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How to Add Content to the Scholarly Communication Notebook

The Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN) is a hub of open teaching and learning content scoped to topics directly relevant to scholarly communication librarianship, such as copyright, open access, open education, open data, scholarly sharing, and research impact. Presently available formats of SCN content include curricular and lesson plans, slides, games, exercises, A/V resources, and introductory texts, but almost anything topical that is digital and openly-licensed is fair game for inclusion. We’ve populated it initially by sponsoring the creation of content as well as curating existing resources. We also mean for librarians, LIS faculty, and LIS students, and related allies (instructional designers working in open education, and open publishers, for example) to be able to contribute resources if they wish, either their own creations or existing open work by others. Doing so is easy, and very welcome, so here’s how:

Step 1: Add Content to the OER Commons

The first step to getting new work into the SCN is adding it to OER Commons.  The SCN is a Hub built in OER Commons by ISKME. Adding content to OER Commons (https://www.oercommons.org/) is simple, but first you must create a free OER Commons profile (see How to create a profile in OER Commons).

After creating your profile, you can add content either by creating it in their Open Author tool or using “Submit from Web.”  If you would like to use the first method, the OER Commons provides instructions for using the Open Author tool.  For the most part, we have added content by submitting from the web, which entails adding a link and descriptive information. Either method is fine. Whichever you choose, please be thoughtful about providing the most complete and accurate descriptive metadata possible.

Screen capture of OER Commons banner, highlighting green "Add OER" button with red arrow.
The “Add OER” Button is at the top and slightly right of center on the OER Commons home page, oercommons.org.
Screen cap detail of the "Add OER" options, the Open Author tool and "Submit from Web"
Resources may be added to OER Commons via the Open Author tool or by submitting them from the web.

To deposit via link, click the green “Add OER” button, and then click the “Add Link” button that appears under “Submit from Web.” In Step 1, enter the resource’s URL. In Step 2, you’ll describe the resource. The fields are: Title*, Overview*, Authors, Conditions of Use* (CC license), Subject Areas* (in our case, usually “Information Science”), Education Levels* (usually Graduate/Professional), Material Types*, Languages*, Educational Standards (probably NA for SCN content), Media Formats, Educational Use, Primary User, Grades (probably NA), Accessibility, and Tags (see Step 2 about Tags below). Some fields may already be populated from the link, but review every field and provide the best information you’re able. Asterisked* fields are required. In the 3rd and final step, preview the submission and, if the information is correct, submit for review.

OER Commons submission notification email. It reads: Dear Josh Bolick, Thank you for submitting content on the OER commons. Our curation team will review your submission within 24 to 40 hours from sbumittal to ensure that it meets our OER quality standards. You can access your submission in your submitted folder. While pending review, your resource is set to private and cannot be viewed by others. We will send you a confirmation message once your item has been approved for our digital library and is ready to be shared. Thanks for contributing to the Open Education community. Sincerely, the OER Commons team
On submission, you should receive this email from OER Commons.

Upon submission, you will receive an email from info@oercommons.org: “Your resource is awaiting review.” Review by OER Commons staff typically takes place within 24-48 hours, during which time the resource is set to private, though you have access to it in your submitted folder. Upon successful review, you will receive another email from the same address:, “Your resource is now searchable and shareable.”

OER Commons notification email. It reads: Dear Josh Bolick, Your resource has been published and cataloged in our digital library. The means your item, [title of item], is fully accessible to all users and available for sharing across the site. Thanks for contributing to the Open Education community. Sincerely, the OER Commons team
Upon review, you should receive this message from OER Commons.
Step 2: Tag Your Work Appropriately

Regarding tags: you may use whatever tags are most appropriate to help discover the content through keyword searches in OER Commons.  Although tags are not a required field when submitting content to the OER Commons, your submission must include tags to be included in the SCN.  We use specific tags to sort the resources into the SCN Collections to make them easier to browse. The collections are Open Access (tag: Open Access), Copyright (tag: Copyright), Scholarly Sharing (tag: Sharing), Open Education (tag: Open Education), Data (tag: Data), Impact Measurement (tag: Impact), and What/Why Scholarly Communication (tag: WWSC) for items that address the whole rather than a part or parts. Each collection has a description outlining the scope of the collection (click into the collection to view the headnote).  Please make sure to use the appropriate SCN Collection tag/s when submitting your work.

