Faculty Learning Communities are a positive way for libraries to engage academic staff in scholarly communication.

The stakes and politics of research and scholarship are different depending on discipline, department, and institution, and as such, increasing awareness of scholarly communication is fraught with difficulty. Librarians Jennifer Bazeley and Jen Waller share their experience developing a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) in order to address the issues. Cultivating awareness of the entire scholarly communication landscape created stronger faculty advocates for change, but key differences emerged between longer established and newer faculty members

Engrossed, Enraged, Engaged: Empowering Faculty in Transforming Scholarly Communication

Librarians are deeply invested in the scholarly publishing lifecycle. This investment, in tandem with an evolving scholarly communication system, has encouraged librarians to become advocates for transformation in this landscape. At the same time, some faculty members have been slower to understand the complexities of the current system and its evolution. At Miami University, traditional communication methods weren’t sufficient to meaningfully engage faculty in these evolving trends. As a response, several librarians designed and cofacilitated two Scholarly Communication Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) for two academic years. These FLCs have been the most successful method of increasing faculty understanding about scholarly communication and academic publishing issues. The FLCs brought together university community members comprised of faculty, staff, and graduate students interested in learning more about scholarly communication. Each group spent two semesters doing readings, attending panel presentations, and meeting for seminar‐style discussions about current issues and trends in scholarly publishing. Over the course of the year, FLC members became more aware of the nuances in the lifecycle of scholarly publication and learned which scholarly communication issues affected them most. As a result, the cofacilitators saw a rapidly growing understanding about problems inherent in the current system of scholarly publishing, a substantial increase in faculty discussions on scholarly communication, and greater faculty‐led advocacy for open access publishing. Additionally, community members appreciated the crossdisciplinary nature of the FLC, which afforded them the opportunity to escape traditional disciplinary silos. This article will discuss how the facilitators used the learning community format to successfully change faculty behavior about issues in scholarly communication and how these experiences altered librarian perceptions and improved interactions with faculty

Teaching Communities of Faculty About Scholarly Communication

This article by Jennifer Bazeley and Jen Waller originally appeared on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog as “Faculty Learning Communities are a positive way for libraries to engage academic staff in scholarly communication” and was re-posted under the Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0).The stakes and politics of research and scholarship are different depending on discipline, department, and institution, and as such, increasing awareness of scholarly communication is fraught with difficulty. Librarians Jennifer Bazeley and Jen Waller share their experience developing a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) in order to address the issues. Cultivating awareness of the entire scholarly communication landscape created stronger faculty advocates for change, but key differences emerged between longer established and newer faculty members

Keep the Change: Clusters of Faculty Opinion on Open Access

The authors discovered faculty opinions about open access by employing Q methodology, a research method combining qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze subjects' attitudes about a given topic. Q methodology, using three main steps, identifies and isolates opinion types. The first step is the collection of subjective statements, largely from qualitative interviews. The next step, called the Q-sort, involves subjects sorting these statements along a continuum. Finally, Q-sort results are analyzed using a statistical technique called factor analysis. Using specialized software, factor analysis generates clusters of opinions. In this Q study, factor analysis revealed three distinct factors that outlined clusters of faculty opinions about open access. The authors described these factors as “Evangelists,” “Pragmatists,” and “Traditionalists.” Each of these factors represents a group of faculty on Miami University’s Oxford campus who hold specific attitudes and opinions regarding open access. Implications for future library initiatives implementing open access programs, services, and policies are discussed, as are directions for additional research

Engrossed, Enraged, Engaged: Empowering Faculty in Transforming Scholarly Communication

Conference Proceedings - Charleston Library Conference 2014Librarians are deeply invested in the scholarly publishing lifecycle. This investment, in tandem with an evolving scholarly communication system, has encouraged librarians to become advocates for transformation in this landscape. At the same time, some faculty members have been slower to understand the complexities of the current system and its evolution. At Miami University, traditional communication methods weren’t sufficient to meaningfully engage faculty in these evolving trends. As a response, several librarians designed and co-facilitated two Scholarly Communication Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) for two academic years. These FLCs have been the most successful method of increasing faculty understanding about scholarly communication and academic publishing issues. The FLCs brought together university community members comprised of faculty, staff, and graduate students interested in learning more about scholarly communication. Each group spent two semesters doing readings, attending panel presentations, and meeting for seminar‐style discussions about current issues and trends in scholarly publishing. Over the course of the year, FLC members became more aware of the nuances in the lifecycle of scholarly publication and learned which scholarly communication issues affected them most. As a result, the co-facilitators saw a rapidly growing understanding about problems inherent in the current system of scholarly publishing, a substantial increase in faculty discussions on scholarly communication, and greater faculty‐led advocacy for open access publishing. Additionally, community members appreciated the cross-disciplinary nature of the FLC, which afforded them the opportunity to escape traditional disciplinary silos. This article will discuss how the facilitators used the learning community format to successfully change faculty behavior about issues in scholarly communication and how these experiences altered librarian perceptions and improved interactions with faculty

