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OER+SC Project Report 2023

Summary

This report provides background and present status on a collaboration that has resulted in an open textbook and a corpus of additional open teaching and learning materials scoped to scholarly communication topics. It concludes with next steps, calls to action, and our appreciation for everyone who supported us and partnered with us to do this work.

This report prepared by Bonn, Cross, and Bolick is licensed CC-BY and also available as a Google Doc.

Background

Our work originated in the recognition that scholarly communication topics are of increasing importance in academic libraries and that open education (one of the growing areas of scholarly communication librarianship) presents a promising opportunity to address the observed gap between formal instruction and practice. Specifically, we imagined an open textbook scoped to scholarly communication librarianship and its topical areas. We outlined our early conception in an Against the Grain article in 2017, “Community Led Teaching and Learning: Designing an Open Educational Resource for Scholarly Communication and Legal Issues.”

In order to support this work we were awarded an IMLS planning grant in 2017 (LG-72-17-0132-17), enabling stakeholder research (with LIS instructors and with field-based practitioners) and outreach. We presented this research in a poster at the ALISE Conference in 2018 and published an article reporting on practitioner research in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication in 2020, “Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties and Training.”

The planning grant also supported an invitational gathering in Raleigh, NC, in April 2018. One of the outcomes of that gathering was a growing realization that an open book alone was not sufficient to support the increase in teaching of scholarly communication topics. While useful, or perhaps essential, the relatively static format of “book” is inherently limited. It can only feature so many contributors and perspectives. It’s linear and relatively fixed; a benefit of our book’s being an OER is the legal ability to update and adapt the book, but the technical ability and labor involved in doing so aren’t insubstantial. Scholarly communication work is highly dynamic, which books tend not to be. What we realized was that the book would be more relevant and useful if it were supported by a companion platform of openly licensed, modular, curated, and contributed content that can reflect essentially limitless points of view, ideas, and practices as they change and evolve.

We were awarded an IMLS project grant (LG-36-19-0021-19) to develop these materials alongside and in conjunction with the textbook. Looking to the Open Pedagogy Notebook as a model, we called our project the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN. We selected ISKME OER Commons as the host platform and developed strategies for populating it with content.

More information about the open book and the SCN is provided below.

The Book

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

is an openly-licensed introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and the issues that work often addresses. It has been  developed by the lead editorial team of Maria, Will, and Josh, with section editors and other contributors. The book will be published in print and digitally under a CC-BY-NC license by ACRL in 2023. While it was conceived as an open textbook of scholarly communication librarianship, we hope it will be a vehicle to increase instruction on these topics in LIS programs more generally, as well as serve as a resource for continuing education. The idea of the book was the cornerstone of our initial collaboration, and we’ve discussed it with a myriad of valued colleagues and mentors whose feedback helped to shape it.

The book consists of three Parts (working Table of Contents). Part 1, written by Bonn, Cross, and Bolick, defines scholarly communication and scholarly communication librarianship. It provides an introduction to the social, economic, technological, and political/legal backgrounds that underpin and shape scholarly communication work in libraries.

In Part 2, we’re privileged to work with four amazing section editors, each developing their topical section on different permutations and practices of open and working with contributors of their choosing. Part 2 begins with an introduction to “open”, broadly conceived, followed by a section each on open access (edited by Amy Buckland), open education (edited by Lillian Hogendoorn), open data (edited by Brianna Marshall), and open science and infrastructure (edited by Micah Vandegrift). Part 3 consists of concise perspectives, intersections, and case studies from practicing librarians and closely related stakeholders.

A CFP for Part 3 was issued in November 2019, and closed in mid-January 2020, with 26 proposals selected and developed in consultation with the editors. We hope these will stimulate discussion and reflection on theory and implications for practice. Some section editors chose to make their materials available for open peer review, which we facilitated through our project site, Google Docs, and Twitter, and received excellent feedback. We are grateful to those who participated in that process.

This text can provide a foundation for LIS courses that center scholarly communication topics, or supplement other curricular areas as they intersect with scholarly communication. Excerpts from the book have been field tested in two sections of the Scholarly Communication course at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (UIUC) and in an Academic Librarianship course, also at UIUC. We have a short list of LIS instructors ready to pilot selections from the book in the fall of 2023 including Dr. Bradley Hemminger at UNC Chapel Hill and Chris Hollister at the University at Buffalo, and we’re eager to learn from their experience and that of their students.