Step 3: Get Your Resource Endorsed

In addition to the correct tag/s, to be featured in the SCN, we must endorse the resource. Without the endorsement, it will be in OER Commons, but not in the SCN. You can let us know by copying the text of the “Your resource is now searchable and shareable” email and submitting it through the Contact form on our project site. We’ll have a look, and assuming we agree it is in scope and of reasonable quality, we will endorse it.

To summarize, in order to have a work included in the SCN, it must be (1) deposited to OER Commons, (2) have the correct collection tag/s, and (3) get our endorsement.

If you have any questions or concerns about depositing content or suggestions for making these instructions clearer, please contact us! If you’re using SCN content, we’d also love to hear from you to learn about your use and take any suggestions you may have.

Thanks to Dr. Lori F. Cummins for her very helpful suggestions on this post. It’s much clearer as a result of her review.

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Announcement: Open Review for “Finding Balance: Collaborative Workflows for Risk Management in Sharing Cultural Heritage Collections Online” (book)

Editors note: text below by the primary authors; shared here to support the authors’ open review. -Josh, Will, Maria

Carrie Hintz, Melanie T. Kowalski, Sarah Quigley, and Jody Bailey, the authors of Finding Balance: Collaborative Workflows for Risk Management in Sharing Cultural Heritage Collections Online, are seeking critical, constructive feedback and comments on this preprint draft of their book to ensure accuracy and clarity. To that end, we are sharing the book for open review. More information about the book and our plan for the review process is below.

Overview of Book

In the fall of 2021, we submitted a proposal for this project to the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN) initiative led by Will Cross at North Carolina State University Libraries, Josh Bolick at University of Kansas Libraries, and Maria Bonn at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences and supported by IMLS grants LG-72-17-0132-17 and LG-36-19-0021-19. We are grateful that our project was selected for inclusion in the SCN. It was conceived as an open educational resource (OER) focused on managing and creating workflows around copyright risk and digitizing and sharing cultural heritage collections online. We hope it will prove useful to library and information science students who are interested in working as scholarly communications specialists or archivists after they finish their studies. We also hope that library and archives professional practitioners will find this book to be a rich resource for continuing education. It is important to note that although much of this book focuses on copyright, we did not create it for legal scholars or attorneys. It is intended to be a practical guide to help cultural heritage professionals who are not experts in copyright law. Licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC 4.0) license, the book will be published more formally in 2023.

How will open review work?

The book is currently in Google Docs, and anyone can follow this link and add comments for approximately 8 weeks, at which point comments will be closed and considered by us as we move toward more formal publication. Anonymous review is permitted, and we ask all reviewers to provide comments only, not edits to the text itself. Reviewers who wish to have their review acknowledged should sign their review with their preferred spelling of their name. Critical, constructive feedback is welcome and appreciated; abusive or combative comments will be deleted and/or ignored. Be the reviewer you wish you had, and help make this work the best it can be. Thank you in advance for taking the time to review the book, and please contact us if you have any questions at FindingBalanceOER@gmail.com.

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New to the SCN: Open Access Publishing Biases

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 “Open Access Publishing Biases” (available through Digital Commons ). This work was created by Chelsee Dickson and Christina Holm to present an overview of the OA landscape and provide learners with tools to develop their own inquiries into the inequities present within the OA publishing industry. Here they are to introduce Open Access Publishing Biases:

The open access publishing landscape is complex. There are many different levels of “open” (often denoted by colors), Article Processing Charges (APCs) vary in cost by journal, and impact factors are sometimes skewed. Added to this complexity is the bias found within the publishing cycle. Today’s academics, authors, and researchers must look at open access through a lens not clouded by the desire for prestige but clearly see the benefits of and biases within the Open Access Movement. My coauthor Christina Holm and I, Chelsee Dickson, endeavored to highlight these issues in our OER.

