Today my place of work had an inter-library workshop on Scholarly Communication. Yay!! So, in the spirit of professional development reporting, here are my notes:
- Molly Keener kicked off with an explanation of the committee and workshop.
- The material (podcast, links, etc) will be on the library website.
- Molly and Sarah Jeong gave an introduction to scholarly communications.
- Defining scholarly communication: “the process through which researchers and faculty worldwide find, build, disseminate and collect now information.
- Papers, presentations, posters, as well as blogs, wikis, data sets, what faculty produce in the classroom with students
- Need to not only think of scholarly communications only in terms of what the library can collect, but also in a broader sense.
- Crisis in scholarly communication: skyrocketing journals pricing, growing number of resources/growing number of researchers/rising costs of materials/some decrease in funds, scholarly communication is still heavily tied to tenure and review
- Core set=highest impact (those that tenure track must publish in)
- Journal cost rising more quickly than CPI.
- We’re often charged more for electronic journals.
- Shouldn’t be complacent with status quo… calling for us to disseminate information
- Changes: publisher mergers, shift to electronic resources and licensing, course websites/CMS/e-reserves, copyright management, calls to revise and strengthen peer-review, new publishing and full-text archiving
- Sarah Jeong gave an overview of open access
- OA is digital, online, freely available, and free of many restrictions
- Dates back to 1990 with Bryn Mawr Classical Review. (Interesting that it’s a humanities publication!!)
- Stovan Harnad recommended self archiving.
- Discussed Gold, Green, and Hybrid OA.
- Molly continued with recent developments
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute agreed to cover costs for their researchers who wanted to publish in OA journals.
- NIH Public Access Policy of 2008 requires that journal articles produced as result of NIH funding must be freely available in PubMed Central.
- Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously voted to make their research available freely through Harvard’s soon-to-be created repository.
- WFU Libraries are working on creating an institutional repository and Reynolda campus fund for paying open access publication fees.
- Q&A
- Open Access fees: Interestingness that some disciplines have to pay huge costs to publish their work, others might even get paid a little bit to publish.
- Misconception that open access is not peer reviewed. Smacks of vanity publishing. But it’s not…. open access can be peer reviewed and accepted for traditional publication.
- Pointed out scientists have a good reason to negotiate for open access due to NIH. Perhaps an ethical argument would be helpful for humanities and social sciences.
- Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University, spoke on Copyright Management for Scholarly Publication.
- We are experts in dissemination of scholarship and use of digital resources.
- Usually the de facto copyright experts on campus.
- Librarians have history of reading IP licenses in acquisitions, which is helpful for OA.
- We have a chance to help define our future. Scholarship is going online. We can create our place in the scholarly process.
- Copyright, digital access, and business models for publishing are all under debate.
- Librarians can help authors understand their rights and retain them.
- Can improve quality by making it more usable, getting higher impact.
- OA can improve a work’s ability to be cited, commented on, and interconnected with other works.
- Studies show that OA improves impact and improves it sooner than traditional publishing.
- Most OA Journals are peer reviewed.
- Copyright really protects publishers, but publishers will say it’s for the author.
- Discussed a “copyright shower” we feel as we put notes to paper (or type on a computer)
- Could make an argument that scholarly publication is a work-for-hire since it’s done as part of the paying job, but many universities state it belongs to the faculty member. This means faculty have to negotiate their own contract.
- No one else is going to help faculty understand what they’re signing away when publishing. We need to do it.
- Most publication agreements are now modified to allow faculty to retain certain rights, but they’re not all the same. Must read each one.
- He walked us through a clause with a generous rights retention policy as well as a clause that restricts authors rights retention.
- OA is the library’s problem: when author signs away copyright without knowing it, they may be unable to contribute to repository even if required.
- Need derivative work…. most faculty do this. Either building on former writing or creating a monograph.
- Non compete clauses limit authors ability to continue producing within the field.
- Journals get the content for free. In some ways we have the upper hand. We can negotiate with them as an academic community.
- NIH actually says deposit upon acceptance. This could be way before publication.
- Things Duke has done to help with NIH compliance: created a submission letter notifying of NIH requirements and contract addendum with NIH requirements.
- And he wrapped up with Creative Commons (fabulous)!
- Creative Commons protects our faculty better than our copyright system. This is because it protects attribution. Helps build reputation and recognition.
- Q&A
- The way to go is to help faculty understand this is good for them, not to mandate it.
- Marian Parker concluded the session with a session on Institutional Repositories
- IRs exist to collect content in a single location, self-archive, and to store and preserve institutional digital assets including grey literature.
- Who is doing what: directory, columbia, cornell, duke law, rice, vanderbilt
- IRs are joint projects between libraries, office of sponsored research, IT, faculty
- What is included? Just final products of faculty scholarly publications? Professors’ class materials? Websites?
- Open Source options: DSpace, ePrints, Fedora; Proprietary options (which seems antithetical): CONTENTdm, DigiTool
- Technical Issues: Interoperability & extensibility, digital objects & metadata, ingest & maintenance
- Q&A
- Still sounds like there are a lot of policy decisions to make. Those will be interesting discussions!
Fabulous workshop! Thanks to Molly and the committee for the opportunity!