Caitlin Carter is the Scholarly Communication and Open Access Policy Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University Welch Medical Library.  She recently took part in our “Five Questions” series to tell us about her role. 

1. Describe your current scholcomm position?
My current position is the Scholarly Communication and Open Access Policy Fellow at Welch Medical Library. Welch is part of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine. I work closely with Robin Sinn who coordinates the Office of Scholarly Communication from the Homewood campus, while I’m based on the medical campus. We are both funded out of the Hopkins President’s Office for two years to socialize the new (as of July 2018) faculty-wide Open Access Policy. I also teach Welch classes about publishing and author resources, and I help plan and run events dedicated to the changing scholarly publishing landscape like the role of preprints for medical and health researchers.

2. What attracted you to scholcomm work?
Leaving my full time job at an IT government contractor to pursue a degree in library science was a hard choice, but one I don’t regret. When I started my program, I was attracted to academia, but I was not sure what form of librarianship I wanted to pursue. When I got a graduate assistantship at the University of Maryland working on the digital repository, helping to make research open access, I discovered the value (and definition of) green open access. This discovery then led me down a rabbit hole where I learned and explored the history of and changes happening within scholarly publishing.

3. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I’m humbled by the fact that working at Hopkins means I have access to a lot of, often, well-funded researchers conducting high-level research. The most rewarding part is that I am encouraging, and, hopefully, making it easier for these researchers to make their research openly accessible to others. When I find faculty allies to encourage peers to share research, it is even more rewarding.  Something I find similarly rewarding is working with early career researchers and graduate students who are navigating the publishing landscape and looking for ways to improve publishing and mentoring processes.

4. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the scholcomm ecosystem, what would it be?
It’s easy for me to think of many large-scale ways the scholarly ecosystem could be revamped: removing journal titles and impact factor from faculty tenure/promotion processes, ensuring open access research is the default everywhere, and diverting library budgets from support for Big Deals or Read and Publish agreements to instead support open infrastructure.  However, because I have to pick one thing, I’m going to go with a small change that would make my day-to-day a little easier: if I had a magic wand, I’d change the perception some have that open access publishing equates to a pay-to-publish model. Heather Joseph (Executive Director, SPARC) came to campus during Open Access Week and discussed how article processing charges (APCs) bake the inequities into the publishing system, and it resonated with me. It can be easy to write off open access journals because of APCs, which not all journals have and not all researchers can pay for when they do. I try to communicate the nuances of open access publishing by describing the many ways researchers can make work open access without paying. When authors or institutions are asked to pay to publish their work, I can see how well-funded institutions and researchers are privileged, and it creates a less equitable and accessible research environment for everyone.

5. If you were not a scholcomm librarian, what would you be?
I have always liked studying what makes people operate the way they do, and helping others navigate through life situations. If I had to choose an alternative career in an alternative universe, I think I would be a psychologist. In my context, I think the better way to answer is: if not a librarian, and had I been better at biology, chemistry, and statistics, I would be a psychologist.

Ellen Catz Ramsey, Virgo Project Lead and Director, Scholarly Repository Services; University of Virginia Library

This is #12 in our series of get-acquainted posts featuring members of the ASERL Scholarly Communications community.

1. Describe your current scholcomm position.
I came to the University of Virginia Library in 2013 to manage the University’s institutional repository, known as Libra. That one-person department was responsible for defining policies and facilitating deposits that would result in more open access to UVA research products. Fast-forward five years and UVA now has a cohort whose portfolios intersect with scholarly communication from several angles. I direct Scholarly Repository Services, which includes repositories for a variety of born-local content. My colleague Sherry Lake stewards data, ETD, and open deposits into Libra, with help on the public services front from Trillian Hosticka and on the digitization side from Lorrie Chisholm. Above and beyond the repository, Chip German and Brandon Butler cover advocacy, education, and outreach about alternative publishing models, among their many other duties beyond scholcomm. Dave Ghamandi heads our new open publishing initiative, Aperio. Hanni Nabahe just joined us as our early career resident librarian in scholcomm, and I am trying not to jade her too much. However, if you believe Dorothea Salo (and I do), scholarly communication librarianship can be a long and lonely road. With the energy of my colleagues bringing new perspectives to UVA scholarly communication priorities, I am taking on new responsibilities leading evaluation, selection, and implementation of an updated discovery layer (e.g. online catalog) for UVA. While that last bit might seem an unusual direction, I have a green light from our library administration to prioritize and highlight worldwide access to UVA resources, as well as the leveraging of open content, as UVA evaluates its participation in big subscription deals.

