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New to the SCN: OER Community of Learning

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 Educational Resources Community of Learning” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub and the OERTX Repository), contributed by Stephanie Towery, Lisa Ancelet, Laura Waugh, and Amanda N. Price. As OER has been experiencing sustained growth for some years, and librarians are a major contributor to its success, we’re happy to support this project. Here are the creators to introduce the OER Community of Learning:

The Texas State University Libraries Scholarly Communications Team designed a foundational course, the Open Educational Resources (OER) Community of Learning, to develop a baseline of knowledge about OER for faculty, librarians, and library staff. The Community of Learning was constructed with self-paced Canvas modules, which were created by librarians and then peer-reviewed by library staff and university faculty, staff, and administrators to assure needs-based, quality content covering a broad range of perspectives in teaching and learning. These self-paced modules included instructional content, quizzes, and supplemental live workshop sessions with content creators and cohorts for active discussions on related topics. Texas State University Libraries shares this foundational OER course content to the broader community by converting the Canvas-based modules for the OERTX repository platform and via the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN).

The course, Open Education Resources Community of Learning, is an OER about OER, suitable for use by librarians, faculty, students, or anyone wanting to learn how to create, remix, and reuse open educational materials. Still available as an open Canvas course, the content was made available outside of the Canvas platform on OERTX, the open educational resources platform hosted by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. OERTX was specifically chosen for both its broad range of features and in order to provide an example for Texas State University faculty pursuing available platforms for creating and disseminating Open Educational Resources in their teaching.

Texas State University librarians Lisa Ancelet, Amanda N. Price, Stephanie Towery, and Laura Waugh created the latest iteration of the course. The OERTX version of the course is now live and available for remix and review. The team plans to update the content in OERTX based on feedback and reviews as well as adding new resources and content this summer.

About the Authors

Stephanie Towery is Copyright Officer at Texas State University as well as the liaison for Theatre & Dance, Distance, and the Office of Disability Services.

Lisa Ancelet is Research, Instruction and Outreach Librarian at Texas State University and currently the liaison to the Criminal Justice, Philosophy, and Sociology departments.

Laura Waugh is the Digital Collections Librarian at Texas State University managing the institutional repository, data repository, and open publishing services.

Amanda N. Price is a Texas State University Acquisitions Librarian who manages the firm orders unit and budgets, collection purchasing strategies, licensing, streaming video, ebooks, PDA programs, and digital archives and packages.

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New to the SCN: Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course

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 “Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub and via Pressbooks), contributed by Emily Ford. Despite its obvious importance to scholarly publishing, peer review is often opaque and frequently poorly understood as a practice. Emily has created this open course to explain and interrogate it. Here she is to introduce Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course:

Peer Review: A Critical Primer and Practical Course is a self-paced, open access training in peer review. In eight modules it asks readers to engage in a variety of activities to learn the who, what, why, and how of peer review. It is geared toward library professionals, library school students, or other academic professionals who must understand and/or engage with the peer-review process. The modules are:

  1. What is Peer Review?
  2. Opportunities and Challenges in Peer Review
  3. Bias and Power Structures in Peer Review
  4. Critically Examining Established Peer-Review Practices
  5. Innovations in Peer Review
  6. Librarians and Peer Review
  7. Developing Peer Review Norms, Guidelines, and Expectations for LIS (or your discipline)
  8. Developing Your Peer Review Practice

My interest in peer-review processes began with my career in librarianship. At the time I was a co-founder of In the Library with the Lead Pipe, where we “invented” an open peer-review process. From then on my research, scholarship, and advocacy has been around building capacity in our profession to engage in peer review, to understand it, to improve it, and to implement open peer-review processes in more of our publications in LIS.

One of the most notable things to me about peer review and librarianship was that we have had no basis upon which to be practicing it. How had we been trained to engage in it? Instruction librarians must often teach students to identify peer-reviewed articles for their research assignments, library workers at reference desks show students how to use limiters and filters to find peer-reviewed content, and instructors continue to try and elevate peer-reviewed scholarship as the most authoritative and the best research. Yet the first time we receive a review request many of us are baffled by the task – we ask colleagues what we are supposed to do. We try to make sense of the minimal instructions sent us by an automated journal management system, we try to have helpful comments, and we fit this work in amongst our busy work and personal lives. We simply learn it by doing.

On top of these issues, and like so many other systems in higher education, peer-review processes and systems can reinforce white supremacy and other forms of oppression. As such it is pertinent that any peer-review practice be mindfully executed to eliminate as much of this oppression as we can. This course attempts to offer folks the opportunity to learn about peer review and to critically question it so that we may, over time, develop peer-review practices, norms, guidelines, and systems for LIS that dismantle its role in systemic oppression. My sincere hope is that the materials offered in this course are used, reused, modified, and become part of a larger conversation and effort to educate scholarly communication and other librarians in peer-review practices.

