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.

September 13, 2023

New to the SCN: Introduction to the Library’s Institutional Repository for Scholarly Communications

Today we’re excited to share “Introduction to the Library’s Institutional Repository for Scholarly Communications” (available via Pressbooks and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Dr. Jennifer Beamer and Sumayyah Jewell. Institutional repositories, or IRs, are at an interesting point in their development and use. Here is Jennifer to introduce their work:

In 2020, Jennifer and Sumayyah began refreshing the nearly 10-year-old institutional repository at the Claremont Colleges Library. Our goal was to start creating documentation about the foundational concepts that we wanted our colleagues to know about. As we were both strong advocates of new and soon-to-be librarians we talked many times about how learning about repositories in library school would be a great idea. So we created a simple guide of how institutional repositories operate within our library. We began documenting the actors and processes of the institutional repository while at the same time internally educating our staff, librarians, and leadership on how our campus’s students, faculty, and staff were interacting with the repository. There are four main areas we have addressed: Libraries and the Institutional Repository, Contents of the Library Repository, Labor and the Library Repository, and Organizations that Support the Library Institutional Repository. At the end of each chapter, there are a few brief questions for exploring and diving deeper into the content presented.

We chose to create a Pressbook in the hopes that we can add more content in the future and possibly case studies. We would love others to get in touch with us and give us feedback on our simple content to date. We realize that it’s a basic introduction for now. This resource is meant for librarians and library students – especially those who may be new to scholarly communication and or have no experience with institutional repositories. It presents how library workers are thinking as they undertake open-access publishing, manage institutional repositories, and assemble digital collections. The simplicity of the current version was well received internally. The feedback thus far has been that it is a good start and more content would be welcome. Please email Jennifer (jenniferb@claremont.edu) with any feedback.

About the Authors

Jennifer Beamer is the Head of Scholarly Communication and Open Publishing Services at The Claremont Colleges, a liberal arts college consortium comprised of seven colleges in Southern California. She believes in the library’s open publishing program by building collaborative relationships with partners from within the Library and across the campuses. Additionally, Jennifer provides leadership, outreach, and education on the scholarly communication ecosystem, including open access advocacy, open science practices, open educational resources, copyright and fair use, and research impact.

Sumayyah Jewell is the Digital Preservation Archivist at the Leonard Cohen Family Trust in Los Angeles, and a future Librarian. She is passionate about facilitating the discoverability and preservation of knowledge. Sumayyah’s areas of expertise include practical experience in reference, scholarly communications, digital asset and repository management, digital preservation, community archives, resource sharing, and open access scholarship.

September 7, 2023

You Can Only Cook with What’s in the Pantry

Editors’ Note: This post is by AJ Boston, Curator of the Scholarly Sharing Collection of the Scholarly Communication Notebook and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Murray State University. AJ is an innovative and often entertaining colleague that we’ve been thrilled to work alongside. We’re always interested in what AJ thinks, so it’s a pleasure to share this post.

In November 2022, I sent Will, Maria, and Josh (SCN leads) a report on over forty items that I spent time considering for the Scholarly Sharing Collection in the SCN. This collection is intended to host materials about authors’ rights, institutional and subject repositories, library publishing, and closely related topics. Like Jill Cirasella (curator of the Open Access Collection), I kept asking myself “which of [these] open resources are open educational resources?” Many of the relevant objects I came across on OER Commons weren’t what I consider OER per se. Because of the narrow way in which I chose to define OER, the collection you see as of today is not overwhelmingly large.

Examples of objects that are both open and relevant included things like research articles (at PLOS, Frontiers, etc.), general websites (Think. Check. Submit; figshare; Pressbooks), or links to metadata records of unarchived past presentations. While these objects can form the basis for education in a classroom, they aren’t really what I would consider to be pedagogical in themselves, in the same way you wouldn’t expect to see “egg” or “flour” listed on a restaurant menu. These are raw ingredients.

There’s good stuff out there not included in this collection that would make great additions. Everyone who teaches a scholarly communication course has a whole semester’s worth of content that could be adapted. I know this firsthand, because I built many assignments from scratch for a (non-LIS) scholarly communication course this past fall, and have so far not adapted and made them open. Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this project is just what a challenge that time can be for faculty interested in building and sharing OER. I’ve always heard this anecdotally to be the case, but now I have the “thick” understanding of experience.

I’ve been weighing in my head whether editing my assignments for a wider audience is going to be worth the time and effort. As Josh counseled me on this point, I won’t know until I know. In fact, this is the case for everything that we do in scholarship. Writing papers, delivering presentations, making closed things open: we won’t really know what needs that our efforts may meet until we make the effort.

