that it’s valuable, that you’re contributing to something, that you feel motivated and engaged to do good work. Maybe that something is bigger than just you, bigger than your library, your institution even.

I’m reminded of Stephen Brookfield in The Skillful Teacher. In it, he writes of teaching that it “is about making some kind of dent in the world so that the world is different than it was before you practiced your craft. Knowing clearly what kind of dent you want to make in the world means that you must continually ask yourself the most fundamental evaluative questions of all – What effect am I having on students and on their learning?”

I think you can apply this to our teaching, to our collections development, to reference, to all of our library services. What kind of dent in the world are you making? And what effect am I having on students [and faculty, and your colleagues, and …]?

But how do you really know? Think about the ways you assess your success, value, and impact as a librarian. Are you writing annual performance reviews? Do you have a list of goals for the year? Do you keep a teaching journal? Do you track statistics on your reference or other work? Look to these, sure, but consider looking beyond a number or measurement to find out where those areas are that you’re passionate about, those things that bring you happiness in your job.

For me, it’s about connections, supporting our library staff, faculty, and students, and making those dents in the world, making a difference. That brings me joy in academic librarianship, and along with it, meaningful work. Find those moments of joy, revel in them, and bring them to life intentionally throughout your work.

I hope that you can find your work meaningful, that you’re making your dents in the world, and that joy is at the heart of it.