7 Things You Didn't Know about Scholarly Communication!

Scholarly Communication Librarian Katie Pierce Farrier 

ACRL describes scholarly communication as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use (Association of College & Research Libraries, “Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication 1,” 2003).  
 
Scholarly Communication is broad topic with many overlapping goals. Copyright impacts author rights, which impact open access, which impact bibliometrics, and so on. Depending on the needs of the faculty and the goals of the university, scholarly communication can help faculty and researchers:

1. Be more successful and impactful in their fields.

Scholarly Communication can help researchers at any stage, from finding open resources to begin initial research, to understanding your rights as an author and finding journals to publish in, to long term storage and dissemination of your work.

2. Avoid predatory publishers.

I can offer publishing guidance if you’re being asked to peer edit for a journal on topics you don’t specialize in, or you’re looking at publishing in a journal that you are unsure about their peer review, editing, or publishing standards.

3. Protect author rights.

I can help authors understand the full extent of their rights, help find addendums to protect author rights, and help find publishers that allow authors to keep more rights. I can also offer guidance on different types of licensing options for their works.

4. Track a researcher’s impact and bibliometrics.

There are several tools, databases, and ways to measure the impact of your work, such as how many times an article has been cited and/or downloaded. I can also help find a specific journal’s impact factor and other citation metrics.

5. Manage the research data life cycle.  

I can help find open data sources for researchers, help find repositories to house your data and share with other researchers, help manage the research data life cycle, offer advice on navigating funder mandates for storage, access, and retention of data.

6. Find and promote Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER).

I function as an advocate for OA resources. I can advise researchers on the benefits of publishing in OA journals, the different types of OA journals, and I can help faculty find OERs for their classes.

7. Understand copyright.

I can offer people guidance on copyright, public domain, fair use and its applications for the classroom.