During the Scholarly Communication Workshop on Tuesday (January 16), a group of librarians and staff from the Health Sciences Libraries started developing some ideas for talking points for talking to faculty (and other patrons) about scholarly communications issues; specifically, why authors should carefully & critically evaluate publishing agreements and consider retaining some rights, perhaps even amending the agreement or submitting an addendum.
During our small group discussion, we came up with some possible ideas for talking points and a couple of strategies for reaching out to faculty. Here are some brief notes.
Talking Points:
1. As an author, you own your own work and all associated rights until you sign them away.
2. The license agreement can be more restrictive that copyright guidelines.
3. You can't foresee how you might want to use your work in the future: e.g., place pre/post-prints into an institutional repository, place an article on electronic reserve, use an article for distance education, reuse a portion of your work (such as a table or chart), republish the work in some forthcoming format, etc.
4. We discussed developing some talking points which specifically target how publishing impacts promotion and tenure. To do this, we need to become well-informed regarding the promotion and tenure processes for faculty here at the University, esp. since these processes are currently under review and might be revised in the near future.
Strategies:
1. Collect and share amongst ourselves anecdotes and stories to use as illustrative and telling examples when talking to faculty about scholarly communications issues; for example, under some agreements, a publisher might be able to charge an author $400 to reuse their own table.
2. Identify and develop faculty to champion and promote discussion of scholarly communications issues amongst their peers and colleagues.
3. Create handouts regarding scholarly communications issues that we can distribute at the Reference Desk, during instruction sessions, as part of liaison work, etc.
If I have missed anything, I welcome any corrections or revisions.
Cheers,
Martha