CFP Round 3: Contribute to the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN)

We are pleased to announce our third (and final, from our current funding) call for proposals for materials to be included in the Scholarly Communication Notebook. Successful proposals will contribute openly-licensed educational materials (OER) about scholarly communication that reflect the broad range of people, institution types, and service models in scholarly communication and specifically fill gaps of representation in the current body of materials. With generous support from IMLS, we are able to offer $2,500 financial awards in recognition of the expertise and labor required to develop these resources.

You can see the full application as a Google doc, read more below, and submit here.

Note: the SCN is distinct from, but related to, an open book project that we’re also pursuing. Learn more about the relationship and distinction, if you’re interested.

Call for Proposals

The Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN) team is excited to invite proposals for the development of open educational resources (OER) that reflect and encourage diversity in scholarly communication. The SCN is an online community/repository that is explicitly intended to support and educate a diversifying workforce of LIS professionals and to extend social justice values to all participants by intentionally and thoughtfully reflecting the broad range of people, institution types, and service models in scholarly communication.

With generous support from IMLS, we are able to offer $2,500 financial awards in recognition of the expertise and labor required to develop these resources.

We are particularly interested in proposals from authors from a broad range of institutions and intersectional identities, particularly emphasizing marginalized and underrepresented perspectives.

The Materials

The OER should be a learning object or collection that is ready to be used in both a formal classroom setting and as a resource for self-guided learning. We are leaving space for a variety of approaches to design of the core resource and pedagogical apparatus. We are also committed to working with contributors to develop proposals before they are submitted and continuing to support development and refinement throughout creation.

Example Projects

Because this is a new project we invite proposals that reflect a variety of approaches to building open resources and supporting open practices. The following examples are results from our first CFP (Fall 2020):

But don’t let these examples limit your thinking! Creativity is welcome! The following hypothetical examples reflect a small set of gaps in the literature that a proposal might help fill:

  • A lesson introducing a model open education program being run at an HBCU
  • An exercise exploring strategies for supporting open and public access at a community college
  • Narratives and discussion questions that highlight unique work being done on archiving and supporting engagement with local materials at a regional college or university
  • A podcast or videos describing a tribal college’s work developing tools that support digital scholarship that engages the college’s history and the communities it serves

Selection Criteria

Proposals are open-ended but should address the following areas:

  • An overview of the topic being presented (copyright, OER, digital scholarship, etc.)
  • The need for this resource and the gaps that it fills. Why is it important? Are you building on existing openly licensed content or creating something new?
  • Your approach to presenting this material. What methods are you using? How are you addressing the need you identified above?
  • The format of the learning object? Is it a selection of readings? Video/s? A podcast?
  • What sort of pedagogical apparatus will be included? Will you include discussion questions? A structured assignment? What will you add to make this an educational resource, not just a document? If you have concerns about this area we are happy to work with you to refine these through discussion.
  • What are the learning outcomes/objectives for these materials?
  • Suggested (foundational/canonical) further reading? What are the most important readings, either necessary or optional for a learner to engage with these materials?

Submission Process

Submit a proposal here. Proposals will be due by December 17, 2021. We hope to communicate acceptances in January 2022 with work to take place through May 2022 (we’ll work with accepted projects to agree on a timeline that makes sense, and remain as flexible as we can be along the way). In the first round, we accepted 10 proposals, and intend to do roughly the same in this round.

To view the entire proposal application as a Google Doc, click here. To use it as a template, click here to create your own editable template.

Please direct questions to Will Cross (wmcross@ncsu.edu), Josh Bolick (jbolick@ku.edu), or Maria Bonn (mbonn@illinois.edu).

Meet the Curators!

“Design a project big enough to capture the talents of others. This will allow you to do something bigger than you can do alone, and to learn from others smarter than you.”

This advice was given to one of us by an early mentor, which was given to him by his mentor. It struck a chord, and we’ve generally tried to bring people into our collaborations because we know it makes our projects better, and we hope it helps those folks, too, by providing an opportunity (for presentations, publications, funding, and, we hope, some fun) and a network of support and collaboration.

For some time we’ve been developing the Scholarly Communication Notebook, which we hope will become the locus of an active, inclusive, empowered community of practice for teaching scholarly communications to emerging librarians. We researched and identified a platform (OER Commons), and we are providing financial awards to content creators through three calls for proposals (third call coming soon; previous call for reference).