2. What attracted you to scholcomm work?
Doesn’t everyone want to change the world? I came to the academic library side of things from the health sciences library world, where open science and access to publicly-funded research have been important topics for a long time. Transferring those interests to a broader range of disciplines seemed like a natural evolution. I probably also like tilting at windmills.

3. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Social justice aspirations for equitable access to knowledge, as well as the challenge of accomplishing meaningful change from inside of the bureaucracy of a large state institution, keep me engaged. Also that no one cares if I knit during meetings.

4. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the scholcomm ecosystem, what would it be?
It definitely seems in the realm of magic for a sustainable revenue model to emerge that works for institutions, scholars, and publishers. You can’t change the scholarly rewards system without changing the publishing industry, and vice versa. Laura, Andy, Kevin,  Brandon, and so many others have spoken far more eloquently on this topic in many open forums.

5. If you were NOT a scholcomm librarian, what would you be?
I’m not sure I really am a scholcomm librarian, though the work I have done for the last several years has certainly been focused on opening access to scholarship born at my institution. Most of the time at work, I am a software and service project manager, open source community member, and unit director. When I am not doing those things, I am exploring near and far destinations with my spouse, parenting a teenager and two dogs, and being a mountain biker, knitter, and curious person.

Marian Taliaferro, Digital Scholarship Librarian, College of William and Mary Libraries

This is #11 in our series of get-acquainted posts featuring members of the ASERL Scholarly Communications community.

Q1. Describe your current scholcomm position
While my title is technically Digital Scholarship Librarian, my role is all about scholarly communications — promoting and creating a strategy for the institutional repository, W&M ScholarWorks, educating the campus community on academic publishing, open access initiatives (including OER) and  intellectual property issues; and also fostering connections between information literacy and scholarly communications.

Q2. What attracted you to scholcomm work?
My interest started pretty early in my career — in 2005, with a library director who was hugely influential on my path to learning about open access publishing and all that goes along with it. She was the driving force behind a campus-wide conference on OA and building library support for it. My interest continued when I worked at a non-profit (Association of American Medical Colleges), which gave me exposure to several aspects of scholarly communication. I served a supporting role in their path to adopting a hybrid model for their peer-review journal, Academic Medicine. My role also provided general library support for the journal editorial staff and I became familiar with their workflows and concerns in publishing. I even served as a peer reviewer for the journal. At AAMC, I also witnessed the ‘birth’ of MedEdPORTAL, an open access medical education curricular tools repository.  From the get-go, MedEdPORTAL used Creative Commons licenses, and I worked as a core staff person in its development. It was also at AAMC that staff increasingly wanted to demonstrate impacts of their publications, so I began delivering metrics on publication usage and initiated and collaborated with Publications staff to investigate altmetrics tools for the Association’s publications. Finally, it was my role to procure copyright permissions for the Association and so I became familiar with educating staff on copyright and fair use. Overall, I think what most attracted me to scholarly communications work was the win-win aspect of it — leveraging my librarian skill sets for helping faculty and researchers make their work more discoverable and garnering increased impact for it, while also appreciating the publishing side of the equation from a non-profit society’s perspective. It seems a key, demonstrable success for libraries to partner with their campus communities in this way.