In addition to print and digital availability through ACRL and its distribution channels, the book will be available in the Scholarly Communication Notebook, on our project site, and in appropriate disciplinary and open education repositories. All contributors will be encouraged to deposit their contribution in their institutional repositories and elsewhere as they see fit. Thanks to ACRL’s ready consent to the open license, thus enabling sharing, it should not be difficult to find.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge can be easily excerpted and adapted according to the needs of students and instructors. It is an openly-licensed and freely-available text, so instructors can download relevant sections and share them through learning management systems and other means of course delivery, or they can link to any online version. Discussion questions and suggested further readings are generally provided to help prompt individual and class-wide reflection on the material and stimulate further inquiry and argument.

In keeping with the principles and practices of open access, open education, and open pedagogy, we encourage users, particularly instructors and their students, to actively engage in updating and distributing the material in the textbook to make it relevant for their own contexts and learning and to benefit diverse audiences with a range of related interests and experience. Editable files will be made available upon publication to aid adaptation.

The Scholarly Communication Notebook

Many of the resources in the Scholarly Communication Notebook complement and align with sections of the open textbook. The SCN has collections relevant for teaching about copyright, open access, research data management, and open education, for instance; all topics in the textbook. Instructors are encouraged to explore the book and SCN in tandem to discover ways in which the OER offers opportunities for active classroom engagement to help process and apply the extended exposition and argument in the textbook. As we work to realize adoption and use of both the SCN and the book, we will be developing a teacher’s guide to support and inspire alignment of these two complementary resources.

The Scholarly Communication Notebook is a repository of community-designed and curated open resources for teaching about scholarly communication and for doing scholarly communication work in libraries. It may be used as a complement to the open textbook described above, or as a standalone collection of resources. The SCN is hosted as a Hub in ISKME OER Commons, which was selected for ease of use, existing features and support, and being a widely known repository of OER. We intend the SCN to be the locus of an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians, where practitioners, LIS educators, and library students can create and share relevant content together in the spirit of mutual support and benefit.

We identified seven topical collections: Open Access, Copyright, Scholarly Sharing, Open Education, Data, Impact Measurement, and What/Why Scholarly Communication. Each collection includes a short description in the collection header. For example, the Scholarly Sharing collection “contains materials regarding author rights, institutional and subject repositories, library publishing, and related issues.” As these topical areas often intersect, some resources are listed in more than one collection as appropriate. As of June 2023, there are over 200 SCN-endorsed items indexed across these collections.

The SCN was populated with content through two primary strategies. First, with funding from IMLS, we issued three calls for proposals: in September 2020, May 2021, and October 2021. In each round, we accepted 10-12 projects, for a total of 35 newly created open resources scoped to teaching and learning about topics in scholarly communication. Creators were paid $2,500 (per project) in recognition of their labor. Each resulting project is deposited to the relevant collections in the SCN and promoted through a news post on our project site and through the SCN Twitter account, with encouragement to creators to share in their own social and professional networks. All of the projects released so far can be viewed by searching “New to the SCN” on the News page of the project site.

Second, we named curators for the collections, experts in those areas, to scan the environment for existing openly licensed content appropriate to our purpose. The curators identified a majority of the items indexed in the SCN. Again, each curator was paid for their work, and each will produce a short overview “environmental scan” and a news post about their work. For example, curator of the Open Access Collection, Jill Cirasella’s post about the collection, Which Open is Which?, was published during Open Access Week 2022. Sara Benson, curator of the Copyright Collection, authored a post for Fair Use Week 2023, highlighting the content of that collection. Additional posts will be published and shared as they are ready.

The SCN is intended to support, educate and represent a diversifying workforce of LIS professionals. It is designed to extend social justice values to all participants by intentionally and thoughtfully reflecting the broad range of people, institution types, and service models engaged in scholarly communication work. Anyone is welcome to use and contribute openly licensed content to the SCN. If you’re a practitioner, the SCN hosts content that may contribute to your professional development or library instruction. If you’re an LIS professor, the SCN is full of resources created by practitioners for use in the classroom or curated with that purpose in mind. Open pedagogy can be a method for creating authentic assignments through which LIS students might contribute knowledge to the SCN. The SCN is in a phase of active development and evolution, so content (instructions for contributing content) and feedback are very welcome.

In June 2023 we invited our community of collaborators to a second convening to review all work done on the project and discuss next steps. We hosted two virtual meetings, inviting those who attended the 2018 meeting at NC State all book contributors, and all SCN contributors to attend the session that best aligned with their schedule.

