KU Libraries

The Dawn of OA OA rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a response to the increasing difficulty of access to scholarly literature, a result of a publishing system dominated by for-profit corporations that control publishing venues, prices, and intellectual property of the majority of scholarly-research output. The buying power of libraries in US and European institutions has not kept up with the growing costs of scholarly literature, which has far outpaced inflation and forced institutions to cut journal subscriptions. In 'southern' and 'eastern' countries-the "Global South"-the challenges and effects were far graver. The emergence of the Web and other digital technologies offered new opportunities for editorial production and distribution and the call for new models of publishing grew, culminating in an official formulation of the term "open access" in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003). These three statements, as well as subsequent OA initiatives, focused on the critical need for better access to read the scholarly literature. The Budapest declaration states: By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself (Budapest Open Access Initiative). The Colorful World of OA Since those early statements and initiatives, the idea of OA-and the models and mechanisms to achieve

The growth of the Internet and digital technology has caused a dramatic and rapid change in scholarly communication practices, giving rise to new forms of digital scholarship and emerging scholarly publishing models. As libraries respond to-and help promote-these changes, they face a number of new challenges and opportunities. Libraries must develop new specialists with specific skills in digital content production and management. At the same time, they must develop a broad, general understanding, among staff across the entire organization, of how changes in scholarly communication practices affect the library enterprise as a whole. This paper discusses three new areas of activity for libraries supporting digital scholarship and scholarly communication: the development of institutional repositories, electronic publishing services, and scholarly communication outreach and advocacy. The paper will also suggest strategies for developing the capacity to support these activities. LIBRARIES & SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION The growth of the Internet and digital technology has caused a dramatic and rapid change in how scholarship is created and communicated. For academic libraries, responsible for preserving and providing access to the scholarly record, these changing scholarly communication practices are creating both new challenges and new opportunities. The challenges include the escalating costs of subscribing to scholarly journals; the explosion of new born-digital content and the corresponding need to manage, describe, and preserve it; and an intellectual property and copyright environment seemingly out of sync with the ways the scholarly community wants to use (and reuse) digital information. At the same time, there are new opportunities to address these problems and transform the scholarly communication environment altogether. The emergence of the Open Access (OA) movement, for example, offers a model of scholarly communication that embraces technology's potential to make scholarship available worldwide by eliminating or reducing economic, technical and legal barriers to access. Developments in open source software make it easier than ever to publish and distribute scholarship online, and the development of standard metadata formats and search tools ensures that, once placed online, it

A level playing field is key for global participation in science and scholarship, particularly with regard to how scientific publications are financed and subsequently accessed. However, there are potential pitfalls of the so-called “Gold” open-access (OA) route, in which author-paid publication charges cover the costs of production and publication. Gold OA plans in which author charges are required may not solve the access problem, but rather may shift the access barrier from reader to writer. Under such plans, everyone may be free to read papers, but it may still be prohibitively expensive to publish them. In a scholarly community that is increasingly global, spread over more and more regions and countries of the world, these publication access barriers may be quite significant. In the present paper, a global suite of colleagues in academe joins this debate. The group of colleagues, a network of researchers active in scholarly publishing, spans four continents and multiple discipl...

Seeking to more effectively respond to campus initiatives and user expectations, the University of Kansas (KU) Libraries underwent a process of significant organizational review and transformation. Guided by a purposeful, open process, a diverse and representative group was elected to serve on the Libraries Organizational Review Team (ORT) to assess the existing organizational structure, determine major functions and cross-functional areas therein, and identify new and vital activities and positions essential for achieving our strategic priorities. Recognizing, too, the trends and challenges occurring within higher education and academic libraries, ORT sought to redefine professional roles and functions to strategically position the Libraries for the future. Utilizing peer institutional research, library literature and reports, and focus groups with each library unit, the team ultimately recommended a significant overhaul of the Libraries' organizational structure. Broadly, the recommendation was for an adaptive and agile structure that is more responsive to university priorities, technological developments, and resource constraints. Specifically, ORT recommended a structure driven by contemporary user expectations and supportive of new modes of scholarly communication, new pedagogical methods, and data management. The recommended organizational design is fluid and user-focused with an emphasis on integrating into the academic life of scholars and students. This paper will report on the purposeful 'grassroots' approach undertaken by the team and its creative processes of organizational review. Additionally, the authors will present ORT's final recommendations, as well as the rationale thereof. Finally, the authors will illustrate the new organizational model and analyze the efficacy and challenges of the reorganization.

