27 May 2022
Joanna Ball, Chair UKSG (Managing Director of DOAJ)
We’re excited to launch a new strategic vision for UKSG at the opening of our Annual Conference in Telford. This marks a milestone for the charity, building on changes to our governance and staffing structures, and marking out a clear direction of travel for the future.
UKSG has gone through a period of significant change over the previous few years, both with the appointment of Bev Acreman as our new Executive Director and then a review of our governance structure led by Andrew Barker to create a slimmed-down and more effective Board of Trustees. It is the responsibility of the Board to set the strategic direction of the charity, and although we inherited a vision and some overarching objectives, these hadn’t been updated for several years. Like all organisations, we were deeply affected by COVID-19, and the cancellation of our 2020 annual conference and the impact that it had on our finances forced us to think hard about our role and contribution to the sector. This was the perfect opportunity to clearly redefine our direction, and in early 2021 we started the process to develop a new strategic vision, one that ensured that we would continue to develop along with the needs of the UKSG community.
Developing the vision was actually made much easier thanks to the shift to online working, and in spring and summer 2021, we held a series of shorter workshops with Trustees to carry out an environmental analysis, evaluate the relevance of our existing vision and where it fell short. We spent time thinking about and discussing our values and what UKSG meant both to us and our diverse stakeholders. We then developed the input from these sessions into a series of provocations or statements about the kinds of behaviours we wanted to exhibit as an organisation. Our Outreach and Engagement Committee used these as the basis of a stakeholder engagement process, to gather feedback from members and the wider community about where they felt we should be focusing our efforts. We were really pleased to see a strong consensus between our proposals and the responses from our members. The Trustees used the results of the consultation to reflect on and amend our statements, creating the vision as it stands today.
The vision statement reflects who we are as an organisation and how we work. It embodies our values around learning and sharing, openness and inclusion. The four themes - include, connect, innovate and deliver - reflect UKSG's special role as a meeting point for the entire scholarly communications community. We also see these themes as steps in a process: ensuring that we build a culture of proactive inclusion that enables everyone to contribute to our community, then bringing those voices together to create a better understanding and discuss the thorny issues in our sector. Only then can we move on to find, and even deliver, solutions to improve the flow of scholarly communication.
Include was a recurring theme in our internal discussions and also in our consultation with members. Including everyone is a fundamental part of UKSG and we try to address this, for example through sponsored places for early-career professionals at our annual conference. This theme commits us to taking a step further, proactively identifying and resolving areas of underrepresentation within our community and our activities.
Providing opportunities for our members to connect is at the heart of UKSG. This theme challenges us to go beyond the annual conference to enable deeper connections within and across the different elements in our sector, by evaluating existing initiatives and exploring new channels of communication. By facilitating the sharing of views and enabling members to improve their understanding of one another's approaches we will ensure constructive and meaningful debate, even over the issues where we don’t agree.
As a community of practice, we are better placed to innovate and act as a catalyst for cross-sector initiatives to benefit our community. This theme indicates our intention to create a space for the generation of ideas and to build collaborations with like-minded organisations to surface issues and find solutions.
We are proud of the innovations we have initiated and supported over the past 45 years. Through the theme of deliver, we will invest our energy and resources in initiatives to improve the sector and focus on practical solutions. This also embodies our commitment to the long-term sustainability of UKSG to deliver our ambitious programme, ensuring that our governance, finances and operations remain healthy and fit-for-purpose.
In terms of the next steps, we recently held a workshop with our volunteer network and staff to discuss and gather input on how we make our vision a reality, and the Board of Trustees will use these outputs to develop a roadmap of activities and ensure that we allocate the necessary resources. We hope that our new vision resonates with you, our members, and reflects your ambitions for the future of UKSG.