Scholarly Publishing Literacy: Reaching our Researchers

For the past several years, librarians have been building repositories and publishing programs, becoming increasingly adept in producing and determining the quality of open access publications. Though researchers may be experts within their own subject areas, many aspects of the publishing process remain a mystery to them. Understanding when to request copyright permissions or how to negotiate their own rights with publishers are sometimes afterthoughts in the research process. Some of our faculty or even students may fall prey to predatory publishing practices, not knowing what criteria to apply in evaluating new publication outlets.

In our role as library publishers, we have developed the expertise to help address these issues. Editors and authors need to understand what Creative Commons licenses are and why they are important, when to request copyright permissions, how to negotiate author and submission fees, and how to identify and avoid predatory publishing. In the course of this presentation, we will define scholarly publishing literacy and discuss outreach in terms of educating new and experienced researchers. The presenters hope to start a larger conversation on this topic that could lead to the development of scholarly publishing literacy standards or competencies.