The After-College Search

What\u27s that? A light at the end of the tunnel! It\u27s been four long years (or is that five years? Six?) and you are ready to graduate . But to get to that light, you have to be on the tracks. That means resumes, cover letters, internships, job searches and treks to the career services office. Got it together? Turn the page and let ethos help

Dissertation-to-Book Publication Patterns Among a Sample of R1 Institutions

INTRODUCTION: A common concern about openly available electronic theses and dissertations is that their “openness” will prevent graduate student authors from publishing their work commercially in the future. A handful of studies have explored aspects of this topic; this study reviewed dissertation-to-book publication patterns at Carnegie Classification R1 academic institutions. METHODS: This study analyzed over 23,000 dissertations from twelve U.S. universities to determine how frequently dissertations were subsequently published as books matching the original dissertation in pagination, chapters, and subject matter. WorldCat and several other resources were used to make publication determinations. RESULTS: Across the sample set, a very small percentage of dissertations were published as books that matched the original dissertation on pagination, chapters, and subject matter. The average number of years for dissertations in the study to be published as books was determined for broad subject categories and for select academic disciplines. Results were compared across public and private institutions, and books that were self-published or published by questionable organizations were identified. DISCUSSION: Dissertation-to-book trends occur primarily in the social sciences, humanities, and arts. With dissertations for which the author is actively working to publish as a book, the commonly offered 6- to 24-month embargo periods appear sufficient, provided that extensions or renewals continue to be available. CONCLUSION: This study has implications for librarians providing services to graduate students, faculty advisors, and graduate colleges/schools in regard to dissertation embargo lengths, self-publishing, and what we have termed questionable publishers, as these areas continue to provide opportunities for librarians to educate these stakeholders.YesJLSC uses a double anonymous review process for peer-reviewed submissions, meaning the authors' and reviewers' identities are not revealed to each other during review. For articles where it would be difficult to fully anonymize the author, we allow authors to opt into a semi-anonymous review, where the author's affiliation is not anonymized in the manuscript. In no case is the author's name shared with the reviewers. Published articles will indicate which type of review the article underwent (semi- or fully anonymous). The editor(s) will perform an initial review of all submitted manuscripts and may reject papers that are clearly outside of the scope of the journal. Manuscripts within the scope will be sent to at least two reviewers. Reviewers will not receive or be able to view any documentation or metadata that includes individually identifiable author information. Authors will be provided with similarly anonymized reviewer comments to aid in the revision of their manuscripts. The review and revision process takes, on average, twelve weeks, with an initial decision within 5 weeks. Authors may not submit the manuscript to other publications while a review is in progress

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

From Start-Up to Adolescence: University of Oklahoma’s OER Efforts

In February, 2013, University of Oklahoma (OU) president, David Boren, issued a letter to all OU faculty members highlighting the high cost of textbooks, expressing his strong “support for the move to open access materials in teaching and research,” and a charge to carefully “evaluate whether our textbooks and course materials add value to the educational experience equal to their cost to our students.” President Boren’s letter also announced the imminent hiring of one of the nation’s first full-time librarians dedicated solely to OER. This case study describes OU’s OER initiatives – from Boren’s letter to the present – with a specific focus on the Alternative Textbook Grant, which in 2017 was on track to save students over $1,000,000 in textbook costs. Case study sub-topics include grant program development, strategies for outreach and adoption, program funding, and resources. The chapter is practical in nature and discusses how the program has matured from its infancy as a start-up initiative to its current evolving – and sometimes challenging – “adolescent phase.” Authors include Stacy Zemke, OU’s first OER Coordinator; Cody Taylor, OU’s OER Student Assistant for three years and now an Emerging Technologies Librarian at OU, and Jen Waller, who took over the OER Coordinator role in May 2016. This collaborative authorship provides a case study that examines OU’s OER initiatives – including its struggles – from the people who have been directly involved with establishing, growing, and developing it.Ye

Engaging Faculty in Scholarly Communication Change: A Learning Community Approach

INTRODUCTION As the landscape of scholarly communication and open access continues to shift, it remains important for academic librarians to continue educating campus stakeholders about these issues, as well as to create faculty advocates on campus. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Three librarians at Miami University created a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Scholarly Communication to accomplish this. The FLC, composed of faculty, graduate students, staff, and librarians, met throughout the academic year to read and discuss topics such as open access, journal economics, predatory publishing, alternative metrics (altmetrics), open data, open peer review, etc. NEXT STEPS The members of the FLC provided positive evaluations about the community and the topics about which they learned, leading the co-facilitators to run the FLC for a second year. The library’s Scholarly Communication Committee is creating and implementing a scholarly communication website utilizing the structure and content identified by the 2012-2013 FLC