Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 and established the ethical foundation for The Wealth of Nations (1776) as well as the important role played by custom and fashion in shaping behaviors and outcomes. Kendall P. Cochran believed in Smith’s emphasis on value-driven analysis and seeking solutions to major problems of the day. Cochran believed that economists moved too far in the direction of analysis free of words like ought and should and devoted his career to establishing that economics is a moral science. A recent study by two Harvard professors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Growth in a Time of Debt (2010), asserted that healthy economic growth and high levels of government debt are incompatible. These conclusions are associated with the austerity movement, which calls for policymakers to reduce government spending in order to reduce the government’s debt and improve long-term growth prospects. The austerity movement has been used to justify the sharp decline in public sector employment that has restrained job growth since the recession of 2007. In 2013, a graduate student named Thomas Herndon discovered an error in the calculations of Reinhart and Rogoff, publishing his findings in a paper co-authored by his professors, …

The National Science Communication Institute (nSCI) hosted a conference in late 2013 to explore the broad issue related to scholarly publishing. The Open Science Initiative (OSI) is a working group convened by the National Science Communication Institute (nSCI) in October 2014 to discuss the issues regarding improving open access for the betterment of science and to recommend possible solutions. The following document summarizes the wide range of issues, perspectives and recommendations from this group’s online conversation during November and December 2014 and January 2015. The 112 participants who signed up to participate in this conversation were drawn mostly from the academic, research, and library communities. Most of these 112 were not active in this conversation, but a healthy diversity of key perspectives was still represented. Individual participants may not agree with all of the viewpoints described herein, but participants agree that this document reflects the spirit and content of the conversation.

Since 2011, OCLC researchers have been experimenting with Schema.org as a vehicle for exposing library metadata to Web search engines in a format they seek and understand. Schema.org is sponsored by Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex as a common vocabulary for creating structured data markup on Web pages. OCLC’s experiments led to the 2012 publication of Schema.org metadata elements expressed as linked data on 300 million catalog records accessible from WorldCat.org.1 In 2011, BIBFRAME was launched by the Library of Congress (LC) as an initiative to develop a linked data alternative to MARC, building on the Library’s experience providing linked data access to its authority files. In the past year and a half, OCLC has focused on the tasks related to the use of Schema.org: refining the technical infrastructure and data architecture for at-scale publication of linked data for library resources in the broader Web, and investigating the promise of Schema.org as a common ground between the language of the information-seeking public and professional stewards of bibliographic description. BIBFRAME has focused on publishing additional vocabulary and facilitating implementation and testing. These new developments prompt the need to re-examine the relationship between the LC and OCLC models for library linked data. …