Happy Belated Birthday to Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge!

It’s been a while! We’re still here and still in the thick of the work of scholarly communication librarianship. Way back in October of 2023, we shared that Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, the book that began and underpins our collaboration, hit the streets and the shelves…er, the repositories and websites? The open edition was live on the ALA Store and in the ACRL Open Access Books site, where it still lives, and print copies were for sale (by our own choice, we receive no revenue from print sales).

We also told you that “for now, we are trying to take it a bit slower, savor reaching this point, and reflect on lessons learned so far. We also have ideas for moving forward and building on the work so far . . .” We have, indeed, savored the completion of the book and, for now, the completion of the work of The Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN), and we have savored the continuing connections with so many smart and valued colleagues that the book helped us to establish, nurture and sustain.

As our friends in publishing, particularly book publishing, know, publishers have a practice of a “birthday party” – a meeting to review the performance, in terms of both sales and impact, around the first anniversary of a book’s publication. We’re a little late, but we wanted to have our own little birthday party for Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge.

We checked in with our publisher, ACRL, and asked our wonderful editor, Erin Nevius, how things look from her perspective. She enthusiastically reported “everything looks good from our seats! You’ve sold 146 copies of the print book and it’s likely to reprint in early 2025, which is really exciting. For an open access book or any book, that’s right when we want to see it needed.” Sadly, we lost quite a bit of the click data on the OA edition, but Erin is confident that “it’s many thousands by now.”

It’s been exciting to see our book generate reviews from our colleagues in the field. In The Journal of Scholarly Communication Librarianship Jonathan Grunert says that the book is a bit of a tome (this is sort of a, ahem, theme throughout the reviews) and praises its attention to scholarly communication issues. We are especially pleased that he calls out our “deft” assembly of contributors”, because bringing those contributors together feels like our greatest accomplishment in creating the book. Most heartwarming of all is that Grunert notes “what is most impressive about the book is the extent to which the editors ensure that the volume practices the values it contains.” Doing just that is an important personal and professional value for us, and we’re so glad that someone noticed.

Mahrya Burnett, in her review in College and Research Libraries, observes that the book “provides both the contextual information, and the practical skills and resources necessary for a deep, multi-faceted understanding of scholcomm and all it entails.” Burnett also notes that authors (we believe throughout, not just us) “have written about complex topics in a conversational and engaging manner, avoiding the terminology soup that can sometimes plague writing about scholcomm.” Alongside building an amazing group of contributors and striving to walk our talk, these are goals we applied ourselves to.

Another reviewer, Brad Eden, in his (paywalled, unfortunately) review in The Journal of Web Librarianship took exception with one place where we interjected our values into our discussion. In the introductory section we have a playful discussion of the difficulty of assigning first authorship to such a highly collaborative work. He declares it “silly.” We’d stick to our guns on this one: we need to recognize the tensions in an environment where first authorship is the coin of the realm and collaboration is essential. We’re grateful for the reviewer’s careful reading and that they found the book to have “many great ideas and content.”

Roxanne Missingham weighed in from The Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association (also paywalled, unfortunately). Roxanne warns that the book is “not a light read.” Boy howdy, do we know! Our many contributors had so many smart things to say on so many important topics that keeping the page count low would have been quite a challenge. We welcome that the review says “if you are new to scholcomm you will get an overview” and appropriately cautions “albeit from an unashamedly US perspective.” As we continue our work, we would love to cross more borders and expand to a more global perspective. We are thrilled that the reviewer calls our book “a genuinely fascinating experiment in scholarly writing.” One of the reasons an open license is valuable is the possibility of customizing to local context, though that requires someone to take it on. Admittedly, no small task.

Even better, Kayla Del Biondo, in a review in Library Resources and Technical Services says that we “wonderfully humanize the scholarly publishing landscape and open science movement.” This is high praise, and that praise must be shared with our contributors who are the ones that add those human voices to our book. Biondo concludes that the book is “fun and captivating!” We’ve known all along that scholarly communication librarianship is fun (it is, right?). We’re glad we can convince others likewise!

The reviews are very gratifying. People are reading our book! They have opinions!! Just as exciting has been the interest it has generated in the field. The book is a work of scholarship, but our intent has always been to reach, teach and support practitioners; both people currently working in scholarly communication and those who might do so.

