Making Scholarly Publishing Work for You: Empowering Graduate Students to Understand the Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem Through a Graduate Academy Seminar

Understanding the landscape of scholarly publishing is an essential competency for graduate students, whether they publish during their studies or after they’ve entered their professional fields. But the scholarly publishing ecosystem can be complicated to navigate, and students cannot always rely on their advisors and colleagues to demystify the processes. To help graduate students achieve their goals when sharing their research, the ScholarWorks Center for Scholarly Publishing at the Duke University Libraries (https://scholarworks.duke.edu/) taught “Navigating Scholarly Publishing,” a five-day, interdisciplinary course introducing essential aspects of scholarly communication and empowering students to make informed, proactive decisions about sharing their work. Taught by expert instructors in the ScholarWorks Center as part of Duke’s summer Graduate Academy (https://bit.ly/47ppflT), the course involved introductory readings, short lectures, forum posts, and seminar-style discussion to explore and address student questions on each day’s topic: Day One: Big Picture (copyright, technology, economics, and ethics as lenses for understanding the scholarly publishing ecosystem) Day Two: Synthesizing Your Research (how the desired audience for one’s research can influence how it’s synthesized and shared) Day Three: Publishing Your Work (legal and ethical considerations, such as copyright, licenses, and collaborations; the economics of discoverability; evaluating publishers and publishing options; APCs and subscriptions) Day Four: Measuring and Articulating Value (impact metrics; injustices hidden by research impact; measuring what we value versus valuing what we can measure) Day Five: Creating Scholarship That Lasts (factors helping or hindering accessibility and usefulness for future scholarship) These topics not only educated students about the current state of scholarly publishing but encouraged them to (1) consider the potential audience for their research before they decide how to publish it and (2) identify their own values when it comes to sharing their research. For instance, is equitable access an essential aspect of their professional moral framework? Do they need to select a journal based on impact metrics in order to advance in their career? How can they most appropriately license their work for long-term (re)usability? We invited students to discuss what research dissemination means to them and how they can operate in the current system to their advantage—and how they can make choices that might influence the future of that system. To serve graduate students is to engage them in the wider conversation and empower them to make scholarly publishing work for them. Each of the instructors will discuss their experience teaching this course: curriculum design, learning management tools, classroom interactions, content covered, student feedback, and lessons learned from the first iteration of this course. We will also discuss how our values of student empowerment and participation infused this course, and how we see libraries as critical advocates for improving publishing (rather than simply teaching students about the status quo)

Moving towards shareable metadata

A focus of digital libraries, particularly since the advent of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, is aggregating from multiple collections metadata describing digital content. However, the quality and interoperability of the metadata often prevents such aggregations from offering much more than very simple search and discovery services. Shareable metadata is metadata which can be understood and used outside of its local environment by aggregators to provide more advanced services. This paper describes shareable metadata, its characteristics, and its importance to digital library development, as well as barriers and challenges to its implementation

How Much Will This Place Cost? Creating and Maintaining Digital Scholarship Centers

The mushrooming of digital scholarship programs and centers in universities around the country and the world has led to a growing literature on the use of physical and virtual spaces in support of digital work. In this open-ended discussion a group of professionals with knowledge and experience in best practices in digital scholarship centers (DSCs) will offer insights into the process of forming functional DS spaces, including discussion of constructive failures in DSC planning. Participation in the discussion by all attendees is welcome and encouraged