We created this resource based on past experiences with open access publishing, the peer review process, and subvention fund management. During the publishing and peer review process, we discovered certain biases that lead to inequity. And as the manager of my institution’s subvention fund, which provides financial support for faculty open access publications, I recognized a lack of diversity and wanted to ensure I avoided discrimination and exclusivity. This led Christina and I to brainstorm exactly how we could make a difference within the field of scholarly communications and open access.
Our open resource, aptly titled Open Access Publishing Biases OER, contains a curriculum for instructors and assignments for students. These objects can be easily tailored to fit the needs of any library and information studies (LIS) course but can also be used as-is within a course module on scholarly communication. We have created: learning objectives; a literature review which synthesizes biases found within open access publishing; a PowerPoint presentation to accompany the literature review; discussion questions for further thought and reflection; an open access publishing landscape map activity; a statement of significance activity; and a cumulative final project. Also included are select readings for students with an interest in furthering their knowledge of these concepts.

Each assignment builds upon the students’ previous work, resulting in a detailed final project with elements of each assignment woven throughout. This resource was designed to help students identify inequities within open access publishing and analyze those inequities knowing that, as society evolves, so too will our thoughts on biases. We crafted this resource with flexibility in mind, allowing it to evolve as new diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues arise, while giving students and instructors the tools to analyze and (eventually) mitigate their own bias. We hope our audience finds this OER engaging and thought-provoking.

About the Authors

Chelsee Dickson is the KSU Library System’s Scholarly Communications Librarian. Chelsee holds an MLIS and a second MS in Information Technology, and she is passionate about open access, open educational resources, copyright, and technology in libraries. She supports faculty and students in their publishing endeavors, and she is interested in the intersection of diversity, equity, and inclusion as they relate to open access and intellectual freedom. Contact her at cdickso5@kennesaw.edu.

Christina Holm is the KSU Library System’s Instruction Coordinator and a Librarian Associate Professor. Christina holds an MLIS and is passionate about information literacy and ethics in higher education. With 9 years of professional experience in a public services department, Christina has led many professional development events and written several contributions to the profession. Christina’ areas of research include academic librarian burnout, bias in academia, and library service design. Contact her at cholm1@kennesaw.edu.

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New to the SCN: Open Pedagogy in Practice: A Primer for Librarians

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 “Open Pedagogy in Practice: A Primer for Librarians” (available via Pressbooks and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Lindsey Gumb and Mandi Goodsett to help librarians and LIS students understand perspectives from teaching faculty (via podcast interviews with them) and proposing an adaptable lesson plan for implementing open pedagogy in library instruction. Here they are to introduce Open Pedagogy in Practice:

As faculty interest and knowledge of open educational resources have increased over the last several years, so has their interest in involving students in the creation and revision processes of these free resources. As librarians and faculty navigate this new and exciting path together, all parties should be mindful of examining the needs of our students as they begin their own exciting journeys as open scholars.

In this support primer, you’ll find a collection of podcast interviews, as well as one-shot lesson plans for librarians or faculty who are exploring open pedagogy in the classroom. Mandi’s podcast series of faculty interviews will be helpful for other faculty seeking to learn more about their peers’ experiences with open pedagogy, but librarians will also benefit from hearing first hand perspectives so they can better understand the necessary support librarians might provide. The one-shot lesson plans are intended to assist academic librarians tasked with supporting faculty embarking on open pedagogy projects; however, we recognize that it often takes a village, and individuals in other roles will also benefit from these (adaptable) lesson plans.

We hope that the community will not only learn from this support primer but that it will expand upon it and transform it into something even better than we could have ever imagined! We’d love to hear from you if you have feedback or suggestions for us; contact us at a.goodsett[at]csuohio.edu or lgumb[at]rwu.edu.

About the Authors

Mandi Goodsett (she/her) is the Performing Arts & Humanities Librarian, as well as the Open Educational Resource & Copyright Advisor, at Cleveland State University. She serves as an OhioLINK Affordable Learning Ambassador and an instructor for the Open Education Network OER Librarianship Certification. Her research interests include open education, critical thinking in library instruction, mentoring new professionals, and sustainability in libraries. In her free time Mandi loves cooking, playing board games with friends, and enjoying the outdoors of Northeast Ohio.

