Purpose
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
April 2009
The Chicago Collaborative was created from a conviction that we are at a pivotal moment in the history
of scholarly communication. It’s 1453 and we’re in a workshop in Mainz trying to do a better job of
getting this wine press to push these metal bits evenly onto this sheet of paper. We’re in the coffeehouses
of London in 1664 trying to work out a scheme for gathering and reproducing reports from the greatest
scientists of the day so that we can send them all across the continent in serial issues.
And it’s the early 21st century, and in libraries and editorial offices and publishers meetings across the
globe, we are trying to figure out how to use the internet and the web and this startling array of new
digital tools to once again push scholarly communication in a new direction.
The members of the Chicago Collaborative believe that collaboration is essential to the development of a
scholarly communication system that serves the best interests of the entire scholarly community. The
future of scholarly communication will, we believe, be determined not only by the opportunities and
challenges before us, but by the way we approach them. While the opportunities before us today far
exceed the imaginings of those visionaries from past eras, making the most of these opportunities will
require the active, constructive engagement of not just some but all stakeholders.
The founding members of the Chicago Collaborative believe that success in this crucial endeavor will
require a relationship of trust and a spirit of collaboration among all stakeholders. Without this essential
engagement, we will fail to meet our responsibilities to society.
It is in order to create an environment where these relationships can flourish, and the grand challenges for
scholarly communication of our age can be confronted, that we have founded the Chicago Collaborative.
Chicago Collaborative Founding Members:
- Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries
- Association of American Medical Colleges, Council of Academic Societies
- Association of American Publishers, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division
- Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
- Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology/DC Principles
- International Association of Science, Technical & Medical Publishers
- International Committee of Medical Journal Editors
- Society for Scholarly Publishing
For more information: Please contact Margaret Reich, Chicago Collaborative Operations Manager, margaretreich@gmail.com.
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