A commentary published recently in Journal of Wildlife Management argued that open access publication has strong negative implications for the future of science. Unfortunately, that commentary was founded in serious and deep misconceptions about the distinctions between open access, commercial, and society publications, and the rigor of peer review in open access journals. To the contrary, open access responds more appropriately than traditional closed publishing venues to the needs and participation of an increasingly global scholarly research community, and peer review by a broader community may in many cases be more rigorous, responding to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of modern research. We respectfully suggest that The Wildlife Society consider a transition from closed access to open access for the Journal of Wildlife Management, as a means of optimizing and maximizing its role in communications in the field.

This archival page includes documents and recordings related to the international symposium, “Envisioning a World Beyond APCs/BPCs,” held in Lawrence, Kansas, on Thursday and Friday, November 17-18. The presenters were a group of 18 internationally respected scholars, publishers, university librarians, and executives from foundations and organizations, who were asked to participate in a discussion about current models available for achieving an expansive, inclusive, and balanced worldwide open publishing ecosystem. The symposium was co-sponsored by the University of Kansas Libraries, Open Access Network (a project of K|N Consultants), Allen Press, SPARC, and ARL. The materials included here are the symposium schedule, recordings of Parts 1 and 2 of the Nov. 17 livestream, a transcript of the livestream, and team proposals originating from the Nov. 18 morning session.

Purpose-In the spring of 2016, the University of Kansas Libraries piloted Research Sprints: One Week, One Project, a program aimed at cultivating relationships with faculty through deep project-based engagement. Methodology/approach-Three faculty members, matched with a team of library experts, worked intensively to complete a research or pedagogic project for one week in May. Critical to the program's success was the use of project management methodologies and tools. These tools were essential to identifying task dependencies, developing workflows, and documenting work processes. Findings-The overall success of the Sprints demonstrated to faculty that library staff can be more than one-shot consultants; faculty collaborators learned first-hand that the library can be a true partner throughout the scholarly process. As an approach to user engagement, Sprints pose some considerations for library management, including the need for robust staff training in project management and teambuilding, internal resistance to utilizing project management tools, difficulty finding staff time and resources to commit for a short but high-concentrated period, and the need to align projects with staff expertise and availability. Originality/value-This chapter provides an assessment of the Sprints pilot, addressing some of the implications, potential benefits, and challenges of adopting and adapting Research Sprints to support library work. It will be of interest to project managers and library staff who are considering integrating project management methods into their outreach and services, and provides examples of how project management can inform library efforts to more deeply collaborate in advancing the scholarly work of local research and teaching communities.

Image courtesy Getty Images, 2014. Used under terms of Fair Use. A Recap of a Presentation Given at CNI in Spring 2016 Craft Culture The disintegration of viable institutional synergy between publishers and scholars … gives rise to creative entrepreneurship We have the infrastructure, will, and impetus to perform small-scale publishing in libraries

The idea of “Open Access” (hereafter OA) emerged in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s with a noble goal: to provide comprehensive access to the scholarly literature for everyone around the world by making the results of scholarly research freely and immediately available online to all. After more than 20 years of OA advocacy and development, where do things stand? Has the noble goal of universal access been realized, and is the scholarly literature now accessible and open to the global community of scholars? How strong is the current OA movement and where is it headed? While significant advances have been made, to be sure, the fact is that elements of OA have taken a wrong turn somewhere, resulting in a system that is broken and has not lived up to its promise. Early OA efforts focused on the need for better access to read and reuse scholarly literature. While significant advancement has been made in this area, it has created another barrier to the free and open sharing of scholarly ...

