The Liaison Role in Scholarly Communication

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The Liaison Role in Scholarly Communication

• Trish Rosseel, SFU
• Lynne Woodruff, UVIC

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Effective Liaison with Faculty

• Know your audience
• You already do! This is an opportunity to learn
  more about them.
• Focus on change makers
• U of T Libraries Newsletter, Spring 2007
• Tap into the issues that are most relevant to them

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Faculty Are Engaged in

• Attracting funding
• Completing research
• Publishing their results
• From Kate Corbys review
• http//edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev478.htm

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Faculty Want To

• Publish their findings in the highest prestige
  journal possible
• Reach a large audience
• Make a favorable impression on potential funders
• From Kate Corbys review
• http//edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev478.htm

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Why Faculty Publish

• Communicate results
• Advance career
• Personal prestige
• Gain funding
• Financial reward
• Swan, A. (2006) The culture of Open Access
  researchers views and responses, in Jacobs, N.,
  Eds. Open Access Key Strategic, Technical and
  Economic Aspects, chapter 7. Chandos.

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Why They Publish in OA

• Free access for all readers
• Faster publication time
• Larger readership than subscription journals
• Articles will be more frequently cited
• Concerned about cost of traditional journals to
  institution

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Why They Dont

• Unfamiliar with OA journals in their field
• OA journals in their field have low impact / low
  prestige
• Smaller readership
• Couldnt identify OA journal to publish in
• Would publish in OA journal if it overcame their
  perceptions about its shortcomings

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Group Exercise

• Break into groups of 2
• Each person spend 5 minutes sharing an experience
  youve had talking with faculty about scholarly
  communication
• Each person note one key challenge or success of
  your partner to share with larger group

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How Does It Fit With Liaison?

• Liaison activities are integral part of services
  we provide supporting research and instruction at
  university
• Scholarly communication is a good fit with our
  other liaison responsibilities
• We already have a close working relationship with
  faculty
• We meet with them on a regular basis

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How Does It Fit With Liaison?

• We are experts in accessing information
• Library liaisons are best positioned to serve as
  resource persons on campus for scholarly
  communication
• We need to move from awareness of scholarly
  issues towards advocacy
• What you can do to get involved!

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Educate Yourself

• Find out about staff training opportunities
• Get involved in peer training
• Attend workshops
• Keep up with current issues

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Educate Faculty

• Arrange training with experts
• Sponsor colloquia or conference
• McGill
• Create web sites
• George Washington University
• Create blogs
• Boston College

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Work with University Groups

• Find out who else on campus is taking a leading
  role in scholarly communication issues and
  establish contact with them
• Faculty departments
• Faculty Library committees
• University Senate Committees

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Present Options/Strategies

• For increasing findability of articles
• For selecting open access journals or open access
  friendly publishers
• For self-archiving in IRs
• For publishing open access journals
• For maintaining authors rights/questioning
  author agreements
• For making most effective use of

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Exercise Elevator Speech

• Individually, develop a script
• 2 minutes in length
• Suitable for elevator ride with faculty
• On any topic discussed today
• Pitch your speech to the person next to you and
  ask for feedback/suggestions
• Share insights with larger group

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Resources to Support You

• Opportunity Assessment Instrument
• Scholarly communications handout
• SPARC web site
• Your colleagues!
• Workshop facilitators