Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Communication

Leadership, Development, and Expertise: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Scholarly Communication Librarian Position Announcements

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Author: Angela Hackstadt

INTRODUCTION

In 2012, the Association of Research Libraries reported that 95% of libraries identified their libraries as leaders of scholarly communication efforts on campus. While academic librarians have long been responsible for SC issues, institutions have explicitly tasked positions with these responsibilities increasingly over time.

This qualitative analysis of position announcements focuses on the ways libraries expect these librarians to engage with SC issues and responsibilities, rather than describing the prevalence of SC-related functions.

Specifically, this study asks the following questions: (1) How do administrators communicate leadership expectations of SC librarian roles through job advertisements? (2) In what ways could these leadership expectations be challenging or problematic for SC librarians in non-administrator positions?

METHODS

This study is a qualitative content analysis of scholarly communication librarian position announcements posted to ALA JobList between January 1, 2016, and July 31, 2019. The advertisements are predominantly from North American academic libraries. Qualitative content analysis is systematic but allows for flexibility of interpretation in describing themes and categories.

The coding scheme developed over multiple readings of the data and the author identified categories through the process of subsumption.

RESULTS & DISCUSSION

Prevalent themes in position announcements include leadership, expertise, and development. Leadership responsibilities appear as management duties or, often in non-administrator positions, as an expectation to take initiative or be an exemplar.

SC librarians are expected to be experts, often as the library’s campus liaison or as educators in a variety of SC issues. They may also be tasked with developing institutional repositories or SC programs, though it is not always clear in the advertisement what support is available.

These themes are discussed in terms of the SC librarian as a boundary spanning role. Boundary spanners are positions within an organization that communicate with the outside environment. They may also serve as filters for information coming into the organization or facilitate communication between departments or units in an organization.

CONCLUSION

In SC librarian job advertisements, positional authority is often absent from positions that have a responsibility to lead or develop SC efforts, programs, or initiatives. Non-experts may bestow some level of authority to experts.

However, leadership and development tasks may prove difficult for a SC librarian who lacks the ability to make decisions or organizational changes. Suggestions for institutions and potential further research are discussed.

URL : Leadership, Development, and Expertise: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Scholarly Communication Librarian Position Announcements

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2376

Genuine semantic publishing

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Authors : Tobias Kuhn, Michel Dumontier

Various approaches and systems have been presented in the context of scholarly communication for what has been called semantic publishing. Closer inspection, however, reveals that these approaches are mostly not about publishing semantic representations, as the name seems to suggest. Rather, they take the processes and outcomes of the current narrative-based publishing system for granted and only work with already published papers.

This includes approaches involving semantic annotations, semantic interlinking, semantic integration, and semantic discovery, but with the semantics coming into play only after the publication of the original article. While these are interesting and important approaches, they fall short of providing a vision to transcend the current publishing paradigm.

We argue here for taking the term semantic publishing literally and work towards a vision of genuine semantic publishing, where computational tools and algorithms can help us with dealing with the wealth of human knowledge by letting researchers capture their research results with formal semantics from the start, as integral components of their publications.

We argue that these semantic components should furthermore cover at least the main claims of the work, that they should originate from the authors themselves, and that they should be fine-grained and light-weight for optimized re-usability and minimized publication overhead.

This paper is in fact not just advocating our concept, but is itself a genuine semantic publication, thereby demonstrating and illustrating our points.

URL : Genuine semantic publishing

Original location : https://content.iospress.com/articles/data-science/ds010

Individuation through infrastructure: Get Full Text Research, data extraction and the academic publishing oligopoly

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Author : Samuel Moore

This article explores the recent turn within academic publishing towards ‘seamless access’, an approach to content provision that ensures users do not have to continually authenticate in order to access journal content.

Through a critical exploration of Get Full Text Research, a service developed collaboratively by five of the world’s largest academic publishers to provide such seamless access to academic research, the article shows how publishers are seeking to control the ways in which readers access publications in order to trace, control and ultimately monetise user interactions on their platforms.

Theorised as a process of individuation through infrastructure, the article reveals how publishers are attempting an ontological shift to position the individual, quantifiable researcher, rather than the published content, at the centre of the scholarly communication universe.

The implications of the shift towards individuation are revealed as part of a broader trend in scholarly communication infrastructure towards data extraction, mirroring a trend within digital capitalism more generally.

URL : Individuation through infrastructure: Get Full Text Research, data extraction and the academic publishing oligopoly

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/3pez-w041

Investigating academic library responses to predatory publishing in the United States, Canada and Spanish-speaking Latin America

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Authors : Jairo Buitrago-Ciro, Lynne Bowker

Purpose

This is a comparative investigation of how university libraries in the United States, Canada and Spanish-speaking Latin America are responding to predatory publishing.

Design/methodology/approach

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings was used to identify the top ten universities from each of the US and Canada, as well as the top 20 Spanish-language universities in Latin America.

Each university library’s website was scrutinized to discover whether the libraries employed scholarly communication librarians, whether they offered scholarly communication workshops, or whether they shared information about scholarly communication on their websites. This information was further examined to determine if it discussed predatory publishing specifically.

