Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Supporting Research Information Management In The Research University: Partnerships, Challenges, And Possibilities, Rebecca Bryant, Beth Sandore Namachchivaya, Julie Speer

Charleston Library Conference

Research universities are increasingly engaging in complex efforts to collect and synthesize information about an institution’s research footprint. The collection, updating, and sharing of the campus’s bibliographic research outputs is an increasingly important part of this effort, as institutions seek to develop external profiling systems and enable collaborator discovery and to also increasingly internally understand the research strengths and synergies of an institution for planning and assessment. Institutions are adopting a variety of tools to support research information management (RIM), faculty activity reporting (FAR), and researcher collaboration and discovery on campus. In this presentation, we will talk about the complex …

Wrangling Services Contracts In Libraries, Michael Rodriguez

Charleston Library Conference

As more and more academic libraries outsource information technology services and enter into cooperative consortial schemes with other organizations, librarians push into a minefield of contractual negotiations, obligations, and liabilities more complicated and consequential than the typical e-resource licenses is. A poorly wordsmithed license may result in loss of access to journals, whereas becoming entangled in troubled consortia, watching an essential technology go offline during finals week, or getting audited by a vendor without contractual safeguards or recourse can produce much greater financial and administrative burdens. This concurrent session was a crash course in negotiating service contracts favorable to libraries, …

The Sky’S The Limit: Scholarly Communication, Digital Initiatives, Institutional Repositories, And Subject Librarians, Sarah A. Norris, Lee Dotson, Barbara Tierney, Richard H. Harrison Ii

Charleston Library Conference

The University of Central Florida’s institutional repository, Showcase of Text, Archives, Research, and Scholarship (STARS), has presented new opportunities for collaboration among the Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communication, Digital Initiatives, Research Services, and subject librarians. Building on efforts to proactively promote scholarly communication initiatives to the university community, these four units have used the institutional repository as a foundation for collaboration, outreach, marketing, and educational efforts. This article will give an overview of a panel presentation given by members of these four units on STARS and highlight the role the institutional repository has in increasing the collaborative efforts of these …

Is Small Beautiful? The Position Of Independent Scholarly Publishers In An Environment Of Rapid Industry Consolidation, Charlie Remy, Steve Cohn, Richard Gallagher, George Leaman

Charleston Library Conference

The publishing industry continues to consolidate, with large multinational publishers acquiring journals and other content from academic societies and independent publishers. This panel provided candid insights into the challenges facing smaller publishers, including how/why they continue to exist in a business environment increasingly dominated by large companies. The discussion examined the advantages that smaller, independent publishers enjoy and addressed their adaptation strategies, business planning (including open versus paid access models), strategic partnerships, technical infrastructure, production procedures, relationships with libraries, and the work needed to meet the evolving needs of library end users. The impact of industry consolidation on libraries, including …

Humanities Collaborations And Research Practices: Investigating New Modes Of Collaborative Humanities Scholarship, Harriett Green, Angela Courtney, Megan Senseney

Charleston Library Conference

This paper presents preliminary findings from “Humanities Collaborations and Research Practices: Exploring Scholarship in the Global Midwest,” (HCRP), a collaborative project led by librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University that examines how collaborative and experimental research practices in the humanities affects scholarly practices, scholarly communication, and research outcomes.

The HCRP study examines a series of multi-institutional humanities research projects funded by the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Global Midwest initiative, a Mellon Foundation-funded consortium of Midwest university humanities centers. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with scholars from diverse humanities disciplines who were HWW Global Midwest awardees. …

What Are Subject Liaisons When “Collections” And “Subjects” Don’T Matter?, Darby Orcutt, Mira Waller, Scott A. Warren

Charleston Library Conference

In this interactive lively lunch discussion, participants explored issues around how the traditional subject liaison role is evolving. Users increasingly require functional information support (e.g., for geographic information system (GIS) or data mining) rather than simply domain-specific. At the same time, reports from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Pilot Library Liaison Institute and others have noted self-conscious trends toward developing liaison roles that engage and support the full research life cycle, as opposed to traditional service models focused on building and promoting library collections as more or less fixed products. Hosts Darby Orcutt, Mira Waller, and Scott Warren outlined …

