In 2016 the LIS-Bibliometrics Forum commissioned the development of a set of bibliometric competencies (2017 Model), available at https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2017-competencies-archived/. The work, sponsored by a small research grant from Elsevier Research Intelligence Division, was led by Dr. Andrew Cox at the University of Sheffield, and Dr. Sabrina Petersohn of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. The aim of the competency statements was to ensure that bibliometric practitioners were equipped to do their work responsibly and well.

The Competency Model was updated in July 2021 and includes a colour gradient to reflect the Levels and how they build upon one another. In particular, the 2021 competencies can help:

To identify skills gaps
To support progression through career stages for practitioners in the field of bibliometrics
To prepare job descriptions

The work underpinning the paper is available here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0961000617728111. It is intended that the competencies are a living document and will be reviewed over time.

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.

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.

We envision a future scholarly community in which the process, content, and outcomes of research are openly accessible by default.

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.

The signatories of the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication support recommendations to keep research international and multilingual to be adopted by policy-makers, leaders, universities, research institutions, research funders, libraries, and researchers. This initiative helps to support bibliodiversity, protect locally relevant research, and promote language diversity in research evaluation. Signatories, events, media, and more information can be found at https://www.helsinki-initiative.org/

This guide provides a means to identify the core components of OA and how they are implemented across the spectrum between “Open Access” and “Closed Access”. Journals have built policies that vary widely across the six fundamental aspects of OA – reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability. This, in turn, has caused confusion among authors seeking to make informed publishing decisions, funders seeking to formulate and enforce their access policies, and other stakeholders within the research ecosystem. The HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Guide consolidates the key elements of journal policies into a single, easy-to-follow resource that interested parties can use to move the conversation beyond the deceptively simple question of, “Is It Open Access?” toward a more productive evaluation of “How Open Is It?”.

Step-by-step guidance about how to make peer-reviewed research articles and unrefereed preprints available open access.

HuMetricsHSS supports the creation of values-based frameworks to guide all kinds of scholarly process, and to promote the nurturing of a values-enacted approach to academia writ large. During the 2016 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI), the authors sketched a preliminary set of core values for enriching scholarship, highlighting five: Equity, Openness, Collegiality, Quality, Community. They created a framework which is intended to help transform how scholarship is created, assessed, and valued in the humanities.

At the workshops and in the toolkit, they emphasize that values are locally negotiated and frameworks locally built. That’s the explicit point of the workshop, to make space for open conversation about values and their meaning, to come to agreement on what matters for a given group, and then to work on constructing a framework that could be used to guide evaluation in the academy — whether that’s through the tenure and promotion process, the setting of annual goals, the hiring of new faculty, or decision-making about what kinds of digitization projects to take on, what kinds of collections to develop, or what kinds of projects to publish at an academic press.

Journal article abstract: With the help of academic search engine optimization (ASEO), publications can more easily be found in academic search engines and databases. Authors can improve the ranking of their publications by adjusting titles, keywords and abstracts. Carefully considered wording makes publications easier to find and, ideally, cited more often. This article is meant to support authors in making their scholarly publications more visible. It provides basic information on ranking mechanisms as well as tips and tricks on how to improve the findability of scholarly publications while also pointing out the limits of optimization. This article, authored by three scholarly communications librarians, draws on their experience of hosting journals, providing workshops for researchers and individual publication support, as well as on their investigations of the ranking algorithms of search engines and databases.

In these texts, Peter Suber makes the case for open access to research; answers common questions, objections, and misunderstandings; analyzes policy issues; and documents the growth and evolution of open access during its most critical early decade.

Labor Equity in Open Science is an interactive lesson plan designed to introduce students to labor equity issues in open science practices. The lesson is designed for MLIS students, and assumes no prior knowledge. During the lesson, students are given a persona representing a researcher, encompassing various professional and personal identities. Students are then given multiple scenarios and asked to predict how their persona would respond and why. Through group discussion and personal reflection, students consider the ways that researchers in different positions engage with open science in different ways.

Quickly following what many expected to be a wholesale revolution in library practices, institutional repositories encountered unforeseen problems and a surprising lack of impact. Clunky or cumbersome interfaces, lack of perceived value and use by scholars, fear of copyright infringement, and the like tended to dampen excitement and adoption. This collection of essays, arranged in five thematic sections, is intended to take the pulse of institutional repositories—to see how they have matured and what can be expected from them, as well as introduce what may be the future role of the institutional repository.