The publication of the book, and the attention it has drawn, led to two wonderful opportunities to connect with our community. We partnered with SPARC this past late summer – early fall on the OA101 Series: Foundations for OA Work in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape. Four sessions were provided: OA Basics, OA Case Studies, Emerging Issues in OA, and Frequently Asked Questions re: OA. Each session had 800-1000 registrants and 300-400 attendees, and the recordings (linked from series page) have hundreds of views. The idea for the series emerged in conversations with Nick Shockey, who contacted us because SPARC was hearing from library deans and directors that they had a need for training that isn’t currently being met. We think the positive response in terms of attendance and feedback confirms that need. It was great to be given a chance to help meet it. We’re presently talking with SPARC about future offerings in this series and will share info about that when we know it.

We were delighted when the Scholarly Communication Caucus of the Medical Library Association reached out to tell us they had chosen Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge as the text for their fall reading group. While we wrote to be accessible for a generalist audience, it was wonderful to see specialists in one field engaging with the book to learn more about scholarly communication in their own work. Throughout the fall, we joined dozens of the caucus members online for five engaging sessions coordinated by Karen Gutzman, Yingting Zhang, and Kim Powell. We hope the participants came away with a deeper sense of many issues at play in scholarly communication. We certainly learned a lot about their experiences and perspectives.

We’ve also gotten occasional kind words of appreciation from colleagues in the field. One librarian wrote to tell us “I’ve recommended that opening portion of your book to several of my more junior colleagues as the essential primer on scholarly communication.” Since this was EXACTLY the role we hope the book will serve, this may be the best review of all.

We think the print book is very handsome, and the content is relevant and important. But it’s still two dimensional (as books and pdfs tend to be). There are more pictures, videos, recordings, charts and graphs that would make the content so much richer, and, we hope, more engaging. We’ve always talked about developing a full digital edition that takes advantage of the affordances of online delivery. It’s about time that we did more than talk. So, in the coming year, we’re planning on turning our attention to that digital edition. We’d love to hear ideas for ways to make it both educational and engaging.

If you have been a part of our work, or learned from it, critiqued it, and/or read this far, we appreciate you. In the midst of a lot of fear and uncertainty, we hope you’re hanging in there.

Maria, Will, and Josh

March 4, 2024

Celebrating Open Ed Week with Regina Gong

Dr. Regina Gong was the curator of the Open Education Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook. Before her current role as Associate Dean for Student Success and Diversity in Copley Library at the University of San Diego, she led open education programs at Michigan State University, and before that, at Lansing Community College. If you’ve been working in the OER space for long, you know Regina’s work, and if you aren’t familiar, you really should be. She is deeply knowledgeable, experienced, and infectiously enthusiastic. We have welcomed every opportunity to work with Regina, who also contributed to the Open Education Section of Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge. She’s also, very deservedly, a LJ ‘23 Mover & Shaker. Below, Regina shares information about the collection of materials she curated. Essentially, it’s OER about OER. For clarity, the Open Education Collection is a catchall of resources that are endorsed by the SCN and bear the tag, “Open Education.” Regina focused her effort in the related Scholarly Communication Notebook Group folder structure in order to ease navigation. The top folder is called “OER (Overview).”

Introduction

OER Commons is a rich resource which hosts a plethora of resources that provide an overview and introduction to open educational resources (OER) and related practices. Faculty, teachers, librarians, instructional designers, academic staff, administrators, and students from different institutions and organizations create, remix, and share these materials to support teaching and learning. These resources available allow for a better understanding and clarity about OER and demonstrate how these materials can be used and adapted for teaching and learning. However, the volume of materials, along with the many facets available to filter the results for relevancy, can be overwhelming, especially for those who may not be familiar with OER. For library and information science (LIS) students and others just starting to learn about open educational content and practices, the SCN is a jumping off point to explore and discover open education as well as the community of people who create these materials as tools for empowerment. Indeed, this is an invitation to expand our knowledge, awareness, and commitment to open education for the public good.

Overview of the Collection

The collection consists of materials that introduce OER and provide a deeper dive into the issues that propelled the rise of these openly licensed teaching and learning materials. The Overview folder provides a starting point for learning the basics of OER, what it can do to improve learning, and how educators can use these materials in the classroom. In this section, you will find a number of toolkits, starter kits, and quick-start guides geared towards specific groups such as librarians, faculty, students, and administrators, among others. It is then subdivided into folders as follows:

