The aim of this toolkit is to support early career researchers in finding a journal that publishes their paper and optimally promotes the visibility of their research. How can they find a journal with a good journal ranking score that is perceived in the respective research community? How can they find a journal that perfectly matches their topic? Should they consider publishing open access? What are predatory journals and how can they detect them?

This faculty and librarian toolkit is designed to support teaching at the intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy. The heart of the toolkit is a choose-your-own scenario activity which can be used in a flipped classroom setting or in a traditional classroom. The choose-your-own scenario activity is inspired by and adapts questions from: Hare, S. & Evanson, C. (2018). Information privilege outreach for undergraduate students. College and Research Libraries. http://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16767. Please note the survey questions are provided below, however, the survey skip logic is not included in the PDF, we recommend the link for the full experience. We also include talking points for librarians and instructors and include ways to modify the activity for students publishing information within their disciplines or for lower-division general education courses.

Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past—from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America—stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story—online open access publishing by scholarly journals—and makes a case for open access as a public good.

A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school.

Willinsky describes different types of access—the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world—and about the future of knowledge.

The goal of this resource is to support scholarly communication librarians wanting to implement accessibility measures in their open access, open education, and open data initiatives.

This short course provides training materials about how to create a set of publication data, gather additional information about the data through an API (Application Programming Interface), clean the data, and analyze the data in various ways. Developing these skills will assist academic librarians who are:

Negotiating a renewal of a journal package or an open access publishing agreement,
Interested in which journals the institution's authors published in or which repositories the institution’s authors shared their works in,
Looking to identify publications that could be added to your repository,
Searching for authors who do or do not publish OA for designing outreach programs, or
Tracking how open access choices have changed over time.
After completing the lessons, the user will be able to gain an understanding of an institution’s publishing output, such as number of publications per year, open access status of the publications, major funders of the research, estimates of how much funding might be spent towards article processing charges (APCs), and more. The user will also be better prepared to think critically about institutional publishing data to make sustainable and values-driven scholarly communications decisions.

The course is presented in two sections. Section 1 describes how to build a dataset. Section 2 describes a free, open source tool for working with data. Examples of how to do analyses both in OpenRefine and Microsoft Excel are provided.

This short course was created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook. The file "Analyzing Institutional Publishing Output-A Short Course.docx" serves as a table of contents for the materials.

Author Carpentry is a researcher-to-researcher training and outreach program in open authoring and publishing. It was initiated at the Caltech Library to enhance scientific authorship and publishing in the digital age. The aim of Author Carpentry is to promote and support good information handling tools, practices, and skills that help researchers prepare, submit, and publish contributions that add value to the scholarly record and invite others to adapt and build upon. Ideally, that means contributions that fulfill not only the original Big Four of the scholarly record – Registration, Validation, Dissemination, and Preservation - but also enable an essential fifth component of knowledge management in the digital age: Replication, Reuse, and Remixing.

Philip N. Cohen gives an overview of the scientific information ecosystem in the context of COVID-19, with an emphasis on the role of preprints.

Unit 1 of this Module gives a general overview of open access movement, its genesis, and various actors. It also relates to two other interlinked public movements, namely, open source software (OSS) movement and open educational resources (OER).

Unit 2 titled “Routes to Open Access” gives overview and definitional approaches two different routes of OA – the Green and Gold routes. It also discusses a hybrid model, where toll-access e-journals are publishing open access articles. Here, subscription-based contents and open access contents coexist in a single platform.

Unit 3 titled “Networks and Organizations Promoting Open Access” elaborates roles of different regional and international networks and organizations in promoting OA. Various OA actors and advocates are found to harmonize global OA movement through formal networks and coalitions. These networks and organizations also strengthen capacity and capability of local institutions and help them in social capital formation.

Unit 4 titled “Study of OA Mandates and Policies” elaborates different institutional and funders’ OA mandates. Some of these mandates have become model OA policies for similar institutions and organizations.

Unit 5 titled “Issues and Challenges of Open Access” discusses concerns, issues and challenges related to OA scholarly literature. No doubt, there is apprehension due to arrival of predatory OA journals in OA domain, with vested profiteering interest. But there are checks and balances to avoid such predatory journals. Due to OA advocacy and awareness raising efforts, OA knowledge producers have improved researchers’ perceptions in quality and recognition of OA literature. This Unit briefly discusses different metrics and performance indicators available for assessing OA scholarly literature.

Slides from the Keynote talk given at Virginia Tech Open Access Week on 20 October 2020. See the full presentation recording and panel discussion at https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/100682.

Virginia Tech's Open Access Week 2020 keynote speaker, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd, Research Policy Manager (Publications) at Loughborough University in the UK, gives a talk about how what we reward through recruitment, promotion and tenure processes is not always what we actually value about research activity. The talk explores how we can pursue value-led evaluations - and how we can persuade senior leaders of their benefits.

The keynote talk is followed by a panel discussion with faculty members at Virginia Tech: Thomas Ewing (Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of History), Carla Finkielstein (Associate Professor of Biological Sciences), Bikrum Gill (Assistant Professor of Political Science), and Sylvester Johnson (Professor and Director of the Center for Humanities. The panel is moderated by Tyler Walters (Dean, University Libraries).