In addition to general updates, Nick Shockey from SPARC generously spoke to the value and importance of our collective work and to addressing needs that SPARC sees from its vantage. We shared a draft of this report and used breakout discussions to invite community participation and feedback on the project. In the first meeting, the breakouts were organized around the following issues: connecting to education, connecting to practice, emerging issues, and ongoing engagement. We are grateful to Brianna Marshall, A.J. Boston, and Christopher Hollister for their assistance facilitating these sessions. Of the roughly 150 folks invited, about half attended one of the two sessions and, as ever, generated great discussion and ideas.

It’s not necessary to replicate those discussions here, but several themes and topics were strongly represented. There was much discussion of community roles and engagement, we think evidence of related desires to contribute and to have opportunities to discuss issues with peers through lunch and learn, training opportunities, and communities of practice and the like. Many attendees stressed the continued need to address DEI in our work and in our communities. Other visible issues included AI in scholarly communication, anticipating and reacting to the OSTP Nelson Memo, concern about data brokering practices (user privacy, surveillance), and transformative agreements/APCs. Notes from the first meeting are here, and the second meeting here. Slides are also available. Thanks to everyone who attended and contributed to these rich discussions! We will continue to reflect on the issues and ideas raised, and seek community input.

Findings and Next Steps

After six years of work on this project we have found that the OER+SC project is an effective model for bridging classroom education and practice in the field. The legal permissions, technical access, and community-driven connection built into open education remove significant barriers and facilitate more authentic connections. This bridge, which has been identified as a clear need for the field, offers significant benefits for LIS students and faculty, for practitioners, and for the field’s ongoing turn towards openness and inclusion.

In order to realize this opportunity, we have gathered and supported the development of a critical mass of open materials. With this community, we are cultivating a clear agenda for ongoing development that fills gaps in the existing corpus. We have seen significant interest in and uptake of these early materials. Blog posts sharing new resources have been met with enthusiastic responses and individual resources have been taken up and used in classrooms and in the field. In addition, the SCN itself has been used successfully in graduate courses, and we are launching wider use in three leading courses in the fall of 2023.

Finally, it is clear that this project will be sustainable if, and only if, it is taken up broadly by the LIS community. While we have been able to develop the core intellectual and technical infrastructure with support from IMLS, the SCN will only remain up to date and relevant if practitioners continue to draw from and add their own materials to the resource. Likewise, the resource will only be valuable if learners – both current students and those looking to stay up to date in the field – recognize the SCN as a valuable resource for their education. The SCN has the potential to refresh our understanding of this quickly-evolving field and to center the diverse set of approaches necessary for scholarly communication to live up to its highest goals. In order to set this virtuous cycle in motion several concrete steps must be completed.

Next Steps

The first, and perhaps most critical, step for this project will be to assure that the SCN is adopted broadly in classrooms across LIS. Faculty should be aware of and adopt the textbook in part or in full, as best-suits their pedagogical needs. Because it is openly-licensed, we hope that faculty instructors will be empowered to easily incorporate the parts that work for them and change or replace the pieces that do not. We are now developing plans for an online edition that will be free and include more graphical elements, as well as offering space for incorporating audio/video content and ancillary materials such as slide decks, quiz banks, and so forth. We are partnering with three leading scholarly communication instructors to pilot the textbook and share their own materials and approaches to using in their upcoming courses.

We are also encouraging them to explore the SCN to discover new resources as they are developed and to facilitate a model of open pedagogy that supports renewable assignments by developing materials that can be shared with their peers and act as a portfolio once they enter the job market. Libraries and library students have seen clear benefits from developing materials for the Notebook and we hope to share these examples and support wider adoption of these pedagogies going forward. We recently had an ALISE Academy proposal accepted, for delivery in Fall 2023, which will use the SCN as a model for teaching LIS faculty about open educational resources and practices.

In addition to this work focused on integration with LIS education, we also plan to support integration in practitioner training. The textbook and SCN can be significant resources for practitioners skilling up or adding scholarly communication responsibilities to their portfolio. We hope to raise awareness of this opportunity in professional venues in the coming year. We also intend to develop models for offering recognition and professional credit for developing materials for the SCN. We have already seen some expected reputational advantages to contributing a popular, high-quality resource, and we understand that those must be accompanied by more concrete incentives that are tied to professional advancement, recognition in the field, and so forth.

As we conclude this phase of our work, it is clear that library and information science needs open materials and open pedagogies. Open resources remove barriers of cost that make LIS less accessible and inclusive. Open practices and infrastructure can bridge classroom and practice work in ways that make the field more impactful and sustainable. We have clear evidence of successful use of open education in scholarly communication courses and will continue to expand that effort to a wider set of courses in the coming years. The field as a whole has a great opportunity to extend these benefits to other areas, from core courses such as reference and cataloging to emerging areas. We hope graduate programs, academic libraries, and academic institutions will take up this opportunity.

