Digital Common+ Great Lakes User Group 2015
Type of Program
Presentation
Location
Bernath Auditorium, Undergraduate Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Start Date
30-7-2015 3:00 PM
End Date
30-7-2015 3:30 PM
Program Description
There is often no systematic means by which information about open access and the scholarly publishing landscape is shared between faculty, students and administrators and the particular concerns can vary considerably from discipline to discipline. The patchwork of beliefs about open access and publishing on our campuses bears more similarity to a body of folklore, an academic publishing folklore. Like all folklore, it can contain elements of both misinformation and truth.
Working as a librarian in a scholarly communications role brings with it the responsibility of conveying the importance of open access to faculty members, students and administrators in order to cultivate a culture of open access on our campuses and to generate support for and use of our programs and services. To accomplish this we often rely upon a narrative familiar to librarians about open access and its value. However, this narrative is not always consistent with the folklore across the rest of our campus and can fail to reflect the concerns of a diverse set of stakeholders with varied needs.
This presentation will draw on both existing scholarly research about faculty attitudes towards open access and from our local experiences at the University of Windsor in order to outline some of the divergences between our varied narratives. Particular attention will be paid to those concerns which may not be part of the traditional library story about open access but deserve to be incorporated, yet it will also discuss why it is important to handle all of these divergent concerns carefully. The success of our outreach depends not only getting our campuses to adopt our narrative about open access, but it also depends upon the ability for our narrative to incorporate concerns that stem from this larger academic publishing folklore.
Academic Publishing Folklore: Finding a Unified Narrative for Open Access
Bernath Auditorium, Undergraduate Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
There is often no systematic means by which information about open access and the scholarly publishing landscape is shared between faculty, students and administrators and the particular concerns can vary considerably from discipline to discipline. The patchwork of beliefs about open access and publishing on our campuses bears more similarity to a body of folklore, an academic publishing folklore. Like all folklore, it can contain elements of both misinformation and truth.
Working as a librarian in a scholarly communications role brings with it the responsibility of conveying the importance of open access to faculty members, students and administrators in order to cultivate a culture of open access on our campuses and to generate support for and use of our programs and services. To accomplish this we often rely upon a narrative familiar to librarians about open access and its value. However, this narrative is not always consistent with the folklore across the rest of our campus and can fail to reflect the concerns of a diverse set of stakeholders with varied needs.
This presentation will draw on both existing scholarly research about faculty attitudes towards open access and from our local experiences at the University of Windsor in order to outline some of the divergences between our varied narratives. Particular attention will be paid to those concerns which may not be part of the traditional library story about open access but deserve to be incorporated, yet it will also discuss why it is important to handle all of these divergent concerns carefully. The success of our outreach depends not only getting our campuses to adopt our narrative about open access, but it also depends upon the ability for our narrative to incorporate concerns that stem from this larger academic publishing folklore.