Q3. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I have to pick just one? For me, it’s always the connections with people that are most rewarding. As anyone reading this blog realizes, copyright is very unclear to most people, so it’s gratifying to be a guide or resource for them in making things more understandable. I enjoy speaking with graduate students about fair use, licensing and embargoes; helping faculty with author agreements and learning about Open Education Resources (OERs) and serving to publish some pretty amazing electronic theses and dissertations (ETD’s).  ETDs are hugely impactful for our students and soon alumni —  we have a large retrospective conversion project rollout and campaign on the books for OA Week. I’m also enjoying helping to grow William & Mary’s scholarly communications program via creating and expanding research guides, making firmer establishments in research data management support services, and also rebranding and relaunching our institutional repository, newly renamed W&M ScholarWorks and a new design debuting soon.

Q4. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the scholcomm ecosystem, what would it be?
That faculty were more aware of how their promotion & tenure practices play into the larger publication ecosystem. It would be great if it were incredibly easy to bridge the barriers to budgetary transparency associated with providing collections in support of research and scholarship. I think that’s probably high on every librarian’s list!

Q5. If you were not a scholcomm librarian, what would you be?
Depending on the day, in no particular order and perhaps mostly if I became aware of a heretofore secret trust fund: Persian rug trader, estate jewelry sales/gemologist, helicopter pilot or landscaper… It’s probably a good thing I went the library route.

Jennifer Solomon, Open Access Librarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries

This is #11 in our series of get-acquainted posts featuring members of the ASERL Scholarly Communications community.

1. Describe your current scholcomm position.
I am currently the Open Access (OA) Librarian in the Office of Scholarly Communications at UNC Libraries. This is a newly created position in a small department, so I work on many different aspects within Schol Comm. One of my primary roles is to lead the outreach and communication initiatives for the UNC Faculty Council’s Open Access Policy implementation, which so far has included collaborating with a marketing firm on a campaign for OA awareness and authors’ rights, developing faculty and graduate student competencies in OA, and establishing connections with UNC departments to deposit materials in the Carolina Digital Repository. I also frequently get to work with (TRLN) Scholarly Communications colleagues to support cross-institutional programs and events.

2. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
That depends on the day! Over the past month, I have had several opportunities to visit department meetings and have been blown away by the interest from the faculty. I have also been meeting with several graduate students in the UNC School of Information and Library Science and we’re cooking up some very exciting plans for OA in the fall.

3. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the scholcomm ecosystem, what would it be?
Imposter syndrome. From librarians, to faculty, to students, to publishers, I have so many conversations with people that stem from their fears about being a fraud. Sometimes this prevents people from asking for help, sharing their accomplishments, or even discussing ideas with potential collaborators. My magic wand would cast a spell for an open and transparent environment in which scholarship and the people who produce it, use it, access it, make it discoverable, and preserve it can do their work without so much anxiety.

4. If you were NOT a scholcomm librarian, what would you be?
A career counselor! Throughout my own career I have worked in many different industries and I’m fascinated by emerging careers and changing workplace cultures. I love helping people to think about the type of work they want to do and how their previous experience and interests have prepared them to take on new challenges.

NOTE:  The authors are seeking input from schol-comm practitioners about their roles and responsibilities via this online survey, which closes June 15, 2018.

The following is a guest post authored by co-Principal Investigators Maria Bonn, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences; Josh Bolick, University of Kansas Libraries; and William Cross, North Carolina State University Libraries.

Sometime in 2016, through a mix of happenstance, initiative, friendly referrals and pure good luck, the three of us began a series of email and telephone conversations in which we puzzled over whether new LIS professionals are being adequately prepared for roles in academic libraries in which they will support scholarly communication in all its permutations.

We are each engaged in such work and bring different perspectives and experience to it, from the trenches of our present and past positions, as instructors, as recent students, as job applicants and hiring committee members. It is increasingly evident that awareness, proficiency, and even fluency in scholarly communication issues is central to the work of academic librarians across institutional type and department. Academic library job postings calling for scholarly communication specialists — or at least for candidates who are well versed in those issues — have been steadily accumulating for some years now. LIS curricular offerings, however, haven’t yet evolved with this shift in the market. Reflecting on this and on conversations with our colleagues, our strong sense is that most new librarians are not well-versed, or even versed at all, in the skills that support scholarly communication: understanding copyright and fair use, open licensing, academic publishing norms, the complexities of peer review, the emergence of open education and data management as focus areas, and so on.