Is A Gold Open Access World Viable For Research Universities?, Greg Tananbaum, Carol Tenopir, Ivy Anderson

Charleston Library Conference

Open access is at the heart of a seismic shift in scholarly publishing. In particular, gold open access (OA) has expanded at an accelerated pace, increasing in market share every year. In the gold OA model, financial viability shifts from the demand to the supply side, with article processing charges (APCs) a common scenario. Ideally, this model would be sustainable for academic research institutions, in that it would cost them cumulatively no more to pay APCs than they pay now in the traditional subscription model. APC-driven gold OA has financial and other implications for libraries, institutions, and authors. In the …

Lifting All Boats: Fostering A Community Of Practice For Student Publishers, Laura Leichum, Kate Dohe, Gillian Berchowitz, Marc Blanc

Charleston Library Conference

Undergraduate and graduate students are increasingly being encouraged to work with faculty and researchers to generate traditional scholarship, as well as other types of projects that feature original content. Through this process, students are more frequently taking on roles as researchers, authors, and publishers. Student scholarship and student-run publications are valuable to the scholarly record, representing the nascent activities of the next generation of scholars, but also serving as an academic playground for emergent forms of publishing and media. Furthermore, students who manage publications gain practical skills that transfer to a variety of careers in academia and private industry. However, …

Open Access, Open Access, How Does Your Catalog Grow? With Selection, Access, And Usage All In A Virtual Row!, David W. Schuster, Susan J. Martin

Charleston Library Conference

Much of the open access (OA) focus and discussion has been on journals (think Glossa), but the open access monograph has come fully into its own. University and scholarly publishers are providing high-quality books, often in areas that rely on long-form scholarship. However, open access monographs presented a challenge. How do they fit into the traditional models of selection, acquisition, cataloging, and tracking usage?

In the spring of 2016, Texas Woman’s University Libraries created a simple workflow to make open access monographs accessible through the libraries’ discovery layer using Google Sheets to track the workflow and EZproxy to track usage.

“We’Ll Do It Live”: Building Access To Video Content Based On Freedoms Of Use, Christine Fruin, Trey Shelton, Aimee Barrett, Allison Jai O'Dell

Charleston Library Conference

Film collections in academic libraries, including streaming video and DVDs, serve a variety of user populations and needs. Videos are used by faculty as part of instruction, by student clubs or other groups as part of public programming, and by individuals for personal study or entertainment. These various use situations are addressed by the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. sec. 101 et seq., and license agreements that accompany video purchases. To maximize use of video collections, and by extension, funds expended on video collections, libraries need to fully understand their rights under the law, track video licenses, and build access around …

Don’T Share This Item! Developing Digital Collections And Services In A Consumer‐Licensed World, William M. Cross, Darby Orcutt

Charleston Library Conference

Libraries have always faced unique challenges in providing non‐academic content for academic use, but the digital age has brought particular problems of “one size fits all” consumer purchase models and vexing methods of digital rights management (DRM), wrapped up with a large bow of legal uncertainty for many institutions. These proceedings describe some practices for sharing consumer‐licensed popular materials and confronting legal and technical barriers, as well as what some libraries are considering and encountering in applying the law, fair use, user expectations, and common sense in developing collections and services around digital content that is geared directly to end …

How Much Do Monographs Cost? And Why Should We Care?, Nancy L. Maron, Charles Watkinson, Meredith Kahn, Shayna Pekala

Charleston Library Conference

What does it cost to make a high quality, digital monograph? What may sound like an obvious question turns out to be a very knotty one, driving to the heart of the essence of scholarly publishing today. It is particularly relevant in an environment where the potential of a sustainable open access (OA) business model for monographs is being explored. Two complementary studies funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2015 have explored this question to understand the costs involved in creating and disseminating scholarly books.