Finally, this work has taken a village of thoughtful, critical, generous, kind, and intelligent people. While we are at the helm of this community, we recognize and emphasize a majority of the content related to the project has been created or collected by the community of practice. We are and will remain deeply indebted to and appreciative of every contributor. We are proud to be a part of this awesome collective.

If you have suggestions, want to talk, or questions, please get in touch with us!

Maria Bonn, mbonn@illinois.edu

Will Cross, wmcross@ncsu.edu

Josh Bolick, jbolick@ku.edu

 

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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.

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New to the SCN: Introduction to Open Education (Instructional Materials) 

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 materials for an “Introduction to Open Education” course (available via Google Drive, and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Sarah Hare, Open Education Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington and Ali Versluis, Acting Head, Research & Scholarship Team at the University of Guelph. They describe the course as “providing an intensive opportunity to become conversant in foundational topics related to open education.” By the end of the course, students will be able to define and explain core concepts related to open education. They will be able to identify resources used to find and create OER and will be familiar with methods for evaluating relevance and suitability. Learners will also be able to identify key stakeholders and craft meaningful, persuasive pitches that will resonate with these individuals. Students will critically engage with the open education movement, tackling issues such as underrepresented voices, accessibility, and labor.

Here are Sarah and Ali to introduce their course:

In 2018, we created and taught a week-long, intensive course at the FORCE 11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) in collaboration with our colleague Lillian Hogendoorn. The course, titled The Basics and Beyond: Developing a Critical, Community-Based Approach to Open Education, focused on introducing open education to novices while also moving beyond foundational concepts to delve into more complex issues, devoting significant amounts of time to interrogating the purported values of the open education movement, as well as our own values as practitioners. The FSCI iteration of the course was well-received by participants, who greatly appreciated the mixture of discussion and hands-on activities. Given this, we felt confident that the resulting syllabus, slides, and activities could be utilized in other contexts or as informal learning objects for library professionals interested in open education.

The OER about Open Education (meta!) that we are sharing in the SCN is a revised version of that FSCI course. While the original FSCI course was 15 hours of synchronous instruction, we have edited the content to be more modular. Concepts or pieces can be reconfigured or adapted to fit other contexts, including workshops, trainings, and online instruction. The first three days of the course provide a foundation by defining OER and Creative Commons, delineating differences between affordable course material solutions and OER, exploring various OER repositories and evaluation tools, and learning about open pedagogy models. The fourth day of the course uses this foundation to explore and interrogate more complex issues, including labor, technocracy, accessibility, openwashing, and the intersection between privacy and openness. We have structured the content so that anyone with some background in scholarly communication (but perhaps no familiarity with open education) is able to learn from the resources firsthand or efficiently adapt them to teach a Library and Information Science course that covers these topics. Speaker notes included in the slide decks give instructors ideas for how to cover the content, as well as guidance for facilitating activities.

There are five activities embedded within the slide decks and listed in a separate document for instructors to adapt to their context. These include:

  1. CC-BY-NDebate: This activity requires students to apply their understanding of the 5 Rs and Creative Commons and construct their own personal stance on ‘how open does open have to be?’ Instead of applying a general rule about whether CC-BY-ND does/does not qualify as an OER, the activity emphasizes the messiness inherent in OER work and the difficulty in striking a balance between advocating for open and respecting creators’ decisions about how to share their work.
  2. Campus mapping: Students create a visual representation of opportunities and potential partners on their campus through a series of guiding prompts. After completing each stage, they are asked to reflect on the map holistically,  considering what this might mean for partnerships, technology, funding, and promotion for open education efforts.
  3. Finding OER: Students assess OER repositories by exploring a specific topic in more detail. After searching for resources in a variety of formats, students reflect on what was challenging, what gaps existed, and how they might teach others to find OER.
  4. Ethical considerations of open pedagogy: After learning about the benefits and considerations inherent in doing open pedagogy work, students break into groups to discuss a question together and then come back as a group for larger consensus building.
  5. Critical reflection and statement of praxis: Throughout the lecture on critical issues, students are prompted to reflect on why, how, and for whom they support OER. Students then compose a brief statement of praxis to guide their open education efforts, after which they work in pairs to help each other refine their statement. A sample statement is provided.

We also include some instructional strategies that we used successfully and tips for integrating them based on context. We hope that these materials will help LIS students and practitioners learn more about open education and become familiar with associated critical topics in order to facilitate relevant, nuanced conversations in the future.

About the Authors

Sarah Hare is the Open Education Librarian at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Sarah leads IU’s Course Material Fellowship Program (CMFP), which supports and incentivizes instructors to adopt affordable course materials. Her research centers on OER, library publishing,  and information access and privilege.

