International Journal of Librarianship

Co-designing an Institutional Repository in Kosovo

2023-11-03T16:09:00+00:00

An institutional repository (IR) launched at the University for Business and Technology in Pristina, Kosovo in 2019. Students from 2018 and 2019 enrolled in an Information Systems course at the University provided ideas and feedback on the repository development. Their suggestions are captured here by focus group sessions held in mid-2019 in Kosovo and subsequently shared with University Administration and the IR platform company. This case study from the field advocates for continuous feedback from stakeholder groups and an expansion of the underlying data collection methods at other institutions.

Making Open Resources Discoverable: Collaborative Approaches for Enhanced Access

2023-09-26T20:22:59+00:00

This article explores collaborative efforts to enhance the discoverability of open access resources. It highlights the pivotal role of librarians, educators, library system platform vendors, and publishers in improving access to these valuable resources. Through collective expertise and cooperation, these collaborative approaches aim to unlock the potential of open resources, benefiting researchers, students, and the broader academic community. By working together and leveraging their collective knowledge, these collaborative efforts promise to tap into the wealth of open resources, making them more accessible for professors, students, and the broader academic community.

Metadata Librarians for Open Access

2023-10-23T14:54:17+00:00

Support by academic libraries for open access (OA) over the past three-plus decades has largely focused on the development of digital infrastructure, promotion of open access publishing, support of policy-driven access mandates, and more recently, adoption of transformative agreements. Libraries have correspondingly created a broad array of scholarly communication roles to support these varied approaches. Surprisingly, one area of open access support that has received less attention from libraries is the facilitation of description and discovery of open access resources through the creation of robust original metadata. Expertise in Organization of Recorded Knowledge and Information represents a core competency of librarianship, yet the current academic library landscape shows few positions that specifically apply this expertise towards support for OA resources. Efforts to describe OA resources typically fall below those dedicated to licensed resources and pale in comparison to OA advocacy work, repository, publishing and other services. This case study offers an example of how one large academic library has introduced a metadata librarian position focused on description of open access resources into its activities supporting open access.

For decades, commercially licensed resources have benefitted from metadata enhanced layer by layer by commercial and library professionals alike. With increased focus and funding being devoted to open access driven by governmental, institutional, and private funders, attention is critically needed to ensure that these new resources obtain the description necessary to allow them to be useful. Metadata librarians focused on open access resources can work with array of positions, such as repository managers and other digital asset management professionals, to ensure that open access resources are properly ingested and managed, and that metadata practices are aligned with best practices for preservation and long-term access. OA metadata librarians could be responsible for developing and implementing metadata standards and practices for open access resources like scholarly articles, data sets, and other digital objects. These standards would help ensure that open access resources are accurately described and discoverable alongside purchased resources, making them more accessible to researchers and other users.

In addition to their technical responsibilities, OA metadata librarians can also play key roles in advocating for open access resources and educating library staff and users about the importance of metadata in supporting discoverability and accessibility. Through participation in professional organizations and initiatives focused on open access and metadata, OA metadata librarians can help raise awareness of the importance of metadata in supporting open access resources, their sustainability, and ultimately, their impact.

The Potential of Library Publishing Services to Transform Scholarly Communication in Ireland

2023-09-26T22:35:57+00:00

Libraries need to move beyond traditional roles of purchasing and distributing scholarly literature, librarians need to strategically position themselves and take ownership of improving access. As a direct result of Covid-19, there is a new level of urgency to transform the scholarly communication process and there are enormous opportunities for an expanded and inclusive library publishing service which addresses access to knowledge and literature. This rich discussion will stimulate the drive to make library publishing a mainstream service within Irish libraries.

The purpose of this study is to provide a vision for how academic libraries can assume a more central role in a future where open access (OA) publishing has become the predominant model for disseminating scholarly research. This work will analyse existing trends related to Open Access policies and publishing with an emphasis on the development of repositories managed by libraries to publish and disseminate articles. These trends, coupled with emerging economic realities, will create an environment where libraries’ will assume a major role in the Open Access publishing environment. This paper will provide an insight for academic libraries and their institutions to consider a dramatic shift in the deployment of subscription financial resources from a largely closed scholarly communication system to one that provides open, unrestricted access to research.