The team at Ithaka S+R studied the full costs of publishing monographs by …

Open Access Funds: Getting A Bigger Bang For Our Bucks, Robert Glushko, Crystal Hampson, Patricia Moore, Elizabeth Yates

Charleston Library Conference

Many libraries offer open access publishing funds to support authors in paying article processing charges (APC) levied by some OA journals. However, there are few standard practices for managing or assessing these funds. The Open Access Working Group (OAWG) of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) was asked to investigate and articulate best practices for successful open access fund management. In spring 2015, the OAWG surveyed Canadian academic libraries with OA funds to review their criteria and collect feedback on current practices. The survey proved timely because many OA funds are under review. Shrinking budgets, ending pilots, and questions …

The Open Movement: What Libraries Can Do, Sheila Corrall

Charleston Library Conference

Open approaches have moved beyond open access, open source software, and open courseware to developments with open infrastructure and open processes. Open initiatives are gaining momentum as a result of both bottom‐up grassroots activism and top‐down policy agenda. In a few instances, they have already reached a tipping point; but in many cases they are being pursued separately by specialist groups, suffering from fragmentation, and not always having their expected outcomes or impacts. Our study of open initiatives uses a simple overarching definition of open resources, and introduces a convenient framework enabling shared understanding of three different types of openness—open …

“Help, We Started A Journal!”: Adventures In Supporting Open Access Publishing Using Open Journal Systems, Anna R. Craft

Charleston Library Conference

The University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) have an active and growing implementation of Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free, open source scholarly publishing platform. But even a free software system is not without its costs, both to the hosting institution and to the creators and staff of individual journals. Institutions that wish to host OJS must be able to install, maintain, and support the product. And while faculty members and other academics are often experts in their content areas, not all of them are prepared to handle other needs associated with creating and publishing …

Where Do We Go From Here: Choosing A Framework For Assessing Research Data Services And Training, William M. Cross, Hilary M. Davis

Charleston Library Conference

Research data management has become a critical issue for campus researchers, funding agencies, and libraries, who have made substantial investments of time, energy, and resources into support for managing and sharing data. As data management programs proliferate, however, assessment of research data services has become a notorious challenge for libraries. How can we know—and demonstrate—that our efforts are having an impact, and how can we learn to make them even more effective?

In this session, we will present a survey of several frameworks for assessing research data management services. We will lead a discussion about the application of different frameworks …

E‐Book Tune‐Up: Maintaining, Sustaining, And Expanding Your Demand‐Driven E‐Book Program, Caroline Mills, Janet A. Nazar, Michelle R. Desilets, Nathan Carlson

Charleston Library Conference

Just like a car, an e‐book program needs continuous maintenance in order to run smoothly. What can we do to structure our e‐book collections to better meet institutional need? Many factors come into play in building a successful demand‐driven acquisition (DDA) program. Student preferences, actual use, collection development, and faculty/staff education and support are all important aspects of maintaining and sustaining a DDA program. This paper describes how the Furman University Library in South Carolina and the Metropolitan State University Library (Metro State) in Minnesota assessed and fine‐tuned their respective DDA programs, and the results of these changes.

Building A Scholarly Communication Boot Camp For East Carolina University Liaisons, Cindy D. Shirkey, Jeanne Hoover

Charleston Library Conference

A growing demand for scholarly communication expertise led two librarians at East Carolina University to create a series of informative and interactive sessions for liaisons. These boot camp sessions covered topics such as open access, citation management, research impact, data management, authors’ rights, copyright, digital humanities, and OER. The goal of the boot camp was to familiarize liaisons with these concepts enough so that they might be able to talk with faculty about them. To achieve this goal, the developers of the sessions used active learning exercises and a flipped classroom model.