Why the skill and education gap? The lack of scholcomm offerings in LIS programs might be due in part to LIS faculty not being themselves comfortable with the contemporary skills needed to navigate the complexity of scholarly communication. There’s also no core educational resource dedicated to developing such skills, no common text that covers scholarly communication as a wide-ranging and rapidly-developing field. This presents an opportunity, so we began to consider the design and development of an open educational resource about scholarly communication librarianship, through which we hope to make a meaningful intervention in our field.

With the generous support of IMLS, we have undertaken a research project to learn how scholcomm workers understand and articulate the practice of scholarly communication librarianship and how we, the community of practice, might have a larger role in preparing our future colleagues for scholcomm work. This research has been underway since the beginning of 2018 and continues apace. While gathering input and data on stakeholders like LIS faculty and students is extremely important, we always knew that we would be best informed by the perspectives and experiences of our community of practice, by hearing from those who do the everyday work of partnering with and supporting scholars who are the primary agents in scholarly communication.

So, as we library professionals do, in early April we had a meeting (agenda).

We brought together almost forty folks with significant experience and investment in scholarly communication, from high-level administrators to new scholarly communication librarians in the first few years of their careers. We gathered in the open, pleasant spaces of the Hunt Library at NCSU and over conference tables and tacos and on whiteboards and sticky notes.  We worked together to define the skills, values, and the stakes of scholarly communication and how to best infuse those through the library profession. We shared experiences, frustrations, ambitions, and ice cream.  These two days of effort scoped the content, audience, and purpose for an OER of scholarly communication librarianship.

There were few quiet moments and no dull ones. Arising from the rich experiential base in the room were stories that provided practical advice, words of warning, and visions for a future in which the academy supports its members in developing and managing scholarship that has broad impact and social benefit. We discussed data management, scholarly identity, metrics of all types, varieties of licensing, mechanisms for open peer review, building prestige for library based publishing, how social justice intersects with these things, and so much more. Invited participants Sarah Hare,  Ali Versluis and Lillian Rigling generously put their experience and intelligence together before the unconference and created a design thinking workshop that inspired and directed us all in building learning objectives for our proposed OER. Amidst this variety, themes emerged and became threads that tied the conversations together.

Kevin Smith, Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, and Heather Joseph, SPARC Executive Director, opened our conversations by calling for those of us who work in scholarly communication to get better at telling our stories, at sharing in a compelling way, what we do and why it matters. Storytelling was a fulcrum of the two days. Sometimes we need to tell stories to our scholars, sometimes to our university administrators, or to our colleagues in the library, even to our friends and families. Whomever the audience, we need the language and evidence that make a compelling case for our work. We frequently came around to reminding ourselves that are many kinds of stories to tell — as many stories as there are scholars — representing all kinds of personal, institutional, and disciplinary identities.

These stories facilitate connections, creating shared understanding and goals. The importance of these connections, of relationships, was another leitmotif of the meeting. The importance of soft skills which are central to developing rewarding relationships, such as confidence, empathy, and a sense of timing, loomed large. For the library community to maximally support scholarly communication, it must do so in the context of a web of relationships, with scholars seasoned and new, with policy makers and government officials, with university administrators, with colleagues at one’s own institution and within a community of practice, and with a public that increasingly may not understand what we do, what value we add (in libraries and the academy more broadly). Interested readers should also see #LISOER on Twitter and this reflection by Molly Keener, who was in attendance.

As is often the case when a community of practice gets together, the appreciation of and desire for our community of practice was palpable. As this reflection was being drafted, the twitter stream from the Library Publishing Forum 2018 was alive with the mention of “community.”