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA): Open education is often framed as a way to democratize knowledge, access, and opportunities for all learners. Equity and social justice are the pillars of ensuring that OER lives up to its promise of empowerment and freedom. In this section, the emphasis is on foregrounding OER as more than just free and affordable materials. It is curated to bring together a critical perspective on open education and how it can advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. Resources in this section are interdisciplinary and include works by authors in the United States as well as internationally-created materials. Here, you will find reports, toolkits, templates, and rubrics that guide educators and learners to intentionally incorporate DEIA in their courses, curriculums, syllabi, and assessments. It is not limited to postsecondary education but also includes materials relevant to K-12 educators.
OER Advocacy: A crucial part of OER work is advocacy and the ability to rally key decision-makers to support initiatives. This section provides information on advocating for OER as a student and librarian.
Open Licensing: Open licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses put the “open” in OER. Understanding these licenses and how they can be used to share materials with the world is crucial. This section comprises full courses and modules that discuss how these licenses work. The goal is to provide not just an understanding of Creative Commons licenses but to use it to demonstrate the affordances and freedom that OER enables.
Open Pedagogy: Open pedagogy or open educational practices are a body of activities that build on the opportunity of openly licensed content. For many educators, these practices are a core benefit of engaging with OER. This section consists of materials that demonstrate how this is done in real-life educational settings.
Open Textbooks: Open textbooks represent the majority of OER that are utilized and adopted by educators and learners. This section provides guidance on creating, modifying, and publishing open textbooks. Authoring with students and information about the peer review process that can be used to publish open textbooks round up this section.

Areas of Strengths

The scholarly corpus that makes up the open education field has been increasing since OER was first introduced in 2002. One area of strength is the availability of materials in all formats that provides an introduction and overview of OER. There are a lot of toolkits, guides, handouts, templates, and rubrics that address the many facets of running an OER program, including advocacy and publishing. A growing area of strength is open pedagogy and DEIA. This collection represents that strength since an emerging focus on equity and social justice has gained ground within the field. Open education practitioners have started to realize the value proposition of OER as a liberatory way to challenge knowledge creation and representation.

Areas of Improvement

An area that needs to be strengthened is one that all open education advocates should strive for: representation and inclusion. The materials available on open education and OER are predominantly Western-centric, specifically from the U.S. and Canada. This is not to say that there is a lack of materials about open education and OER from countries outside of North America. The issue is that those materials are not frequently cited, recommended, or referred to. For example, several materials from OER Africa, Europe, and the Global South are not represented in the major repositories (including OER Commons), which has serious implications for their discovery. As curator of this section, it was challenging to find these materials, so I intentionally added them as a resource in OER Commons so that the SCN could endorse them. While it is impossible to curate everything and be everywhere all at once, it is critical that we, as librarians and information professionals, practice what we preach. It is an ongoing effort to ensure that LIS students and emerging OER professionals learn about open education from as many perspectives, worldviews, and positionalities that make up this global community. This collection is a start, and hopefully, it will grow to include and represent the diverse voices waiting to be heard and discovered.

If you are aware of openly licensed materials about open education, here’s how they can be added to the Scholarly Communication Notebook.

November 8, 2023

What a Fall!

About 6 weeks ago, we announced that Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, the book that has been the core of our collaboration, was off to the printers. Since then, a lot has happened!

The open edition went live on the ALA Store and in the ACRL Open Access Books site in late September, just in time for a pre-conference we provided at the ALISE Conference in Milwaukee (cool city!), where we had a supportive and interested audience. There, we talked about open content as a bridge to practice in LIS instruction.

While we were at ALISE, our print copies arrived at our homes, so we got to hold them in our hands for the first time. Really exciting!

Triptych of Maria, Josh, and Will each holding their copy of Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge (book).

Since then, each of our institutions have issued a press release (UIUC, NCSU, KU). To our delighted surprise, Nick Shockey opened the ACRL/SPARC Forum (recording) with a very generous announcement about the book, and we were invited to write a short piece for ALA’s I Love Libraries blog about OA as an antidote to misinfo and disinfo. That was especially fun because we got to use a lot of horror references. Related: our friends at the Open Library of the Humanities wrote a similarly themed post that is very worth reading. Towards the end of October, our editor let us know that the digital/open version of the book had already been viewed “a whopping 1570 times” in just a month, which is great!

For now, we are trying to take it a bit slower, savor reaching this point, and reflect on lessons learned so far. We also have ideas for moving forward and building on the work so far, so that will be a focus in the new year. Thank you to everyone who contributed, who provided suggestions and supported us to reach this point together. We’re so proud of what we have collectively accomplished, and look forward to building on our success so far!

Maria, Will, and Josh