Cc‐By: Is There Such A Thing As Too Open In Open Access?, Leetta M. Schmidt, Kyle K. Courtney, Calvin Manning

Charleston Library Conference

Support and demand for researchers to publish in open access (OA) journals has been growing steadily among funding agencies, research organizations, and institutions of higher education. The Wellcome Trust and the Research Councils UK OA policies have begun imposing more finite restrictions, like publishing only under CC‐BY licenses, on researchers. CC‐BY, or Creative Commons Attribution, is one of several, and the most open, of all creative commons licensing. It most closely embodies the definition of OA, as established by the Berlin Declaration and Bethesda Statement on Open Access, by allowing for the most reuse, including the unrestricted creation of derivatives. …

The Secret Life Of Articles: From Download Metrics To Downstream Impact, Carol Tenopir, Lorraine Estelle, Wouter Haak

Charleston Library Conference

No abstract provided.

Learning Mendeley Through Its Certification Program For Librarians, Rajiv Nariani, Yath Ithayakumar

Charleston Library Conference

York University Libraries (YUL) ended its subscription to their default citation management program in the summer of 2015. The Mendeley Certification Program for Librarians was launched during that time and the science librarian at YUL completed this program. The steps undertaken during the completion of the program led to successful migration to the freely available, and libraries supported, citation management programs. This paper details the various initiatives that were done prior to and during the certification program and how completing the program has benefited our academic community. The certification program has helped solidify relations with faculty and students during the …

Aligning Collections With Emerging Needs In Research Informatics, Heidi J. Tebbe, Darby Orcutt

Charleston Library Conference

Some of the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries’ largest investments are in collections, digital library development, and technology‐rich collaborative spaces. The goal of the NCSU Libraries Fellows Program initiative, "Aligning Collections with Emerging Needs in Research Informatics," is to ensure these areas leverage one another to the benefit of our users in support of emerging research informatics needs through licensing and acquisition of new data sources, as well as leveraging the capabilities of new high‐tech library spaces. Over its two years, this initiative seeks to address and mainstream subject specialists’ and selectors’ consideration of high‐tech research informatics needs of …

Managing, Marketing, And Measuring Open Resources, Trey Shelton, Steven Carrico, Ann Lindell, Tara T. Cataldo

Charleston Library Conference

Academic libraries face many opportunities and challenges in managing, marketing, and measuring open resources (OR). Many questions arise when incorporating OR into an academic library collection. How do libraries select quality OR for inclusion in the collection? What tools and practices are used to manage electronic access? How can libraries better market OR to faculty? How can libraries measure the use and usefulness of OR? This paper outlines a project launched to improve the management of OR at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries; as well as incorporating feedback garnered at the Charleston Conference discussion forum on the …

Changing The Conversation: Using Agile Approaches To Develop And Assess Collections Holistically, Genya O'Gara, Cheryl Duncan

Charleston Library Conference

In 2013–2014, James Madison University (JMU) Libraries embarked on an endeavor to create a flexible, holistic model for developing, managing, and assessing collections. The effort began by surveying what qualitative and quantitative data was being collected that could inform big‐picture questions about whether library collections were meeting evolving campus research needs. The investigation included an in‐depth literature review, the launch, evaluation, and adoption of several pilot projects, and ultimately the construction of an evaluation rubric and disciplinary subject snapshots that articulate both the impact of collections and potential gaps within them at institutional and departmental levels.

In order to remain …

Engrossed, Enraged, Engaged: Empowering Faculty In Transforming Scholarly Communication, Jen Waller, Jennifer W. Bazeley

Charleston Library Conference

Librarians are deeply invested in the scholarly publishing lifecycle. This investment, in tandem with an evolving scholarly communication system, has encouraged librarians to become advocates for transformation in this landscape. At the same time, some faculty members have been slower to understand the complexities of the current system and its evolution. At Miami University, traditional communication methods weren’t sufficient to meaningfully engage faculty in these evolving trends. As a response, several librarians designed and cofacilitated two Scholarly Communication Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) for two academic years. These FLCs have been the most successful method of increasing faculty understanding about scholarly …