About the Author

Emily Ford is Associate Professor and Urban & Public Affairs Librarian at Portland State University. Her research uses narrative inquiry methods to understand peer review and she is an advocate for open peer review. In 2021, her book Stories of Open: Opening Peer Review through Narrative Inquiry was published by ACRL Press. In her spare time she is the proud human guardian of two cats and three fancy rats, volunteers at a local no-kill cat shelter, and runs tree-lined trails through forests near her home.

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New to the SCN: Teaching with Copyright Chat

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 “Lessons from Practice: Teaching with Copyright Chat” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub as well as its own project site), contributed by Sara Benson, who is also curating the SCN Copyright Collection. Sara has been hosting the Copyright Chat podcast since 2017, in which she interviews experts about issues in copyright. These recordings are rich with pedagogic potential, which Sara has developed for us. Here she is to introduce Teaching with Copyright Chat:

I started the podcast titled Copyright Chat to engage with the broader public (outside of my home institution in Illinois) including librarians, students and professors of information science, and the general public about copyright issues relevant to libraries. I work at a land grant institution and part of our mission is to bring our educational efforts to the rest of the state, the country, and, ultimately, the world. In my daily work as a Copyright Librarian, I quickly became aware that copyright is an area of the law that is not well understood–mostly because it is not discussed with enough frequency to become common knowledge with members of the campus community. The most exciting part of hosting Copyright Chat is that I get to learn new things about copyright law by talking to different copyright experts and professionals, too. Copyright law is an exciting area of the law because it changes often through new case-law and legislative and administrative developments–so the podcast is an ever-evolving project.

The podcast archives some evergreen topics such as discussions about author’s rights, copyright myths, and fair use. Although copyright law never gets dull because new cases and laws continue to arise, there are some topics that are key to being a successful information professional. For that reason, select episodes of the podcast were chosen to provide educational context for students studying information science to learn about copyright issues.

Screen capture of Teaching with Copyright Chat Podcast, featuring the logo and header image of the site, basic navigation, and title: Lessons from Practice: Teaching with Copyright Chat"
Screen capture from Lessons from Practice: Teaching with Copyright Chat

These modules are meant to be very flexible so that instructors can use them in their courses as they see fit. They are organized into three categories: Basics Lessons, Fair Use Lessons, and Rights Statements Lessons. Each module explains the lesson objectives and is centered on an episode of the ©hat (Copyright Chat) Podcast. Some modules incorporate recommended readings as well. Each module has some “homework” for students to do outside of class as well as in-class exercises and discussion topics. The lessons are organized into modules because an instructor may only wish to engage with a particular topic, such as fair use or copyright myths, or might be more ambitious and have time to devote to all eight lessons. In any event, each module can stand alone or be used with other modules to create a course unit. The CC-BY license attached to the modules sets the sky as the limit in terms of remixing, reusing, and revising modules and I hope instructors will make these lessons their own. I’m excited to see how these modules will help students learn more about copyright.

About the Author

Sara R. Benson is the copyright librarian and an assistant professor at the Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also teaches courses at the iSchool at the University of Illinois. She holds a JD from the University of Houston Law Center, an LLM from Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley, and an MSLIS from the School of Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the library, Sara was a lecturer at the University of Illinois College of Law for ten years. Sara is the host of the  ©hat (“Copyright Chat”) Podcast, available on iTunes.

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New to the SCN: Analyzing Institutional Publishing Output

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 “Analyzing Institutional Publishing Output: A Short Course” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub as well as in Google Drive and Penn State’s ScholarSphere), contributed by Allison Langham-Putrow and Ana Enriquez, who both do scholarly communication work, at University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Penn State University, respectively. Here’s Allison and Ana to introduce their project:

We met way back in October 2018 at the “Choosing Pathways to OA” working forum held at University of California-Berkeley, a meeting at which attendees were encouraged to discuss a wide range of options for moving from a subscription-based world to one in which library budgets are used to support open access publishing.

We had both been analyzing publishing patterns for our institutions. Allison, influenced by an opinion piece by Liam Earney, a blog post by Danny Kingsley, and a class at the 2018 FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute by Katie Shamash titled “How Much Does Open Access Cost?”, had been looking into where researchers from University of Minnesota publish, trying to figure out how much was open access, and looking (in vain) for information on peer review and editorships. Ana was using publishing data to plan outreach programs and trying to learn about Penn State authors’ APC payments.

The “read-and-publish” agreement between MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry was advertised as the first such agreement in the US. It received a lot of press, at least in the scholarly communication/open access world, and was a hot topic at the Choosing Pathways event. It was just a matter of time before the model came across the radars of our libraries’ administration. In fact, it was just about two months after we met.

Since late 2018, we’ve done analysis of publication patterns for our institutions and for the other members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance—overall publication and with specific publishers. We’ve learned a lot and proposed this course for the Scholarly Communication Notebook because it’s something we think will become even more important as publishers continue to design and push new types of OA publishing agreements.

We also just think data analysis is fun and want to share the fun.