Clearly the yearning for ongoing community was not idiosyncratic to our meeting. As meeting organizers and participants, we experienced the same appreciation meaningful professional connection. We also observed a community that is clearly and impressively developing, populated by professionals keenly aware of each others’ skills and expertise, and eager to be part of a shared project to maintain and improve the systems through which we share scholarship. If you’re a member of this community, if you work on scholcomm topics in libraries, we’d love your input via this survey, which closes June 15, 2018. If you want to learn more about our project, reach out to any of us directly via email, Twitter, or one of the many conferences we’re presenting on this and related work.

Jason Burton, Lead STEM librarian, University of Mississippi

This is #9 in our series of get-acquainted posts featuring members of the ASERL Scholarly Communications community.

Q1. Describe your current scholcomm position.
The University of Mississippi does not have a scholarly communications department, so the work is distributed. I am our Lead STEM Librarian, but I am also the convener of our Open Access Discussion Group, lead our nascent open science efforts, and work closely with our Collections Strategist on open access issues and alternative models of supporting research. In addition I am actively involved in our data management program.

Q2. What attracted you to scholcomm work?
I am interested in the mechanics of academic research. I quickly realized that the choices researchers made in how to communicate their work was one of the more fascinating parts of the research process.

Q3. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Helping researchers expand their idea of what libraries and librarians can help them achieve. The library isn’t always the first place that researchers think to go when they are trying to figure out how to write a data management plan that explains how they are going to share their microscopy data.

Q4. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the scholcomm ecosystem, what would it be?
Since magic was mentioned, complete and total open access. I think the combination of funder-required public access and the expansion of university open access mandates makes this more reality than magic every day.

Q5. If you were NOT a scholcomm librarian, what would you be?
I started my librarian career working in occupation safety and health and could have moved towards public health as a career. Walking around oil rigs and fishing boats was a lot of fun.

Robin Sinn, Coordinator, Office of Scholarly Communication, Johns Hopkins University Libraries

This is #8 in our series of get-acquainted posts featuring members of the ASERL Scholarly Communications community.

Q1. Describe your current scholcomm position.
I am the new (as of January) Coordinator of the Office of Scholarly Communication, so I’m still figuring this out. I am also the sole person in this office. This opportunity came to me because for several years I’ve been the chair of the JHU libraries Scholarly Communication Group. Members come from across the Hopkins libraries (which are more like a consortium than a system). We work on issues dealing with copyright, open access, intellectual property, tools and resources we think the libraries need, education and outreach, even some policy. This work hasn’t been very programmatic up until now because my primary job was as a STEM liaison librarian. All the members have their own primary jobs. This new role will allow me to focus on scholarly communication and grow a program. I’ve got a great group of people to work with. Now it’s time to do some serious planning and get to work.

Q2. What attracted you to scholcomm work?
In the early 2000s I remember wondering why researchers weren’t starting their own journals, since the web was obviously going to make that possible. I watched the early OA movement develop with great interest. When I got to Hopkins, I became part of the Scholarly Communication Group and eventually its chair. It’s exciting to provide researchers and students with information that allows them to share their work in new ways.

Q3. What is the most rewarding part of your job?
I enjoy being a consultant on a project and bringing basic library tools as well as an understanding of the publishing/copyright environment to a discussion. The amount of innovative work that is going on in labs and classes is astounding. They need someone who can help them with the dissemination side of their work.

Q4. If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the scholcomm ecosystem, what would it be?
I’ll echo Dave Hansen: We need a separate copyright environment for academic work. And I’d like the infrastructure for the credit and attribution to be a shared priority. I’m thinking of things like ORCID , GRID  CReDIT , and the like.

Q5. If you were NOT a scholcomm librarian, what would you be?
I think I’d like to work in a small special library; that would allow me a broad scope of action. My first official librarian job was Public Services Librarian at the library of the Academy of Nature Sciences http://www.ansp.org/research/library/ in Philadelphia and I enjoyed that immensely. Outside of librarianship? I love houseplants and was just joking with my husband that my retirement job could be taking care of the plants in office buildings.