Ali Versluis (she / hers) is currently the Acting Head of the Research & Scholarship Team at the University of Guelph, which resides on the ancestral lands of the Attawandaron people and the current treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. Prior to running point on strategic and operational matters for the R&S Team, Ali was an Open Educational Resources Librarian. She tweets half-baked thoughts, organized labor wins, and vociferous appreciation for the Toronto Raptors @aliversluis.

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Happy Open Education Week from the SCN Team!

It’s Open Education Week, which is a great chance to highlight the Open Education Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN). If you’re new to the SCN, welcome! Here’s some background about the SCN and its relationship with an open book to be published later this year by ACRL; that book also includes a section on open education with some of the smartest contributors in the landscape.

It’s also International Women’s Day, so take a moment and reflect on the leadership of women around the world who’ve contributed to the growth of open education and every other aspect of our lives. We can think of numerous women who inspire us daily, many of whom we’re lucky enough to have worked with. Thank you.

If you’re new to open education, it’s your lucky day, or week, as there are lots of opportunities to learn about open educational resources (OER) and related practices, including in the SCN. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) describes open education as encompassing “resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment.” The resources SPARC refers to are often called open educational resources, or OER. Creative Commons defines OER as “teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”

In the SCN, you’ll find an Open Education Collection that includes lots of general and specific resources about open education, some foundational and others that explore more advanced issues. These resources are themselves open, so they’re OER about open education. Some of these projects were created with the direct support of the SCN, like “OER for LIS: Toolkit for Building and OER Librarian Course” by Steven Bell, “Trans Inclusion in OER” by Stephen Krueger and Kat Klement, and “OER Community of Learning” by the Scholarly Communication Team at Texas State University Libraries. Others have been added by our wonderful friend and colleague, Regina Gong, who is a widely, nay, universally respected leader in open education. As the Curator for the Open Education Collection in the SCN, Regina scanned the landscape to identify open content that is useful for teaching and learning about OER and open educational practices. She built the collection to nearly 50 resources (at time of publication) that LIS instructors, students, librarians, and allies in other roles might use to learn more about open education and how they can advance it. Regina has built a great collection that we’re confident will continue to grow. If you know of something that isn’t there but should be, here are instructions for adding content to the SCN.

We hope you’ll take this week as an opportunity to learn something about open education and to celebrate the impact it has had and continues to have! In a few weeks, the SCN team is convening in Inverness, Scotland for OER23, where we’re presenting on our work (session: More than a Textbook: Librarianship as a Case Study for Building a Community and Opening Up A Discipline; full program). We’re excited to see friends and make new ones!

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Happy Fair Use Week! Check out the Copyright and Fair Use Resources in the SCN

Happy Fair Use and Fair Dealing Week! Fair use is an essential tool enabling creativity and scholarship. We build on the works of others when we create something new and without fair use, much of that creativity would be stifled due to the inability to afford licensing fees, inability to determine the correct copyright owner (in the case of orphan works), or, in some cases, when the copyright owner simply refuses to grant permission (wherein fair use is still justified, thankfully). This is not just any Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week . . . this is the 10th Anniversary of the celebration of Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week! This is the perfect time to highlight the Copyright Collection in the Scholarly Communication Notebook. And who better to tell you about the collection than Sara Benson, Associate Professor and Copyright Librarian at the University of Illinois Library, who curated the collection of open access works about copyright in the collection.

The task was no small one: to gather relevant openly licensed works about copyright that would be relevant to library and information science students and professionals. While this sounds easy enough, there are not as many truly open access works as I would have liked (works with an open license in addition to being paywall free) and some of the works are aimed at K-12 audiences while others are aimed more at law school students.

I think I managed to find a good balance of works, including these open access fair use resources:

One of my favorite copyright tools of all time, though, and not to be missed, is affectionately called the Peter Hirtle “copyright chart” or, officially named: the Copyright Term and the Public Domain Chart. This tool is essential to my daily work as a copyright librarian. Whenever I have a question about an older book, I look at this chart to help me determine whether it is still in copyright. Published in 1945? Missing a copyright notice? It’s in the public domain! Related hat tip to the great work librarians are doing at NYPL, who recently found that up to 75% of books published before 1964 may be in the public domain due to formalities required at the time (VICE coverage by Claire Woodcock).

I encourage you to check out the many open resources about copyright included in the SCN collection. If you’re the creator of something that belongs here, or you’re aware of a resource that could be included, we’d love to know! If you’re interested in adding it yourself, here are detailed instructions. And, exercise your right to fair use!