Educating the Educators

At this point in time it is accurate to call the emphasis that educational organizations are placing on Scholarly Communications a movement. The Scholarly Communications Movement like many social and political movements can be characterized by its detractors, supporters and strategies. One such strategy, which I call “Educating the Educators” is the art of communicating with faculty and librarians about the roles that they play as creators, owners, buyers and disseminators of scholarly publications in the scholarly resource enterprise.

Many groups are doing their part to get the word out, emphasizing the need for institutional repositories, retaining author rights and understanding the difference between copy right infringement and fair use. But the work of “Educating the Educators” is never done and I predict that this movement is still in its infancy. It was in this spirit that Kevin Smith, Pat Thibodeau and I led a Scholarly Communications brown bag lunch for the Duke University Library staff this past spring.

Kevin’s presentation, “Authors’ Copyrights: Helping Duke Authors Manage their Rights” was an overview of Duke’s Author Advisory Service that provides information and advice for Duke faculty authors. Kevin’s presentation emphasized that informed authors can “add value by increasing the usability of their work.”

Pat’s presentation, “Faculty / Author Advocacy: Power and Influence on Scholarly Publishing” outlined methods of encouraging faculty to become Scholarly Communication Advocates and to consider publishing in Open Science (Access) sources. This advocacy is mutually beneficial for faculty members and libraries. Faculty can increase the “visibility of their work” and “immediately communicate with peers” and libraries will be in a stronger position to provide access to affordable content.

My presentation, “Institutional Repositories + Libraries” presented the findings of an Association of Research Libraries’ study of the growth and use of Institutional Repositories (IR’s) in libraries. I also gave an overview of the four IR’s at Duke University:

1. Portfolio @ Duke
2. MeDSpace
3. Duke Law Faculty Scholarship Repository
4. DukeSpace (Under Development)