SCN – Page 2 – OER + ScholComm

February 17, 2023February 17, 2023

New to the SCN: Finding Balance

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 “Finding Balance: Collaborative Workflows for Risk Management in Sharing Cultural Heritage Collections Online” (available through Pressbooks and via OER Commons). This work was created by Carrie Hintz, Melanie T. Kowalski, Sarah Quigley, and Jody Bailey. Digitizing material is core work for many cultural heritage organizations, but navigating the rights issues can be a challenge. This team uses their experience at Emory to help the rest of us balance risk with reward to best support users and collections. Here they are to introduce Finding Balance:

Digitizing archives, special collections, and other rare and unique historical documents so they can be shared online is mission-critical work for most cultural heritage institutions. In particular, those with an educational or research mission want to provide open and equitable access to their collections to all users, not just those who can afford to travel across the globe to perform research in person. While most institutions share the goal of digitizing and disseminating the unique resources in our collections, traditional digitization workflows limit our ability to do large-scale digitization. Selecting, imaging, describing, and assessing rights for digitized content can be enormously resource-intensive and time-consuming. Rights clearance work, in particular, is highly labor-intensive, requires specialized knowledge, may require significant research, and has traditionally been conducted at an object level.

In this open educational resource, we offer guidance for creating scalable, cross-functional workflows using a risk-management approach that increases efficiency and distributes responsibility for rights assessment work more equitably across stakeholders. It includes advice for navigating knowledge gaps, building an engaged team with the right skillsets, reimagining workflows, and rethinking traditional archival processing work to build capacity for rights analysis during arrangement and description. The tools and insight in this resource are intended to help organizations make thoughtful, informed decisions about how to implement risk-analysis frameworks and workflows to perform rights analysis at scale. Our ultimate goal is that these tools will help maximize the amount of material we can make available online while working within our institutions’ risk-comfort zones. We hope this OER 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.

About the Authors:

Carrie Hintz

is the associate director of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University Libraries where she provides vision and leadership for all aspects of library operations, including archival processing, digital collection management, and research and engagement activities. She has led special collections technical services programs at Emory University’s Rose Library and Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3040-2145)

Melanie T. Kowalski was the copyright and scholarly communications librarian for Emory University Libraries from 2013–2022. In this role, she was primarily responsible for copyright outreach, education, and consultation with faculty and students. Additionally, she was responsible for copyright consultation and analysis for digitization and managing rights metadata within the Libraries. In February 2022, Melanie moved on to a new role as the open knowledge licensing coordinator for the Center for Research Libraries, where she is working to operationalize an open knowledge strategy for licensing library content and serves as the primary resource for copyright information policy. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1815-9410)

Sarah Quigley was the head of collection processing at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University Libraries from 2019–2022. Prior to this, she was a manuscript archivist at the Rose from 2011–2019 and came to this project with significant experience processing collections and providing strategic oversight of the library’s processing program. In July 2022, Sarah became director of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Libraries where she provides vision and leadership for the division, including collection development, digital collections, public services, and technical services departments. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7186-6483)

Jody Bailey is the head of the Scholarly Communications Office at Emory University Libraries and leads a team of librarians and library specialists who are responsible for all library services surrounding copyright, open access and publishing, research data management, and open educational resources. The team also manages two scholarly repositories for Emory faculty and students. Before joining Emory University Libraries in 2018, Jody was director of publishing at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries where she oversaw all publishing and open education services. (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4226-4173)

January 9, 2023

New to the SCN: Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication

Today we’re excited to share “Publishing Values-Based Scholarly Communication” (available through project site and via OER Commons). This work was created by Kath Burton, Catherine Cocks, and Bonnie Russell. We think they’ve done an incredible job! Here they are to introduce Publishing Values-Based Scholarly Communication:

In Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication, Kath Burton and Catherine Cocks of the Publishing and the Publicly Engaged Humanities working group and Bonnie Russell of the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in Humanities and Social Science) initiative have created a resource intended to increase understanding of how a values-based approach to scholarly communication can address the challenges of publishing publicly engaged scholarship.