Findings

Most libraries in the US/Canada sample employ scholarly communication librarians and nearly half offer workshops on predatory publishing. No library in the Latin America sample employed a scholarly communication specialist and just one offered a workshop addressing predatory publishing.

The websites of the libraries in the US and Canada addressed predatory publishing both indirectly and directly, with US libraries favoring the former approach and Canadian libraries tending towards the latter. Predatory publishing was rarely addressed directly by the libraries in the Latin America sample; however, all discussed self-archiving and/or Open Access.

Research limitations/implications

Brazilian universities were excluded owing to the researchers’ language limitations. Data were collected between September 15 and 30, 2019, so it represents a snapshot of information available at that time.

The study was limited to an analysis of library websites using a fixed set of keywords, and it did not investigate whether other campus units were involved or whether other methods of informing researchers about predatory publishing were being used.

Originality/value

The study reveals some best practices leading to recommendations to help academic libraries combat predatory publishing and improve scholarly publishing literacy among researchers.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10393/40733

Showcasing Institutional Research: Curating Library Exhibits to Support Scholarly Communication

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Authors : Devina Dandar, Jaime Clifton-Ross, Ann Dale, Rosie Croft

INTRODUCTION

To support faculty in communicating their research outcomes to the academic community and the wider public, the Royal Roads University (RRU) Library established Showcase, a physical venue in the library designed to promote institutional research.

While professional literature mainly focuses on the use of library exhibits for outreach and community engagement, more literature is needed on applying museum interpretation practices to the development of library exhibits, and the use of library exhibits for knowledge mobilization of research outcomes and promotion of institutional scholarship to the wider community.

DESCRIPTION OF SERVICE

This article discusses the Royal Roads University Library’s practices to develop the ‘Showcase’ brand by curating research-based exhibits as a scholarly communication initiative to support institutional research dissemination.

It provides a brief description of the Showcase venue and infrastructure. It then describes the processes, challenges, and lessons learned in developing three research exhibits, that is, 1) cultivating faculty partnerships; 2) reformatting academic research to multimedia formats; and 3) integrating technology to showcase scholarship.

NEXT STEPS

It concludes by outlining the next steps for developing this initiative and the practice of curating academic research exhibits.

URL : Showcasing Institutional Research: Curating Library Exhibits to Support Scholarly Communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2335

“You Need to Make it as Easy as Possible for Me”: Creating Scholarly Communication Reports for Liaison Librarians

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Authors : Jessica Lange, Carrie Hanson

INTRODUCTION

The typical trifecta of liaison librarian positions (collections, reference, and teaching) is shifting to include additional skillsets and competencies, particularly scholarly communications.

While liaison librarians adapt to these changing roles, the question of how to upskill and train liaison librarians in scholarly communications is timely and still in flux. The lack of time required to improve these competencies and skills is an oft-cited challenge.

DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT

To address the challenge of lack of time, this article describes a pilot project undertaken with the aid of a Master of Information Studies practicum student to create scholarly communications reports for liaison librarians.

These reports provide background knowledge and discipline-specific information about the scholarly communications landscape, particularly within the institutional context.

The goal of the reports is to provide liaison librarians with greater contextual knowledge of their disciplines and the publishing patterns within their departments.

This article will discuss the methodology behind creating these reports as well as feedback from liaison librarians on their relevance and potential use.

NEXT STEPS

The initial pilot was promising, however using a practicum student to create such reports may not be sustainable. Other possibilities include holding “research report retreats” for liaison librarians to complete their own reports with a scholarly communications expert on hand.

Additionally, institutions without a master’s program in library and information studies could consider the creation and updating of such reports as a backup project for existing fulltime or student staff.

URL : “You Need to Make it as Easy as Possible for Me”: Creating Scholarly Communication Reports for Liaison Librarians

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2329

Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties & Training

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Authors : Maria Bonn, Will Cross, Josh Bolick

INTRODUCTION

Scholarly communication has arisen as a core academic librarianship competency, but formal training on scholarly communication topics in LIS is rare, leaving many early career practitioners underprepared for their work.

METHODS

Researchers surveyed practitioners of scholarly communication, as defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), regarding their attitudes toward and experiences with education in scholarly communication, job responsibilities, location within their academic libraries, and thoughts about emerging trends in scholarly communication librarianship.

RESULTS

Few scholarly communication practitioners felt well-prepared by their graduate training for the core set of primary and secondary scholarly communication responsibilities that have emerged.

They deploy a range of strategies to fill the gap and would benefit from support in this area, from more robust education in graduate programs and through continued professional development.

DISCUSSION

The results of this survey support the assertion that as academic libraries and academic library work have increasingly recognized the importance of scholarly communication topics, library school curricula have not developed correspondingly.

Respondents indicated a low level of formal pedagogy on scholarly communication topics and generally felt they were not well-prepared for scholarly communication work, coming at a significant opportunity cost.

CONCLUSION

Scholarly communication practitioners should create and curate open teaching and learning content on scholarly communication topics for both continuing education as well as adoption within LIS curricula, and LIS programs should develop accordingly, either through “topics” courses or by integrating scholarly communication into and across curricula as it intersects with existing courses.

URL : Finding Our Way: A Snapshot of Scholarly Communication Practitioners’ Duties & Training

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2328