thinking through scholarly communication reform

Attending the ARL/ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute. This morning, I walked around the Duke campus and enjoyed a cup of coffee in the lovely Perkins Library Pavilion. The first session of the workshop was very interesting. I was particularly intrigued by how some research faculty from various academic fields reacted to team proposals (or sales pitches) for scholarly communication reform. At a couple of points, there was a clear tension between the desire to guide researchers towards publishing in open access journals and the demands of department chairs and colleagues involved in promotion and tenure decisions. In a sense, as one life sciences researcher put it, junior faculty are being asked to risk their tenure decisions and livelihoods on an unproven (open access) concept. The session underscored the need for a truly collaborative process in scholarly communication reform generally, institutional repository development specifically.

On several points, the discussion came back to the same question: what issues are really relevant to research faculty. I mentioned Peter Hirtle's article on the use of an author addendum in last night's post. One seemingly important right that Hirtle mentions is the right of a faculty researcher to use the content of his/her publication in classroom instruction. By my count, three attendees argued that this right isn't considered relevant by researchers:

• the faculty member may not need to use his/her articles in instruction. Summary: the graduate students are already in the loop, the material isn't applicable to undergraduate instruction
  
• no publisher would sue a faculty member for infringement under this scenario
  
• peers and grant reviewers are the audience, not students

This is shaping up to be a fascinating and challenging workshop.