Humanities and social science scholars are increasingly interested in doing research with and alongside communities outside the academy. This values-based, publicly engaged scholarship encompasses research, teaching, preservation, and programming conducted in partnership with diverse individuals and communities outside the university. It is intended to deepen and broaden the horizons of scholarship at the same time that it serves the public good in both its processes and outcomes. In short, this kind of research deploys the resources of the humanities to address society’s most pressing challenges.

But these collaborative research projects often call for publications quite different from the standard academic journal article or book. Works that incorporate multiple voices, are broadly accessible, and are designed to intervene in public issues may not fit easily into the standard academic journal article or monograph. Publicly engaged work is about process and methodology as much as it is about outcomes. What options exist for including all aspects of a project’s processes and methodologies, including failures and adjustments? And yet, the standard genres play an important role in an individual scholar’s career progression. Publishing models that support academic success and also include an explicitly values-based approach to scholarly communication are therefore required. In this OER we highlight several projects and we bring you the voices of scholars who are doing this work and finding creative ways to publish it. We also offer an exercise in analyzing the partnerships and publication outputs of several publicly engaged humanities projects.

University-based librarians have important roles to play in publicly engaged research. For scholars, libraries obviously offer crucial resources for conducting research, and some may also be able to provide resources to community organizations. Libraries can support public engagement efforts and facilitate connections between community organizations and scholars in many ways–for example, by hosting reading groups that bridge distinct communities; collaborating to create digital or material exhibits; consulting on issues of privacy and intellectual property; offering space, design assistance, and tools for digital projects, as well as flexible print publishing opportunities; and providing repositories for long-term access and preservation. Perhaps most important, as professionals focused on the broad circulation of knowledge, librarians can help scholars think through what it means to produce research in service to public, rather than solely disciplinary, aims.

To get readers started with values-based, collaborative scholarship, we offer the HuMetricsHSS Values Sorter. HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences) was established to assist scholars and scholarly organizations in establishing a values-based approach to guide all kinds of scholarly processes through workshops and interactive tools. The Values Sorter is a self-assessment tool for everyone who wishes to engage in embedding values in their scholarly practices. We look forward to future iterations of the OER where we can include examples of effective practice using the Sorter and the HuMetricsHSS values framework.

Publishing Values-Based Scholarly Communication takes inspiration from the Scholarly Communication Notebook’s community of practice approach to empowering active engagement across the landscape. We are extremely grateful to colleagues at SCN for their generous funding and guidance as we sought to showcase the many examples of publicly engaged scholarship via this project.

To read the OER visit https://publiclyengagedpublishing.org/.

About the Authors:

Kath Burton is co-convener of the Publishing and Public Humanities Working Group. With extensive publishing experiences, ranging from commissioning to program management, she now leads the editorial development of the Humanities, Media and the Arts portfolio at Routledge, Taylor & Francis. Among other interests, Kath is an avid outdoor swimmer and helps grow community gardens in Reading, UK. ORCID: 0000-0001-7785-9604

Catherine Cocks is the interim director of Michigan State University Press and a member of the Publishing and Public Humanities Working Group. She formerly worked with Teresa Mangum and Anne Valk on the Humanities and Public Life series at the University of Iowa Press and continues to be passionate about publicly engaged scholarship. ORCID: 0000-0001-6581-4740

Bonnie Russell is the Project Manager for MESH Research at Michigan State University where she is the Project Manager (and resident librarian) for Humanities Commons and the Digital Specialist for HuMetricsHSS. She has worked with digital humanities scholars since 2012, helping scholars shape projects and identify technology needs. Before coming to MSU she spent 9 years as the Technical Project Manager at the Wayne State University Press, managing the Press’s online and digital offerings. ORCID: 0000-0002-0374-0384

September 13, 2022September 20, 2022

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.

