Category: Events

Scholarly Communication: From Understanding to Engagement

ACRL Delaware Valley Chapter Spring 2019 Program

April 26, 2019 at Penn State Great Valley

Session Reports

On a spring morning, librarians gathered at the Penn State Great Valley campus to engage in the interactive ACRL National, Scholarly Communications RoadShow. The workshop was led by two expert presenters, Carla Myers, Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Scholarly Communications of Miami University Libraries, and Will Cross, Director of the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center of North Carolina State University. The workshop started with an introduction to the field of scholarly communications and copyright.

Afterwards, lunch commenced! When lunch was finished, the business meeting was held. President Jess Denke and Vice President Stefani Gomez discussed opportunities for members to participate in chapter activities including the mentoring program, resume review, social committee, board, and new Open Scholarship/OER learning community. The mentorship relationships that have been established by the chapter over the past year are going well. The resume review is ongoing. Jess also announced a $5 increase in membership dues annually and provided opportunity for comment from attendees. This increase is an attempt to provide financial stability to the chapter while increasing equitable access to membership. This year the chapter has extended free membership to students and first-year librarians.

In the afternoon, the presenters focused deeply on OER and accessibility. Presenters prompted discussion and facilitated interactive learning activities throughout the day. If you would like to take a look at live tweets from attendees, follow the hashtag #acrldvcspring19 on Twitter.

Here are brief summaries of what was shared during the workshop with links to the presenters’ slides.

Introduction

Will started the day framing the big issues surrounding scholarly communication in the field. He began by stating that scholarly communication should be a part in every job description because it is something that all librarians do in some way, shape or form.
All areas of library work fit into scholarly communication from acquisition and content licensing to discovery and access for all. He explained that scholarly communication can be thought of as a system of interconnected systems starting with a research idea, moving into the creation of a research project, formulating ideas and findings that can be shared for replication and testing and then resulting in a final published format to again be shared and made discover-able to the larger community.

Will highlighted the fact that throughout the scholarly communication process we see various pressures applied to those engaged in scholarly communication. For example, “prestige publishing”or publishing in the “right” journals is a form of social pressure faculty encounter when up for tenure review.   These “prestige” publications also exert economic pressures on library budgets struggling to afford subscriptions to these high priced publications and on researchers who may not have access through a library and are faced with expensive article charges. Additional pressures within the scholarly communication process include both technological and policy related.   Scholarly publications have been slow to change from the print model which was time consuming and priced according to physical publication requirements. The digital world has made the production, reproduction, and publication process much quicker and easier but more difficult for traditional publishers to wrangle. This leads us to the questions: “Are the prestige journals still needed if research results can be published much quicker and easier to GitHub for example? ” and  “How do researchers meet scholarly communication policy pressures – for example open access mandates? “. These are all issues researchers, publishers and librarians are grappling when it comes to dealing with scholarly communications. These same pressures also present opportunities for change within the scholarly communication system. New publishing models have come about and in some cases expanded standards for tenure review (i.e. the acceptance of blog postings as published works.)   

→View presenters’ introduction slides.

Copyright

In the morning, Carla talked in depth about issues of copyright. First, she reviewed the basics of copyright. Carla covered what is copyrightable and not copyrightable; what rights are granted to copyright owners; who owns copyright; how long copyright lasts; and a whole host of exceptions, including Fair Use. She also discussed licensing works and different types of licenses, as well as publication agreements.

Accessibility

In the afternoon, Carla spoke in depth about the need for accessible content and systems for our patrons who are living with disabilities or may need assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to utilize library materials. She touched on the following points:

• We are all responsible for accessibility in scholarly communication.
• Content that has accessibility baked in, also known as universal design, is better for everyone.   
• If accessibility is part of the content creation process then there is little need for time consuming and expensive remediation processes.   
• An analogy to curb cuts is often made when explaining the benefit of universal design. While originally implemented to accommodate wheelchairs, curb cuts are beneficial to many different people including those pushing strollers or shopping carts or those riding bikes.  
• Accessible content can be utilized by screen readers for those with low or no vision but also by patrons who prefer listening to content or those in need of a temporary accommodation, for example someone suffering from a concussion.
• Video captions are useful not just to those who are hearing impaired but to those who learn better visually or in cases of those learning a new language captions can prove to be invaluable learning tool.   
• Standards to be aware of include the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – WCAG 2.0, section 508 and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

→View presenter’s slides.

Open Scholarship and Open Educational Resources

In the afternoon, Will led attendees in a discussion on Open Education Resources (OER)—from textbooks to isolated resources—such as single exercises—to entire open courses. Will defined OER as free, educational resources but those still requiring permission to use them—like any copyrighted materials. This tied in nicely with Carla’s discussion of various licensing agreements, including Creative Commons licenses. Will discussed the advantages of open education resources, as well as potential barriers (and incentives) to their use and creation.

→ View presenter’s slides.

Thank you to everyone who attended the program, as well as Carla, Will and the board for making the program a success!