Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives · 17
a coherent SC program with a committee dedicated
to coordinating the activities and the communica-
tions to support them.” Another commented that
they would like all of their librarians to add SC
components to their bibliographic instruction ef-
forts.
None of the respondents indicated directly
that they had success on the biggest challenge—
alleviating faculty concerns about the effects of
open access publishing on promotion and tenure.
However, at least one institution has passed a reso-
lution encouraging it’s faculty to publish OA when
feasible and several respondents noted that there is
increased support for OA publishing. Both of these
outcomes suggest that there are some subtle chang-
es going on in the long-standing scholarly com-
munication paradigms. To be sure, the researchers
are concerned about the future of their scholarly
societies, but several respondents noted success in
getting the editors of scholarly journals to consider
going OA with their journals.
Conclusion
Clearly, scholarly communication education is
a changing and growing area of activity for ARL
member libraries. Ten years ago, SC education
mostly focused on fair use and copyright restric-
tions. Now, open access, authors rights manage-
ment, institutional repositories, and the economics
of scholarly publishing are the topics of these edu-
cation initiatives. As many survey respondents feel
they are still early in the process of developing their
programs, the coming years will likely see many
further initiatives in this arena. However, unlike
other library initiatives, the library alone does not
have control over the outcomes of scholarly com-
munication education efforts. The economic engine
that is scholarly communication has many players
in addition to libraries—faculty, researchers, com-
mercial publishers, and scholarly societies—and
is also influenced by government regulations. The
efforts of libraries to affect change are only one of
many factors at work.
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