Introduction to Scholarly Communication

Academic professionals are sharing their research, scholarship, and creative works in more formats and to wider audiences than ever before. As this system of communication evolves, the opportunities for scholars expand, and so do their responsibilities as both consumers and producers of information. Maximizing the influence of our work means understanding and managing how it is affected by various methods of dissemination, evaluation, access, and preservation. This session will introduce the system of scholarly communication and highlight the issues most pertinent to graduate students and early career researchers

Researcher Profiles and IDs: Taking Control of Your Online Identity

Researcher profiles and unique identifiers increase your visibility as a scholar and creator while differentiating your work from the work of others. It is becoming commonplace for publishers and funders to require the use of certain identifiers and for some profiles, such as Google Scholar, to be automatically generated for you. It is important to intentionally manage your online presence so that your work is accurately represented and to promote your research, showcase your achievements, and attract collaborators and funders. This session will review different types of researcher profiles and identifiers and help attendees establish a realistic strategy for managing their scholarly identity online

Activity: Source Evaluation Scorecard

This tool builds upon the commonly used CRAAP Test for evaluating resources through the addition of a scoring system. The scoring system helps students turn their qualitative judgements about a source into a numerical figure that they can then use in their determination of whether or not to use the source. The tool is accompanied by the questions and elements that go along with each of the five criterion of the test. Students are encouraged to consider all elements of each criterion before assigning it a simplified score. Then students add up all five scores for a total that is used to categorize the strength of the source as a whole. Rather than simply rely on this total, students use this added information to think critically about why a source earned this score and as a guide for moving forward. The scoring system relates the strengths and limitations of a single source to one another, as well as compares and relates the variety of sources that students are considering for use in their paper or assignment. It has particular application to assignments that require students to select and cite only a small number of sources. This resource can be used in an activity or as a stand-alone tool to be used routinely by students. Editing files and instructions are included for customization

Growing Library Presence and Information Literacy Beyond the One-Shot: The NINJA Project

The limitations of one-shot library instruction have birthed innovative techniques by librarians that include the use of embedding and flipped-learning models. The implementation of these techniques requires buy-in from and relationship-building with teaching faculty, and is accompanied by variables that fluctuate widely between disciplines, personalities, and teaching styles. Via collaboration that aimed to emphasize the research process in an Argumentation & Debate course (COMM 211), a liaison librarian and Communication Studies professor developed a playful approach to the research process that also informs the process of moving one-shot library instruction into more engaged models. The original concept, which uses the acronym “NINJA”, guides students through research from navigating a topic to appraising their final product. When the approach is applied to embedding librarianship, the same steps act as a road map in the adventure of collaborating with any teaching faculty in order to more fully integrate library services and information literacy into their courses

Black & White Response in a Gray Area: Faculty and Predatory Publishing

This study focuses on faculty knowledge, experiences, and attitudes regarding fraudulent journal operations. Many definitions presented to researchers contain two primary aspects to describe these intentional perpetra­tors: 1) the chief motivation to profit monetarily, and 2) the misleading promise of and failure to deliver on indicators of quality, such as peer review. While this definition is simple on its surface, when put into practice it often expands into discussions of poor or unethical practices by journal publishers. It is common to find lists of grievances clarifying acts that signal predatory or unethical practices, which are used to broadly classify jour­nals as either predatory (“blacklists”) or reputable (“whitelists”). Jeffrey Beall’s lists of “potential, possible, or probably predatory” publishers and standalone journals have been the popular method of combatting predatory journals. Beall relied on 28 indicators of predatory practices and 26 indicators of poor practices. Now, Cabell’s Blacklist Violations include 64 considerations when determining the status of a journal. These manifold criteria are indicative of the impossibility of binary journal evaluation, as many journals are neither black nor white, but somewhere in the gray between. The discussion of predatory journals thus expands from overt scams to include scam-like journals or those with lower provision of quality or service. Therefore, “predatory publishing” encompasses a far broader range of publishing practices than those that are completely fraudulent. The difficulty scholars encounter delineating between reputable and predatory practices, along with their disparate publication practices, prompted the present study to explore what publishing faculty know about the phenomenon and their attitudes toward it. This exploration began with broadly investigating the publishing practices of faculty through interviews, which revealed a benchmark from which to begin conversations with faculty on our campus. With the results from this study, we will develop a survey instrument that more specifically examines faculty interactions with predatory journals

A Predatory Primer: What Every Librarian Should Know About Problem Publishers

Researchers and faculty are talking about predatory publishers within the academic literature. How scholars come to know about and interact with deceptive publishers has evolved and matured since they first garnered attention a little over a decade ago, and thus, how we as information professionals approach this topic must adapt and mature. The issue of “predatory journals” is deceptively simplistic, but its underlying complexities extend the conversation into a variety of topical concerns in librarianship. Such conversations include questions about the consequences of journal labeling and categorization, the use of pejorative or racially-charged terminology in such labeling, the new challenges for open access and start-up publishers, the relationships between journal reputation and diversity, the unidentified consequences of publishing in low-quality journals, and the overall academic publication system

Flipped Library Sessions: Customized Instruction that Prioritizes Applied Information Literacy Learning

Time constraints often restrict the instruction of unique research skills required by a given subject area. By collaborating with instructors, librarians can offer flexible and efficient content that improves student information literacy skills. Meet librarians who have implemented various flipped methods and tools for distinct instructor and course needs

Collaborating on Flipped Library Sessions: 8 Best Practices for Faculty & Librarians

Library instruction varies in format but often manifests in the librarian teaching a single, isolated class session—what librarians refer to as a “one-shot.” Many challenges accompany this traditional format, including time-constraints, disengaged audiences, and little understanding on the part of the student as to how the library instruction integrates with course content. Flipped Learning methods can help counter these challenges even when the overall course is not based on a flipped model. They liberate librarians and faculty from the one-shot model and expand opportunities for library instruction to occur at multiple times in a course, to be delivered virtually or in person, and to invoke a broader range of educational tools. We offer eight best practices for those who are interested in exploring flipped methods for incorporating library content into a course

Scholarly Communication Competencies Self-Assessment

This self-assessment instrument is intended to: •understand librarian competencies and experiences regarding core areas of scholarly communications in order to improve research support services; assist with planning departmental and individual liaison goals related to research and scholarly communication support; help inform scholarly communication professional development for the department; and create a collaborative, non-punitive, and effective assessment process of research support