The slides from this presentation are in Loughborough University's repository under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/presentation/Counting_what_counts_in_recruitment_promotion_and_tenure/13113860

This open access book is tailored to educators and librarians to teach them more about how to use and apply creative commons licenses. The book covers the basics of copyright law and licensing, as well as how to choose, find, and use creative commons licensed materials. There is an entire section of the book specifically dedicated to creative commons for educators and librarians, including chapters on open access to scholarship, open pedagogy, open educational resources, and more.

Some research funders have a mandate for data resulting from their funded research to be shared. This presentation provides a general definition of data sharing and how scholars can identify and follow data sharing mandates.

In this deep dive session, we discuss the current model of scholarly publishing, and highlight the challenges and limitations of this model of research dissemination. We then focus on the value of open access and elaborate on different open access levels (Gold, Bronze, and Green), before discussing how preprints/postprints may be leveraged to promote open access.

Bryan Cook and Stacy Shaw provide an introduction to preprints with a focus on their contributions and limitations in the context of current models of scholarly publishing. We discuss various "levels" of open access publishing (Gold, Bronze, and Green), and how the use of preprints can supplement some of the limitations of these common open access publishing models. Research on the use of preprints are highlighted, and we discuss how preprints/postprints may be leveraged to promote open access.

Differentiating open access and open educational resource can be a challenge in some contexts. Excellent resources such as "How Open Is It?: A Guide for Evaluating the Openness of Journals" (CC BY) https://sparcopen.org/our-work/howopenisit created by SPARC, PLOS, and OASPA greatly aid us in understanding the relative openness of journals. However, visual resources to conceptually differentiate open educational resources (OER) from resources disseminated using an open access approach do not currently exist. Until now.

This one page introductory guide differentiates OER and OA materials on the basis of purpose (teaching vs. research), method of access (analog and digital), and in terms of the relative freedoms offered by different levels of Creative Commons licenses, the most common open license. Many other open licenses, including open software licenses also exist.

DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

This link will take you to DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals. The following is from their home page:

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 50% of which comes from sponsors and 50% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

Open access has been identified as a way to support diversity, equity and inclusion in new publishing models, compared to inequities in traditional publishing models.Despite the open movement being decades old, there is still a gap in research on Black, Indigenous, and faculty of color (BIPOC) in the context of open access. Understanding the motivations for and barriers against Open Access (OA) publishing (and the relationships between them) among BIPOC faculty helps LIS practitioners and Open advocates design incentives to increase participation and decrease lack of knowledge and stigma around OA.

In 2020, Camille Thomas served as co-PI on a research team that designed an original qualitative study (Perceptions of Open Access Publishing among Black, Indigenous, and people of color Faculty, forthcoming College & Research Libraries) that uncovers ways in which pre-tenure and tenured BIPOC perceive attitudes towards the legitimacy of open access publishing, especially as it relates to their own tenure and promotion processes. This study illuminates how their perceptions motivate or diminish their own interest in and adoption of open access as well as their level of advocacy for open access in their field, campus, and department, et al.

To foster practical application of outreach needs based on responses from the study, this resource includes:
- Readings
- Discussion questions
- Sample Scenarios, Events and Initiatives
- Assignments

Assignments were specifically created for developing strategic initiatives and outreach to support marginalized scholars. While these materials do not seek to solve systemic issues in academic research, they will encourage building equitable open infrastructure and an inclusive culture when discussing open access at institutions. This resource provides hands-on assignments to integrate inclusive practices in outreach and technical work. It will prepare students for practical experience with open advocacy and encourage deliberate outreach planning, execution and assessment as scholarly communication continues to evolve.

Learning Objectives
To understand diverse needs of researchers and scholars based on their positionality and intersectionality (student, post-doc, research topics, discipline and departmental culture, identities)
To identify when encouraging open may harm researchers or communities
To develop messaging that highlights social justice through open access’ benefits of transparency, access and non-traditional formats
To develop strategic initiatives that address the unique needs of an institution and its surrounding community
To develop advocacy, leadership and management skills by planning, executing and assessing strategic initiatives

An open educational resource

Short Description:
An open educational resource to introduce ethical and policy considerations which apply to digitizing traditional knowledge.

Long Description:
Ethical and Policy Considerations for Digitizing Traditional Knowledge is a comprehensive instructional resource designed to introduce library professionals to the ethical and policy issues which accompany the digitization of traditional knowledge collections. This instructional resource includes a lesson plan, a slide deck, a case study with accompanying worksheet, and an annotated bibliography. Instructors will lead students through a lesson plan which includes identification of prior knowledge, direct instruction, guided practice and independent practice. Through this “I do, we do, you do” approach, students will learn about the definition of traditional knowledge, how and why it might be preserved, ethical considerations when preserving it, and examples of traditional knowledge collections. The resource also includes an opportunity for students to work through an authentic case study from a library which digitized a traditional knowledge collection. Using a worksheet that includes guided criteria, students can review the case study to determine how the community was considered within each stage of the digital content lifecycle. The resource also includes background reading on digitizing and preserving traditional knowledge with brief annotations for both instructors and students.

Word Count: 3900

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)