Scholars & Scholarship

Our priority is to align library strategy, staffing, and spending to advance the principles and practices of open scholarship. Through collective action with partners in research and learning communities, we increase the amount of high-quality scholarship that is openly available, support our members to promote “open science by design” within their own institutions, and provide leadership on high-impact collective collections initiatives.

Research libraries partner in the creation of new research and scholarship while they also manage vast collections in print, special collections, media, and other formats. A new openness in scholarly and research environments is transforming how knowledge is created, shared, and sustained. We contribute to this transformation by deeply engaging with scholarly communities and acting collectively to reduce friction between users and the information they seek and create.

Contact Cynthia Hudson Vitale (cvitale@arl.org) or Judy Ruttenberg (judy@arl.org) to find out how you can get involved.

Text and Data Mining Exemption to Digital Millennium Copyright Act Would Advance Knowledge of Diverse Works

This week, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), as a member of the Library Copyright Alliance, joined the Authors Alliance and the American Association of University Professors in submitting a...

Implementing Effective Data Practices Toolkit

This communication toolkit draws upon the outcomes of a 2019 conference, “Implementing Effective Data Practices: A Conference on Collaborative Research Support,” convened by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), California...

Data Management, Access, & Sharing

Researchers who generate data face a myriad of funder and publisher policies and community norms regarding the management of that data for sharing, public access, and reuse. Internationally, FAIR—Findable, Accessible,...

TOME Brings Scholars’ Books to Wider Audience

What good is a book if people can't read it? Calvin L. Warren, assistant professor at Emory University, studies “concerns of black existence, such as justice, anti-black violence, and black...

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  Data Curation Network Makes More Research Data Available to All

  Research data has the most impact when other researchers and the public can find it and use it to build upon the original researcher’s findings. Researchers struggle with sharing their...

• Digital Humanities Discovery

  With funding from a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), ARL researched and prototyped ways to index and discover digital humanities (DH) projects on...

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  Digital Scholarship Profiles

  Research libraries support digital scholarship with "innovative programs that approach the collection and curation of digital images, text, and sound, and the creation of tools to work with these materials...

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  HuMetricsHSS Develops Values-based Scholarly Measures

  What would it look like if measures for assessing scholarship embodied humane values like equity, openness, collegiality, quality, and community? Across disciplines, incentives and reward structures in academia are widely...

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  Librarians Create Conditions for Researchers to Tackle Grand Challenges with Data Science

  The COVID-19 pandemic, and the global scientific effort to develop treatments and vaccines, is the latest large-scale event to show the power and urgency of collaboration and data-sharing to solve...

• Principles and Practices

  A new openness in scholarly and research environments is transforming how knowledge is created, shared, and sustained. Open practices accelerate the dissemination of scholars’ work and improve its quality, impact,...

• Wikidata

  In 2018, ARL convened a task force of expert Wikidata users, which recommended a variety of ways for librarians to use the open knowledge base in advancing global discovery of...