This handout provides a brief overview of open access to scholarly literature. It looks at the problems with traditional journal publishing, the promise of open access as a solution, and the different paths to open access.

The Publishing Trap is an open educational board game designed to teach researchers, academics, doctoral students, librarians and other professionals in higher education about the impact of publishing and scholarly communication choices they make throughout their career. Following the COVID-19 pandemic the game has been shifted to be played online using virtual classroom / webinar software (e.g Zoom, Microsoft Teams). The team nature of the game requires break-out room functionality to allow each team to confer during each round of the game.

The focus of this resource is primarily on the underrepresented area of publicly engaged scholarship. It addresses a wide range of MLIS students and LIS professionals based at universities, especially those whose mission explicitly encompasses engaged scholarship initiatives. The resource also spotlights publicly engaged publishing initiatives that provide examples of scholarly communications projects with social justice values such as equity, access, fairness, inclusivity, respect, ethics, and trust deeply embedded in their design. 

While examples shared in the first iteration of the resource will focus on model practices primarily in North America, the values-based nature of the resource will have global appeal. This resource describes the publishing challenges that publicly engaged scholars often encounter and offers a framework for tackling these challenges. Video interviews and insights are included to provide a range of viewpoints from scholars, advocates, and instructors.

A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies.

The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. The contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.

This lesson on the nature and cost of scholarly publishing could be taught by
itself, or as part of a series on scholarly communication, or as a small part of a larger lesson on
information privilege.

SI 615 - This is a special topics seminar focusing on the current state of Ňdigital librariesÓ broadly defined. The seminar is multi-disciplinary in focus and in method, covering the history of the idea, its manifestation as projects and programs in academic, non-profit, and research settings, and the suite of policy issues that influence their development and growth. The concept of the digital library will serve as an intellectual construct within which to explore the related concepts of scholarly communication, digital preservation, cyberinfrastructure, representation, and information technology standards. Given the seminar format, students will be expected to master a diverse literature, to participate actively in the discussion of issues, and to take steps, collectively and individually, to advance our understanding of future directions of digital libraries.

This guide will help you determine whether open access is right for you and your work and, if so, how to make your work openly accessible. This primer on open access explains what “open access” means, addresses common concerns and misconceptions you may have about open access, and provides you with practical steps to take if you wish to make your work openly accessible.

This guide has been created by bibliometric practitioners to support other users of InCites, a research analytics tool from Clarivate Analytics that uses bibliographic data from Web of Science; the guide promotes a community of informed and responsible use of research impact metrics. The recommendations in this document may be more suited to other academic sector users, but the authors hope that other users may also benefit from the suggestions. The guide aims to provide plain-English definitions, key strengths and weaknesses and some practical application tips for some of the most commonly-used indicators available in InCites. The indicator definitions are followed by explanations of the data that powers InCites, attempting to educate users on where the data comes from and how the choices made in selecting and filtering data will impact on final results. Also in this document are a comparative table to highlight differences between indicators in InCites and SciVal, another commonly used bibliometric analytic programme, and instructions on how to run group reports. All of the advice in this document is underpinned by a belief in the need to use InCites in a way that respects the limitations of indicators as quantitative assessors of research outputs. Both of the authors are members of signatory institutions of DORA, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. A summary of advice to using indicators and bibliometric data responsibly is available on pages 4-5 and should be referred to throughout. Readers are also recommended to refer to the official InCites Indicators Handbook produced by Clarivate Analytics. The guide was written with complete editorial independence from Clarivate Analytics, the owners of InCites. Clarivate Analytics supported the authors of this document with checking for factual accuracy only.

This guide is designed to help those who use SciVal, a research analytics tool from Elsevier that sources bibliographic data from Scopus, to source and apply bibliometrics in academic institutions. It was originally devised in February 2018 by Dr. Ian Rowlands of King’s College London as a guide for his university, which makes SciVal widely available to its staff. King’s does this because it believes that bibliometric data are best used in context by specialists in the field. A small group of LIS-Bibliometrics committee members reviewed and revised the King’s guide to make it more applicable to a wider audience. SciVal is a continually updated source and so feedback is always welcome at LISBibliometrics@jiscmail.ac.uk. LIS-Bibliometrics is keen that bibliometric data should be used carefully and responsibly and this requires an understanding of the strengths and limitations of the indicators that SciVal publishes.

The purpose of this Guide is to help researchers and professional services staff to make the most meaningful use of SciVal. It includes some important `inside track’ insights and practical tips that may not be found elsewhere. The scope and coverage limitations of SciVal are fairly widely understood and serve as a reminder that these metrics are not appropriate in fields where scholarly communication takes place mainly outside of the journals and conference literature. This is one of the many judgment calls that need to be made when putting bibliometric data into their proper context. One of the most useful features of SciVal is the ability to drill down in detail using various filters. This allows a user to define a set of publications accurately, but that may mean generating top level measures that are based on small samples with considerable variance. Bibliometrics distributions are often highly skewed, where even apparently simple concepts like the `average’ can be problematic. So one objective of this Guide is to set out some advice on sample sizes and broad confidence intervals, to avoid over-interpreting the headline data. Bibliometric indicators should always be used in combination, not in isolation, because each can only offer partial insights. They should also be used in a 'variable geometry' along with other quantitative and qualitative indicators, including expert judgments and non-publication metrics, such as grants or awards, to flesh out the picture.

This Workshop in a Box (WIB) contains everything you need to prepare for and deliver a workshop for faculty, researchers, and students on open access. After attending this workshop, participants will have a better understanding as to whether open access is right for them and their works and, if so, how to make their works openly accessible.

In this webinar, a panel discusses licensing options, fundamentals in choosing a license for your research, and answers questions about licensing scholarship. The panel consists of moderator Joanna Schimizzi, Professional Learning Specialist at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, along with panelists Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy, University of Virginia Library and Becca Neel, Assistant Director for Resource Management & User Experience, University of Southern Indiana for an informative discussion on licensing your research. Accessible and further resources for this event are available on OSF: https://osf.io/s4wdf/