This UK report presents the findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. The review was chaired by Professor James Wilsdon, supported by an independent and multidisciplinary group of experts in scientometrics, research funding, research policy, publishing, university management and administration. This review has gone beyond earlier studies to take a deeper look at potential uses and limitations of research metrics and indicators. It has explored the use of metrics across different disciplines, and assessed their potential contribution to the development of research excellence and impact. It has analysed their role in processes of research assessment, including the next cycle of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). It has considered the changing ways in which universities are using quantitative indicators in their management systems, and the growing power of league tables and rankings. And it has considered the negative or unintended effects of metrics on various aspects of research culture. The report starts by tracing the history of metrics in research management and assessment, in the UK and internationally. It looks at the applicability of metrics within different research cultures, compares the peer review system with metric-based alternatives, and considers what balance might be struck between the two. It charts the development of research management systems within institutions, and examines the effects of the growing use of quantitative indicators on different aspects of research culture, including performance management, equality, diversity, interdisciplinarity, and the ‘gaming’ of assessment systems. The review looks at how different funders are using quantitative indicators, and considers their potential role in research and innovation policy. Finally, it examines the role that metrics played in REF2014, and outlines scenarios for their contribution to future exercises.

The Metrics Toolkit co-founders and editorial board developed the Metrics Toolkit to help scholars and evaluators understand and use citations, web metrics, and altmetrics responsibly in the evaluation of research.

The Metrics Toolkit provides evidence-based information about research metrics across disciplines, including how each metric is calculated, where you can find it, and how each should (and should not) be applied. You’ll also find examples of how to use metrics in grant applications, CV, and promotion packages.

Academic publishing processes are shaped by the ways in which scholars within the field review and evaluate the work of their peers. In an ideal world, these methods would simply promote the publication of the best forms of research without prejudice or subjectivity. In reality, issues such as Knobloch-Westerwick, Glynn, and Huge’s Matilda effect, Merton’s Matthew effect, Blank’s institution bias, and Robert’s and Verhoef’s gender bias shape the ways that scholarly inquiry are evaluated.

Knowing that the peer review process can introduce issues of bias, what then of other aspects of the publishing cycle? For example, what of the subvention funding provided by some institutions to support their faculty in pursuing dissemination of research in Open Access (OA) journals? This Open Educational Resource (OER) will present an overview of the OA landscape and provide learners with tools to develop their own inquiries into the inequities present within the OA publishing industry. All assignments include suggested grading rubrics and build upon one another in a cumulative manner.

If you work in a university, you are almost certain to have heard the term 'open access' in the past couple of years. You may also have heard either that it is the utopian answer to all the problems of research dissemination or perhaps that it marks the beginning of an apocalyptic new era of 'pay-to-say' publishing. In this book, Martin Paul Eve sets out the histories, contexts and controversies for open access, specifically in the humanities. Broaching practical elements alongside economic histories, open licensing, monographs and funder policies, this book is a must-read for both those new to ideas about open-access scholarly communications and those with an already keen interest in the latest developments for the humanities.

Four-volume curriculum about open access for library schools, from UNESCO:

Module 1: Introduction to Open Access
Contents: Scholarly Communication Process; Open Access: History and Developments; Rights and Licenses; Advocacy for Open Access; Open Access Research Impacts
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000231920.locale=en

Module 2: Open Access Infrastructure
Contents: Open Access Repositories; Open Journals; More about Open Approaches
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232204.locale=en

Module 3: Resource Optimization
Contents: Open Access Mandates and Policies; Content Management in Open Access Context; Harvesting and Integration
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232201.locale=en

Module 4: Interoperability and Retrieval
Contents: Resource Description for OA Resources; Interoperability Issues for Open Access; Retrieval of Information for OA Resources
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232199.locale=en

Five-volume curriculum about open access for researchers, from UNESCO:

Module 1: Scholarly Communication
Contents: Introduction to Scholarly Communication; Communicating with Peer Review Journals; Electronic Journals and Databases; Serials Crisis
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000231938.locale=en

Module 2: Concepts of Openness and Open Access
Contents: Introduction to Open Access; Routes to Open Access; Networks and Organizations Promotion Open Access; Open Access Mandates and Policies; Open Access Issues and Challenges
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232207.locale=en

Module 3: Intellectual Property Rights
Contents: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights; Copyright; Alternative to a Strict Copyright Regime
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232208.locale=en

Module 4: Research Evaluation Metrics
Contents: Introduction to Research Evaluation Metrics and Related Indicators; Innovations in Measuring Science and Scholarship; Article and Author Level Measurements; Online Citation and Reference Management Tools
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232210.locale=en

Module 5: Sharing Your Work in Open Access
Contents: The Publishing Process; Share Research Results in Open Access
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232211.locale=en