Now we’re thrilled to share that we’re welcoming six content experts to help us identify, collect, and describe existing open learning content related to their topical area. Please help us us welcome this impressive group of colleagues:

  • Sara R. Benson, Copyright Collection
  • Jill Cirasella, Open Access Collection
    • Jill is the Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She leads the Mina Rees Library’s scholarly communication initiatives, promotes open scholarship across campus, and contributes to university-wide scholarly communication efforts. Her priorities include enabling public access to GC-authored scholarship and providing instruction about open access, copyright, fair use, publication contracts, research metrics, and more. Jill’s research focus is scholarly communication, very broadly construed: recent and current projects include anxieties surrounding open access, attitudes about practice-based library literature, and the lived experiences of hard of hearing librarians. She is committed to advancing ethical, community-led open access initiatives and currently serves as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Twitter: @jillasella
  • Arthur “AJ” Boston, Scholarly Sharing Collection (library publishing and repositories)
  • Regina Gong, Open Education Collection
  • Hoa Luong, Open Data
    • Hoa Luong is an Associate Director at the Research Data Service, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the point person for the Illinois Data Bank, known as the institutional data repository, to help Illinois researchers share their research data. Hoa leads and works with subject liaisons at the Library to curate datasets in the Illinois Data Bank and provides data management plan (DMP) review, as well as coordinates workshops and educational outreach. Hoa received a B.S. in Food Sciences and M.S. in Library and Information Science, both from the University of Illinois.
  • Rachel Miles, Research Impact
    • Rachel Miles is the Research Impact Librarian at Virginia Tech, where she supports researchers in improving and assessing the impact of their research through education of Open Access (OA) and author rights; provides specialized support for citation analysis, bibliometrics, altmetrics, network visualization, and emerging applications of impact data at individual, department, institutional, and other group levels; and supports best practices in developing and maintaining research profiles. Her research primarily focuses on the awareness and usage of research impact indicators, such as bibliometrics and altmetrics, among Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty and academic librarians at R1 institutions. Twitter: @metric_guru

As you can see, this is an all-star team, and we couldn’t be happier to be working with them. They’re going to be scanning the environment for a target of 30-50 open objects that are appropriate to their content area, creating metadata, depositing the resources into the SCN, and writing up a summary of their work: what’s covered, what’s missing and needs development, etc. You might see them at disciplinary conferences talking about their work, or crowdsourcing from their communities. If you know of great open content in these areas that’s appropriate for learning about the topic, please reach out to them. If you’ve created such content, send it along! Or add it yourself, if you like. Just let us know so we can endorse it and get it into the right collection/s. We’re also planning to introduce a “What/Why Scholarly Communication” collection for content that spans all or most of these areas. Will, Maria, and Josh will curate that collection.

We’re very excited to collaborate with these folks (and with you) and to see this progress and growth of the SCN!

Here’s more background on the SCN on our project site, and here’s a post reflecting on the relationship between the open book that we’re working on, and the SCN.

Open Access Section Editor

We’re super stoked to share that Amy Buckland is contributing to the forthcoming ACRL Intro to Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Open Access Section Editor. Amy is Head, Research & Scholarship at the University of Guelph. Her professional life revolves around open access initiatives, publishing support, digital scholarship, and research data services. Her considerable experience as a passionate advocate for openness is a huge boon to the project, particularly on an aspect of SC (and broader) librarianship that has become so pivotal. She’s done more rad things than can be quickly listed here, among them raising critical awareness of SC issues in the ACRL Scholarly Communication Roadshow. Prior to joining libraryland, Amy worked in publishing for 14 years, and left that industry to build a better system with libraries at the centre. She generously wrote the following post to announce her involvement:

Hey everyone! I am excited to be joining this extremely great super awesome group of folks working on an open textbook for scholarly communication. As someone who has been working in open access for almost 15 years (yowsa), I was honoured to be invited to edit the section on open access. Just as Brianna (open data) and Lillian (OER) have mentioned in their posts, I’d love to hear from you about what should be included (I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have lots of ideas, but the magic lives in our community). Since this topic is near and dear to my heart, rest assured that we will not shy away from controversies, nor will anyone be mollycoddled.

Give me a shout at @jambina or buckland[at]] uoguelph.ca with questions, comments, criticism, and cathartic confessions.

This leaves one more section editor announcement to round out the editorial team, to be made in the next couple of weeks. #highfive #nomollycoddling