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