Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here. You’ll note that many of these are issues that have been important to the CNI agenda in recent years, and I’ve included a few references to some of these materials

Updating the Agenda for Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communications

This issue of C&RL is focused on scholarly communication, and it seems appropriate, in this invited guest editorial, to step back and examine the broader agenda that academic and research libraries need to consider today in engaging with scholarly communications as a way of framing the issue. My view is that this agenda is ripe for re-thinking. The overall environment has changed significantly in the last few years, underscoring the growing irrelevance of some long-held ideas, and at the same time, clearly identifying new and urgent priorities. What I hope to do here is to summarize very succinctly my thoughts on the most pressing issues and the areas most needing reconsideration. Articles in this issue touch upon aspects of many of these topics; I hope that future authors may also find topical inspirations here. You’ll note that many of these are issues that have been important to the CNI agenda in recent years, and I’ve included a few references to some of these materials

The IR has Two Faces: Positioning Institutional Repositories for Success

This article will describe ongoing efforts at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries to evolve the role of the institutional repository (IR) and to effectively position it within the context of the Libraries’ collections, research support, and scholarly communication services. A major component of this process is re-examining the fundamental aims of the IR and aligning it to the Libraries and the campus strategic goals. The authors situate UNLV Libraries’ experience within the context of the current literature to provide background and reasoning for our decision to pursue two, at times conflicting, aims for the IR: one for scholarly communication and another for research administration

Green v. Gold, or Chatter About How Green OA is Not Cutting It

Andrée Rathemacher\u27s prompts for a discussion at the 2017 Boston OA Advocates Meeting, which took place on July 19, 2017 at Lamont Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Also included as supplementary files are presentation slides and the meeting agenda

Medical Institutional Repositories in a Changing Scholarly Communication Landscape

An institutional repository (IR) is an online digital archive that organizes, preserves, and provides access to the educational, scholarly, and research output of an institution. Medical libraries began establishing IRs more than a decade ago and these repositories have become an important component of scholarly communication outreach. In an article in the 2014 Against the Grain health and biomedical sciences special issue, Palmer described institutional repository services provided by health sciences libraries, and the barriers and challenges to providing those services. What has changed since 2014? What is the current landscape for repositories in medical and health sciences libraries

From the Ground Up: A Group Editorial on the Most Pressing Issues in Scholarly Communication

A group editorial from the Editorial Board of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication in the Context of Digital Literacy: Navigation and Decision Making in a Complex Landscape

As digital technologies have come to dominate the conduct and dissemination of scholarship, seasoned and budding scholars alike may have little knowledge of what happens with the data that are gathered from their scholarly products, online profiles, and community platforms. Growing commercialization, mergers, buyouts, and venture capital investment lend credence to the idea of research results as “big data” to be mined and scholarly communication as “big business”. The scope of the issues that now govern the funding and sharing of knowledge is formidable and international. How does one even begin to understand what is needed to navigate and make decisions in such a complex environment? Not just a concern of faculty, these issues can have profound influence on student learning, academic services, and society at large. Scholarly communication is often viewed as a mechanistic and closed system; we should reframe it in a larger context and apply concepts of digital literacy and social justice

Open access: a journey from impossible to probable, but still uncertain

An overview of the evolution of open access (OA) to scientific publications over the last 20 years is presented. This retrospective look allows us to make two observations that seem to overlap: on the one hand, how close the initial objective seems to be to what initially seemed utopian and, on the other, the unanticipated and solid obstacles that open access has encountered along the way, as well as the unexpected and diverse solutions that are emerging to overcome them. The overall assessment of OA is positive, and it underscores that open access is (or is becoming) possible, that it is good, and that it is necessary. However, this overall positive evolution has come up against two major obstacles that are slowing its progress: the double payments generated by hybrid journals (subscription and article processing charges [APCs]) and the unchecked growth in APCs. In addition, this intensive use of APCs is creating a publishing gap between publishers that charge fees to authors and those that do not, and ultimately, it is causing dissension regarding the (previously shared) strategy toward open access. There are no immediate, one-off solutions to overcome the aforementioned dysfunctions, although three actions that, in the medium term, can remedy them can be mentioned: changing the approach to the evaluation of science, adopting measures to regulate APCs, and promoting alternative publication models. Finally, it should be noted that OA has acted as the vanguard and spearhead of a broader movement: that of open science

Access to Open Educational Resources during the Pandemic: the case of the OER Community in the Portuguese Open University Repository

The COVID-19 pandemic that affected the world in 2020 and 2021, imposed important changes in teaching and learning processes in many institutions, notably in Higher Education. During this period teachers and students had to access online quality resources which increased the importance of Open Educational Resources (OER). Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University) is the only university, in the Portuguese higher education context, that includes in its institutional repository an autonomous OER community. It was considered of particular interest to analyse access to resources made available in the OER community during the pandemic, verifying whether this scenario had an influence on access and download numbers. Results show that the number of OER archived in the repositories has been growing, but the most relevant difference is between years 2018 and 2019. During the analyzed two years of the pandemic (2020 and 2021) the number of new deposits had remain stable, but the number of these resources’ downloads is very significant showing an increase during the pandemic period. We conclude that this increase in use should be considered a valid argument to justify more internal actions to support the strengthening of the OER collection at the UAb, especially in the scientific areas with fewer deposits.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Evolving Institutional Repository Landscape

Advances in technology affecting content creation and digital dissemination continue to reshape the role of academic libraries. The impact of these changes requires reimagining a strategy for the library built around digital collections–not only those acquired from publishers but the growing variety of files created in the development of scholarship and learning. Institutional Repositories (IRs) are emerging as a vehicle for new directions in how libraries can support the academic community both locally and globally. To gain insights and gather data on IR operations, we conducted interviews, an open survey, and web research to obtain a snapshot of the current perspective and potential role of IRs in a changing landscape. Relevant data and comments in italics from the survey are included throughout this report to provide examples and a better understanding of the variety of applications of IRs and the complexity of the broader environment. Of 151 survey participants, 93% are academic and 85% are academic institutions in North America. Worldwide institutions are scattered across Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Further analysis reflects a market pattern of widespread participation that is greatest in larger institutions in each academic category, but also includes community colleges, hospitals, corporations, government, not-for-profits, a funder, and a national park. A full summary of survey results is included as an appendix to this white paper