By Corinne Guimont, Anita Walz and Beth Bernhardt

Virginia Tech and UNC Greensboro are two of nine founding members of the Open Textbook Network Publishing Cooperative, a pilot program launched by the Open Textbook Network (OTN) in 2017. The goal of the Cooperative is to create a network of higher education institutions committed to publishing new, openly licensed textbooks.

The pilot will last for a period of three years. During that time, each member institution will build expertise by training a designated project manager who can then establish publishing workflow and processes tailored to the particular needs of that institution. After the training is complete, each project manager will have the tools necessary to oversee a minimum of two new open textbooks as they move from conception to publication. At the completion of the three-year period, the nine members of the Publishing Cooperative will have collectively published at least two dozen new, freely available textbooks with Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licenses.

Virginia Tech’s goal in participating in this pilot is to build our publishing capacity and expertise specifically in the area of Open Educational Resources (OER) as part of our broader library publishing program, VT Publishing. We joined the Co-Op because of the opportunities for learning, collaboration, and professional development within a cohort of other institutions. VT Libraries is prepared to invest up to $22,000 into the program over the next three years, in addition to staff time. Funds will pay for author stipends, peer reviewer honoraria, and to supplement in-house technical and publishing expertise. We hope to create and share many more open textbooks with the world.

For Virginia Tech the program will expand its Open Education Faculty Initiative Grant program, started in 2016, which provides technical assistance and grants for creation or adaptation, public dissemination, and classroom use of openly licensed resources of various kinds. Previous open textbooks published from this program include Fundamentals of Business (2016) by Stephen J. Skripak and a newly released Beta Version of Electromagnetics (2018) by Steven W. Ellingson which is being field tested and will be revised and released with its LaTeX source code in Summer 2018.

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/78735
[see cover credits below] 

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961
[see cover credits below]

In addition to Fundamentals of Business’ over 80,000 worldwide downloads, these books along with other open educational resources adopted by faculty at Virginia Tech have saved 3,000+ Virginia Tech students more than $785,000 in course material costs in 18 months.

UNC Greensboro decided to join the Cooperative to provide faculty members the opportunity to create an open textbook for their courses. Martin Halbert, Dean of University Libraries, when asked why UNC Greensboro joined the cooperative stated, “This is a critically important time for the transformation of scholarly communication, and new models for the production of openly accessible educational resources are central to successfully establishing a sustainable new ecology of higher education learning.” The Office of the Provost and the University Libraries have committed $10,000 and staffing towards the project. The funds will be given as two $5000 stipends to faculty that receive funding. The funds will be distributed in two parts, $2500 at the beginning and $2500 when the open textbook is complete. Staff have been attending a 9 week training from the OTN on publishing platforms. UNC Greensboro will send out a call for proposals for the two grants in March 2018 and announce the winners by the beginning of May 2018. The University Libraries will provide the faculty with training on software to help create these textbooks.

Founding members of the OTN Publishing Cooperative include: Miami University, Penn State University, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, University of Cincinnati, University of Connecticut, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Virginia Tech, and West Hills Community College District (CA).

About the Open Textbook Network: The Open Textbook Network (OTN) is a community working to improve education through open education, with members representing over 600 higher education institutions. OTN institutions have saved students more than $8.5 million by implementing open education programs, and empowered faculty with the flexibility to customize course content to meet students’ learning needs.

Cover credit for Electromagnetics, Vol 1 Beta: Robert Browder
Cover image attribution: (c) Michelle Yost. Total Internal Reflection is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license (cropped by Robert Browder)

Cover credit for Fundamentals of Business: Trevor Finney
Cover image attributions: “Hong Kong Skyscrapers” by Estial, cropped and modified by Trevor Finney CC BY-SA 4.0; “Paris vue d’ensemble tour Eiffel” by Taxiarchos228, cropped and modified by Poke2001 and Trevor Finney CC BY 3.0; “London Bridge” by Skitterphoto, cropped and modified by Trevor Finney, Public Domain; “New York” by Mscamilaalmeida, cropped and modified by Trevor Finney, Public Domain.