At the start of this post, I noted there are objects in OER Commons that are open, but not yet what I consider to be pedagogical. I myself have created pedagogical objects, but have so far chosen to keep them closed. How can I be a proper advocate for open if I don’t practice what I preach? So, should I spend some time this year adapting my materials? Laying the case out like this makes the choice look clear. Maybe this resonates with some of you. Let me know. Maybe the 2023-24 academic year can be our ‘adapt-a-thon’ year.

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023

New to the SCN: Making OER with and for PreK12

This is the latest post in a series announcing resources created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN. The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholcomm topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019, permitting us to pay creators for their labor while building a solid initial collection. These works are the result of one of three calls for proposals (our first CFP was issued in fall 2020; the second in late spring ‘21, and the third in late fall 2021).Today we’re excited to share “Making Open Educational Resources with and for PreK12” (available via Pressbooks and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Anita Walz and Dr. Julee Farley, both of Virginia Tech. As we collectively look to expand collaborations between higher ed and PreK12 educators, and to support the creation of open content for that environment, it’s important that we engage in knowledge and respectful ways. Here are Anita and Julee, adapted from the resource, to introduce their work:

Higher education and PreK12 are vastly different domains. Well-intended, collaborative relationships do not always result in hoped-for creation of useful and reusable learning materials for PreK12 classrooms, nor of effective partnerships. This toolkit is designed to address known gaps in knowledge and practice which limit the development of generative relationship-building processes between higher education faculty and PreK12 educators. The toolkit is intended to prepare and position practicing and future academic librarians and interested higher education faculty, staff, and students consulting with librarians to address these gaps related to outreach to PreK12, and expand use and re-usability of learning resources through informed practices regarding copyright, open-licensing, and accessibility. Designed for use in formal graduate-level library and information science courses and relevant for self-study by academic librarians already in practice, this toolkit includes videos, presentations, transcripts, activities, guides, assignments, and assessment tools for learning and delivery by librarians to faculty and students in higher education, and for use by interested instructional designers, other faculty, staff, and graduate students seeking to improve their service to PreK12 educators.

Introduction

Higher education has a long history of outreach, sharing, and collaboration with formal PreK12 education. Some attempts have been more successful than others. In sharing this openly-licensed toolkit and the curriculum resources within, we hope to raise the success rate of partnerships initiated by higher education in service to and collaboration with PreK12 administrators and teachers, expand the number of healthy, sustainable partnerships between higher education and PreK12, and broaden the availability of usable, customizable, open educational resources created with and for for PreK12 teaching environments.

Origins of the Toolkit

This curriculum guide and toolkit originated from a series of consultations between the authors, a Higher Ed – PreK12 liaison, and an open education and copyright librarian. It initially culminated in a series of documents including curator and OER contributor checklists, release forms, and contributor agreements developed to support university students and faculty to create and share open educational resources. We presented this work at the Open Education Conference 2021 under the title “Boundary Spanners: Bridging Gaps Between Higher Education and PreK12.” After our presentation, we decided to pursue more formal documentation of the project and its resources. In our search for a publication venue, we realized that the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN), a resource for training graduate students, especially those enrolled in library and information science programs, may be a natural fit for developing the types of skills librarians and others in higher education need to assist others in forming respectful, informed, and productive working relationships with PreK12 audiences.

What is the Toolkit?

The openly-licensed toolkit includes editable course materials — readings, slides and presentation transcripts, sample communication templates, assignments and partnership evaluation forms — intended for self-study and mediated graduate and undergraduate instruction. The toolkit covers diverse areas of knowledge in a linear progression, including working with minors, educational standards-related issues, copyright, open-licensing, and acceptable uses of third-party works, communication skills, empowering teachers to provide their expertise, and adapting and sharing openly-licensed works. Each section of the toolkit contains presentations or readings, and either self-assessment or reflection questions. Some sections contain communication templates and customizable forms.

This toolkit is designed for higher education faculty and librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, and undergraduates who aspire themselves — or to assist others — in building respectful and productive outreach relationships with PreK12 teachers, and to create relevant open educational resources for use within the PreK12 context.

We’d love to hear about interest and use, and receive feedback! Here’s a form for providing that if you’d like: https://bit.ly/interest_hek12.

About the Authors

Anita Walz

is the Assistant Director of Open Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian at Virginia Tech where she founded and oversees the Open Education Initiative and OER grant program. She actively supports instructor adaptation, creation, and public sharing of open educational resources of various formats, including open textbooks, primary source collections, and emerging formats for learning resources such as interactive calculators and virtual reality animals. She holds a masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has worked in government, international, school, and academic libraries for the past 21 years.

Julee Farley, Ph.D., is a boundary spanner and evaluator whose work focuses on increased access and equity for under-resourced populations. She works with PreK-16 educators and researchers to create mutually beneficial research-practice partnerships, research impactful interventions, and design inspirational outreach and engagement experiences. Julee began this project while working at the Center for Educational Networks and Impacts at Virginia Tech; go to juleefarley.com for more recent updates about her work.