Communicating information on scholarly communication issues to campus colleagues - librarians, faculty, and administrators - is a major component of the Create Change program supported by SPARC, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of Research Libraries' Office of Scholarly Communication (ARL OSC). Since Create Change has been in place, a number of campuses have held major events on the scholarly communication crisis, the economics of journal publishing, and the move to digital publishing environments. These events are intended to encourage discussion that would bring about change in the scholarly communication system. The recent SPARC/ACRL Forum at ALA in Toronto featured presentations by librarians and faculty on aspects of these campus advocacy events and discussed factors that contributed to their success. The Forum included a summary of a survey on campus events, an example of a campus activity, and summaries of faculty-developed projects.

Randall Ward and David Michaelis, Brigham Young University

Researchers from Brigham Young University, Randy Ward, Chemistry Librarian, and David Michaelis, Research Assistant, reported on the results of a survey they conducted of SPARC members this year about campus communication events and follow-up activities. Their preliminary findings are published in the June issue of College & Research Libraries News. With over 85% of SPARC members responding to the survey, there is now a benchmark regarding campus advocacy events since about half of the responding institutions have held some sort of event. Some of the suggestions for ensuring that events are successful include: have more events - one single event is not enough, think about follow-up activities before holding the event - what will be done to maintain interest in the topic or continue the dialogue, in order to encourage participation at an event have the provost's office or work directly with departments by having chairs extend invitations jointly with the library, ask SPARC to assist with the planning. It is particularly important that a clear goal be established for the event. Increasing faculty understanding was the most common objective for these events and many institutions reported that objective was met because they had begun dialogue with faculty about scholarly communication issues. Increasing personal contact regarding the issues will help increase understanding and perhaps change behavior among faculty. The anecdotal data from the survey is not yet fully analyzed, but libraries reported that future discussions will be focusing on institutional repositories and building faculty/library relationships.
presentation [PPT]

Joyce Ogburn, University of Washington

Joyce Ogburn, Associate Director of Libraries, University of Washington, reported that her university had held an early meeting on scholarly communication, with invitations extended by the president and provost and they have been continuing their communications with faculty. This year they wanted to focus on faculty motivations for publishing, especially those faculty from within the humanities and social sciences, and with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation hosted a retreat in March on digital scholarship. It was designed to have scholars tell the library and each other what kind of infrastructure is needed to support the transformation to a new form of scholarship. Elements that made the retreat successful included strong support from the President and Provost, pre-retreat surveys to gather information, faculty involved in program planning, time for faculty to demonstrate some of their more innovative projects, and minimized participation of the library. The retreat began with plenaries that set the tone for the two-and-a-half day event and then followed with a series of questions that invited participants to consider what digital scholarship meant to them and how the university could support their efforts. The library staff who attended the retreat focused on listening for possible roles for the library. Information on the University of Washington Digital Scholarship program can be found at http://www.lib.washington.edu/digitalscholar/.
presentation summary [PDF]

Leslie Chan, Bioline International, University of Toronto

Leslie Chan, Associate Director, Bioline International, University of Toronto, addressed a series of questions regarding changes in scholarly communication. He first asked why scholarly communication is changing so slowly and suggested that one of the reasons was that it has been low in campus priorities. It is a topic that affects tenure and promotion and faculty are not quick to make changes in that system. He suggested one approach might be to address how research is being communicated and work with disciplines on projects that meet their needs - those projects should address the process rather than just the results (publications). Chan outlined a number of activities that libraries could engage in that would help move the scholarly communication process along: increase institutional collaboration, support open access journals and open archives, lobby funding agencies to support the input-pay model, encourage scholarly societies to establish disciplinary portals, and stop making big deals and promote little deals. He has been involved in a number of projects (in-house digital publishing unit, eprints server, open access journals, and Bioline International) and described them for Forum attendees. Chan indicated several factors that resulted in project failure: lack of support by senior administration, insufficient infrastructural and technical support, lack of a business plan, and misconceptions of electronic publishing and open access by faculty. He encouraged librarians to become actively engaged with faculty projects by providing some of the necessary infrastructure, especially with interdisciplinary collaborations.
presentation [PPT]

Christian Zimmermann, University of Connecticut

The final speaker, Christian Zimmermann, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Connecticut, shared his experiences as an author of economics articles. The two major issues for economists are costs of library subscriptions and publication delays. Regarding costs, the specialized journals all went commercial and there are efforts by societies now to reclaim them. He provided two personal examples of publication delays - over a year for rejections and up to three years for acceptance. In order to increase access to the economics literature, preprints emerged as a means of communication. RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), a collaborative effort to disseminate economics information was begun in 1997 by Thomas Krichel (who also was in the Forum audience) and others. Zimmermann summarized the RePEC operating rules and described the current contents of the RePEc system. He emphasized that librarians can help faculty efforts like this by ensuring that there is access to them through the library catalog, that faculty are made aware of the existence of these open access resources, that similar efforts in other disciplines are supported, and that any institutional repositories ensure papers are contributed to services such as RePEc.
presentation [PDF]

Amy Kautzman, University of California, Berkeley

The final speaker of the Forum gave a brief update on Public Library of Science.

A brief question and answer session followed the presentation and the conversation on campus advocacy issues continued with speakers Ward, Michaelis, Ogburn, and Chan at the ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group the following afternoon.

updated: January 6, 2005