So what is Analyzing Institutional Publishing Output: A Short Course? It’s a set of training materials that walk through how to create a set of publication data, gather additional information about the data through an API, clean the data, and analyze it in various ways. We separated it into two sections: Section 1 describes how to build a dataset using data from one of three sources (Web of Science, Scopus, and the Lens) and using the Unpaywall API, via OpenRefine, to enrich it with open access information; Section 2 has five lessons on analyzing the dataset. One of us prefers Excel for analysis; the other prefers OpenRefine. We learned a lot from each other, but no one’s mind was changed, so we wrote the analysis lessons with instructions for both.

By doing these analyses, librarians can develop a critical eye for the data and learn to work with it to make sustainable and values-driven decisions. Library agreements with publishers are at a crucial turning point, as they more and more often include OA publishing. Our short course prepares you to enter into negotiations with a publisher. Publishers hold a lot of power and having a deep understanding of what publishing looks like at your institution can make the uneven playing field of library-publisher negotiations slightly more even.

We hope you’ll take our course and that you’ll share it with others.

About the Authors

Allison Langham-Putrow is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Minnesota. She supports the University of Minnesota Libraries in exploring new approaches for sharing, preserving, and enhancing the impact of scholarly activity. Her background is in engineering, having earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and she has over 20 years of research experience. She cares deeply about open access to research and works with colleagues and publishers on how to make open access happen in an equitable way.

Ana Enriquez is the Scholarly Communications Outreach Librarian at the Penn State Libraries. A copyright lawyer and librarian, Ana works to improve access to research at Penn State and through inter-institutional collaborations. She also teaches the university community about open access, publishing, copyright, and related topics.

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New to the SCN: Perspectives on Scholarly Communication

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 “Perspectives on Scholarly Communication: A Student-Created Open Textbook” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub as well as in Open Science Framework), contributed by Christopher Hollister. Christopher, who teaches a graduate MLIS course at University of Buffalo, used an open pedagogy assignment to have students author essays on scholarly communication topics of their selection. Here’s Christopher to introduce the project:

Dear SCN Readers…

As noted by the SCN Team, this project involves the experimental use of open pedagogy to teach the Scholarly Communication course in a graduate-level library and information science (LIS) program. Open pedagogy is variously defined, but generally understood as a framework that requires students to be active creators of course content rather than passive consumers of it. Proponents view this as a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate greater understanding of content by virtue of creating it.

Students in this course learn by doing; that is, they learn about scholarly communication by participating in the process. Each student is required to develop a chapter—on a scholarly communication topic of their choosing—to be included in an open access monograph. Following the semester, the text is published under a Creative Commons license on the University at Buffalo’s institutional repository as an open educational resource (OER), allowing for reuse or repurposing in future sections of the course or in similar courses in LIS programs at other institutions. To date, students have created the following open monographs: Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, Volume 1 (2019), Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, Volume 2 (2020); and Perspectives on Scholarly Communication, Volume 3 (2021). Support for the development and production of the third volume was generously provided by the SCN Team and its 2019 IMLS grant. 

Immediate outcomes of the “learn by doing” aspect are clear. The experience of publishing engages students in the applied side of concepts they are introduced to by way of lectures, readings, and other class activities. This experience is invaluable for those entering academic librarianship, particularly for those who will have scholarly communication responsibilities. Immediate outcomes of the open pedagogy aspect are also quite compelling. Research shows that students ascribe a positive learning experience to the implementation of this framework, and they hold for its continued use in future sections of the course. Students are enthusiastic in their embrace of creating renewable versus disposable coursework. They express great satisfaction with contributing to the professional literature, building the discipline’s nascent OER record, and having a publication to feature in their curricular and professional dossiers. The experience also resonates with students on a philosophical level; LIS students are characteristically inclined to support activities that align with the field’s abiding “free to all” ethic.

Long-term outcomes for the Scholarly Communication course are emerging as this experiment continues to unfold. Most notably, select chapters from these volumes are used as required readings. The following student-created chapters, for example, are required readings for the upcoming 2022 fall semester:

  • Moving toward multilingualism in scholarly communication to combat the linguistic injustices caused by English as a lingua franca (Huskin, 2021)
  • Indigenous knowledge in academia (Neumaier, 2021)
  • Flipping the script: Creating equity for BIPOC academics in scholarly publishing through open access (Poenhelt, 2020)
  • Ethics and academic tenure: The struggle for female identifying scholars to achieve tenure (Roberts, 2020)

About the Author

Christopher Hollister is the Head of Scholarly Communication with the University at Buffalo Libraries. In that role, he advances initiatives related to scholarly publishing, open access, and open education. A longtime advocate and activist for transforming the current system of scholarly communication into an open one, Chris is co-founder and co-editor of the award-winning open access journal, Communications in Information Literacy. He also teaches the Scholarly Communication and International Librarianship courses for the University’s Department of Information Science. His current research interests include scholarly publishing and open educational practices.