Lindsey Gumb is an Associate Professor and Scholarly Communications Librarian at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, and she also serves as the Open Education Fellow at the New England Board of Higher Education in Boston, Massachusetts. With an active interest in the intersections of information literacy, open education, and critical librarianship, Lindsey works with faculty on her campus and region-wide to push the awareness of open education from a cost-savings tool to be more inclusive of pedagogies that allow for opportunities to create systemic changes in more representative and equitable information creation, evaluation, and access. She resides in Rhode Island with her family and together they enjoy the beach, hiking, gardening, and their animals.

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New to the SCN: Wikidata for Scholarly Communication Librarianship

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 “Wikidata for Scholarly Communication Librarianship” (available via Pressbooks and in the SCN OER Commons Hub). This work was created by Jere Odell, Mairelys Lemus-Rojas, and Lucille Brys, who we think have done a fantastic job presenting a somewhat technical topic in a clear and consumable way, with activities to help apply knowledge gained. Here they are to introduce Wikidata for Scholarly Communication Librarianship:

Have you ever wondered if your work to support open access will be lost to a new kind of data market? Do you wish you could do something to push back against a scholarly communication ecosystem that rewards the usual suspects? Have you ever wondered what it would look like if citation data lived in the commons and not in the pockets of for-profit, “information analytics” companies? Have you heard about Wikidata, but wonder how you might get started? In Wikidata for Scholarly Communication Librarianship we provide an introduction to contributing open citation data to Wikidata. We also share how contributing to Wikidata can align with your efforts to support both gender equity and open knowledge at your institution.

Wikidata for Scholarly Communication Librarianship grew from our own efforts to begin creating truly open, communally-owned author profiles for women authors on our campus. In this five-part text we provide a practical introduction to Wikidata with suggested activities for people that work on scholarly communication projects in academic libraries.

In Chapter 1, we introduce the open knowledge base and Wikipedia-related project, Wikidata. We also give readers basic steps for creating an account, editing their user page, and enabling useful account preferences and gadgets. After reading Chapter 1, readers will be ready to make their first edits to a Wikidata entry.

In Chapter 2, we describe the data model that makes Wikidata a powerful linked open data (LOD) environment. The structure of the triples in Wikidata are expressed as Items, Properties, and Values. These statements make the building blocks that facilitate the connections between entities (e.g., authors and their works). The chapter also provides a short list of useful properties when editing existing or creating new entries for scholarly authors and their works. On completion of this chapter, readers will be ready to add a missing statement with a supporting reference to an entry for an author or a scholarly article.

In Chapter 3, we introduce the concept of “open citations” and describe recent initiatives to establish a body of open citation data that would enable researchers and others to be less reliant on proprietary, citation databases. Wikidata interacts with these initiatives as an open knowledge base for using and enhancing open citation data.

In Chapter 4, we briefly review gender inequities in scholarly communication and open knowledge projects. We demonstrate how Wikidata can be used to partly address these gender inequities and propose a model gender statement that could be cautiously used in Wikidata entries for authors.

In Chapter 5, we provide a short summary of selected tools that we have found useful for  contributing data to Wikidata as well as for visualizing the content related to authors and their works. These tools include Scholia, a web-based application that renders scholarly profiles based on Wikidata’s data. Using Scholia and the approaches described in the prior chapters, libraries can work toward generating faculty profiles for authors. By making use of freely available data, libraries can minimize the need for proprietary profile systems.

If you are interested in learning more about Wikidata in the context of scholarly communication, we encourage you to check out this work and hope you find it useful.

About the Authors

Jere Odell (0000-0001-5455-1471) works as a Scholarly Communication Librarian at IUPUI University Library. By supporting a broad range of open access initiatives at IUPUI, Jere hopes to do a small part toward building a culture where anyone can contribute to and benefit from open knowledge.

Mairelys Lemus-Rojas (0000-0002-3727-2187) works as the Head of Metadata Services at Brown University and previously as the Open Knowledge Librarian at IUPUI. As a proponent of open knowledge, she is committed to democratizing knowledge by improving the representation of underserved and underrepresented subjects and communities through the repurpose and reuse of curated data in open infrastructures.

Lucille Brys (0000-0002-9521-6685) is an Open Knowledge Specialist for University Library at IUPUI. She loves creating open metadata for digital collections and Wikidata entries for IUPUI authors and their works.