Recognizing the importance of designing educational opportunities that draw upon students' prior knowledge and experiences, this paper uses focus groups to explore how Spanishspeaking students in a graduate program at the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence understand academic information literacy practices within their new cultural contexts. This paper demonstrates that a variety of interwoven scholarly and sociocultural pressures mediate graduate student information activities. Findings from this paper broaden understandings of information literacy within today's diverse information environments while also highlighting the need for librarians to engage with the complexity of graduate student experiences.

Purpose This paper describes the creation and work of a collaborative learning community, consisting of library staff from a variety of library departments. The purpose of this paper is to build proficiency in using tablet devices and to explore the potential application of tablets to various types of library work. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from discussion sessions, journals, and a survey, which documented participants’ experiences in learning how to use tablets and how they applied them to work-related tasks. Findings The project helped increase participants’ awareness of different types of work across the library, encouraged inter-departmental communication, and provided an open environment for asking questions, trouble-shooting, and sharing tips about using tablets. Participants mastered basic functions and navigation and explored ways to use tablets in their work. Portability was the top advantage of the tablet. Originality/value Although participants found...

Librarians are natural collaborators. As professionals we enjoy working with colleagues within the same institution and beyond. This is particularly fitting when it comes to collection development. Academic libraries strive to support the research needs of our users by providing access to a wide range of materials. In a world of shrinking budgets and limited staff, we turn to collaboration as a way to continue to deliver excellent services to our patrons. Collaborative partnerships between regional institutions or across state lines allow individual organizations to reallocate their resources and better serve the local needs. If you are ready to begin the planning stages of a collaborative collection development project, this book is a great starting point. Shared Collections: Collaborative Stewardship is a gathering of essays that discusses an array of cooperative collection development projects in a variety of institutions. It covers everything you need to know from how to create ...

Recognizing the importance of designing educational opportunities that draw upon students' prior knowledge and experiences, this paper uses focus groups to explore how Spanishspeaking students in a graduate program at the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence understand academic information literacy practices within their new cultural contexts. This paper demonstrates that a variety of interwoven scholarly and sociocultural pressures mediate graduate student information activities. Findings from this paper broaden understandings of information literacy within today's diverse information environments while also highlighting the need for librarians to engage with the complexity of graduate student experiences.

The globalization of campuses has led to increasing numbers of international and exchange students. However, librarians often develop instructional opportunities for students from other countries with little understanding of how academic information literacy (IL) differs around the world. Using Mexico as an example, this study employs survey and focus group methods to examine how Mexican librarians understand and teach for IL within higher education. 1 Findings from this study are subsequently used to explore the design of more culturally appropriate learning experiences for international students in the United States. 2

Los Estados Unidos de América recibieron, en el otoño del 2015, más de 80,000 estudiantes internacionales de posgrado. De estos, la mayoría son estudiantes doctorales. Más de 3,000 de los estudiantes matriculados provienen de América Latina y el Caribe; con un total de 793 provenientes de México. ¿Qué podemos hacer, como bibliotecarios, para prepararlos de manera que puedan enfrentar los desafíos de sus estudios universitarios? Este trabajo busca describir las diferentes expectativas informacionales de las universidades estadounidenses. Discutiremos las expectativas de los profesores tanto en clase como en la investigación. Discutiremos los servicios disponibles en la biblioteca desde el punto de vista de materiales y recursos, como también de personal. Se explorarán algunas estrategias que nos ayudarán a cubrir la brecha. Palabras claves: Estudiantes internacionales; AlFin; Competencias informacionales; Bibliotecas académicas.

In this presentation we describe the development of our project, which explores the application of table computers to the daily work of library staff across a variety of library departments; how the project was administered and evolved; and some of the preliminary results. Slides for the presentation are embedded in the narrative. Internet Librarian Conference 2015 Presentation Devlin, Giullian, Reyes Tablets: Tools, Toys, or Troubles?