Given the importance of scholarly publishing, a number of Irish Third level libraries have launched library publishing services including the establishment and management of high quality library published peer-reviewed open access journals and Open Educational Resources to support formal and informal scholarly communication. Librarians are also upskilling in the area of library publishing. A number of Irish Librarians have completed the Library Publishing Coalition's Library Publishing Curriculum. There is also the Library Publishing Group as part of the Library Association of Ireland. This work aims to identify and examine the factors of library publishing services that facilitate scholarly communication. The clear message from this discussion is that libraries need to include publishing in their services, advocate for open access and serve their communities and societies.

Finding the Right Platform

2023-10-27T00:43:02+00:00

This Report from the Field introduces a collaboratively authored set of documentation that compares digital publishing platforms that are typically used by library publishers. This report discusses how we created this set of crosswalks that compare 10 publishing platforms, most of which are academy-owned and open-source. These platforms are used to create eBooks, digital humanities projects, journals, collections, and community projects, and the crosswalks compare a set of common features each has, including hosting options and cost, ingestion options, interactivity, archive and preservation features, export options, accessibility, and other features. We walk readers through how to use this Creative-Commons-licensed tool to compare platforms, features, and project types, with the hopes that users (be they librarians or authors) can easily compare and make decisions about which platform might best suit their publishing needs.

The Impact of Transformative Agreements on Publication Patterns

2023-10-06T13:28:49+00:00

"Transformative agreements" are agreements made between publishers and institutions that were intended to transform the traditional subscription-based scholarly publishing system to open access. Some publishers and institutions have argued that these are the best option, yet, they are increasingly being called into question. Not only does the transition remain incomplete, they create negative effects on researchers without access to an agreement or funding to pay an article processing charge. This research project sought to address the question of whether transformative agreements increase the number of open access publications. In April 2022, we retrieved 370 transformative agreements from the ESAC Transformative Agreement Registry, of which 72 met our inclusion criteria. At that time, agreements in the ESAC Registry were heavily weighted towards Europe. We retrieved publications from the Web of Science Core Collection, and screened these to ensure that they were authored by researchers at participating institutions and published in hybrid open access journals covered by the agreement. Using the Unpaywall API, we determined the open access status of each item. Through this process, we identified 156,053 publications that met inclusion criteria. In this article, we examine changes in publication patterns at an aggregate level and per agreement.

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Institutional Research Data Management Strategies

2023-09-26T23:13:34+00:00

Research data management (RDM) is a field of emerging concern for academic librarians. As funder agencies increasingly mandate institutions and researchers to ethically and responsibly manage their research data, academic librarians are frequently tasked with creating institutional strategies and services to support researchers. This article explores how a racialized librarian at a medium-sized, teaching-focused Canadian university created an institutional research data management strategy through a process informed by critical librarianship research and contributive justice (Gomberg, 2016; Honma & Chu, 2018). It examines the lack of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) principles in both funder directives and RDM research literature and proposes an approach to do institutional RDM work in an EDI-centered way.

Barriers in LIS Scholarship in India: Some observations

2023-09-26T22:41:48+00:00

Although LIS research output, globally, has increased in recent years, why is there a dearth in LIS research from countries like India in the Global South? What barriers and challenges impede LIS researchers’ active participation in scholarly communications? Is there a bias against research output from the Global South? These are some of the questions that the author investigated with the help of ACRL’s Research and Scholarship Grant (2019 - 2020). The author collaborated with a librarian colleague in India at a second stage of the project to collect supplementary data. The second phase of the research was supported by the Marcia Tuttle International Travel Grant from NASIG (2020 - 2021). Important findings include the need for Open Access and training in academic writing standards which could help resolve some of the challenges. Learning from our Global South colleagues may assist with our work with international students and students from multiple backgrounds.

Guest Editorial: Navigating the Global Landscape of Scholarly Communication: A Special Issue Exploration

2024-01-31T16:33:10+00:00