May 24, 2022September 23, 2022

New to the SCN: Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing

Today we’re excited to share “Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing” (available in the SCN OER Commons Hub and via Pressbooks). This work was created by Amanda Makula from the University of San Diego. Folks in scholcomm land may be familiar with Amanda’s great work as the principle planner of the Digital Initiatives Symposium. We’re thrilled with what she’s created here, as scholarly publishing can definitely use some problematizing. Here’s Amanda to introduce Power, Profit, and Privilege:

The scholarly communications system – and open access in particular – has always been interesting and exciting to me. There are so many intricacies and possibilities for innovation that the conversation is endless, and always evolving. But though I find it fascinating, I’ve noticed that non-library faculty and students are generally less enthusiastic. Rather, understanding and navigating it seems to be just one more hurdle for them to get around to reach their goal of publication in a top-tier journal.

After years spent having these conversations, and feeling frustrated that open access wasn’t necessarily intrinsically interesting or valuable to the academic community, I realized that the only way to truly engage my audience was to contextualize the scholarly publishing system within their culture of academia. Open access and scholarly publishing reform didn’t necessarily matter to them if it was isolated from their lived reality of trying to secure an academic position or achieve tenure and promotion.

Scholarly publishing and academia are bound together, and tightly. One does not exist separate from the other, and one cannot change without redefining the other. If we as librarians want to transform scholarly communications, as we say that we do, we must work internally, from within academia, to make it happen. This means doing things like agitating for the reform of rank and tenure, problematizing journal rankings, desanctifying peer review, and working not only to pass OA policies on our campuses but also to connect them to other existing academic policies and practices.

This is a tall order, and academia is notoriously slow to change. Those of us who have lived in it for a while can have difficulty seeing that it is a construct, not a natural order. Those who are new to it, who are students themselves or who are contemplating pursuing an advanced degree, are more likely to question why it operates as it does – and whether there might be better ways to build, consume, and share knowledge in the future.

I designed Power, Profit, and Privilege: Problematizing Scholarly Publishing with this audience in mind. To revolutionize scholarly communications, we need to start with the next generation of academics. Scholarly communications should have a place in the curriculum; it should be taught so that students who are interested in publishing their scholarship, who are interested in matriculating to graduate school, will have a foundational understanding of the system and what it means to participate in it. I think too often it’s assumed that students will pick up this information on their own or from faculty advisors as they go through a program. But even if that’s the case, it’s unlikely that they will question the system or recognize its complicated challenges. And we absolutely need them as allies to make inroads on reform.

My curriculum is organized into two main parts, each with several chapters. The Fundamentals aims to acquaint students with the basic framework of contemporary scholarly publishing. (Some) Problems raises issues that complicate scholarly publishing, specifically how it intersects with power, money, prestige, and privilege. Chapters include hands-on exercises, readings, and additional resources. The course culminates in two final written assignments that instructors can use as part of the curriculum, or that independent learners can work through on their own.

I hope that you and/or your students will find something provocative, perplexing, and pragmatic within the pages of Power, Profit, and Privilege. Like scholarly publishing itself, this work is evolving and benefits from your feedback. Get in touch with me at amakula[at]sandiego[dot]edu if you have questions, comments, or ideas. In the meantime: happy reading!

About the Author

Amanda Y. Makula worked as a Research & Instruction Librarian for 12 years before moving into her current role as Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of San Diego, where she manages the institutional repository, engages the campus community on scholarly communication topics, serves as liaison to the Ethnic Studies department, and oversees the annual Digital Initiatives Symposium. Her most recent research project appeared in the March 2022 issue of College & Research Libraries. In her spare time you’ll find her listening to podcasts in Spanish or riding her e-bike.

April 11, 2022May 11, 2022

New to the SCN: Teaching with Copyright Chat

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 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.