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SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
Building a new future: "Preparing future faculty" and "Responsible conduct of research" programs as a venue for scholarly communication discussions
C&RL News, October 2005
Vol. 66, No. 9
Richard Fyffe and Scott Walter
What do you talk about when everyone already knows how expensive journals are? As the Pew Foundation report “To Publish and Perish” reminded us more than seven years ago, the “seemingly permanent imbalance between the funds accorded to research libraries and the volume of scholarly output these libraries are expected to purchase and manage” is not in fact “the library’s problem,” but one that has developed from the practices and traditions of scholarly writers and readers.1
How can campus conversations be shifted from the cost of journals to the benefit of scholarly communication, from library to scholar, from consumption of scholarly information to production, and from access to dissemination?
One of the purposes behind the recently released ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit is to move campus discussions of emergent developments in scholarly communication beyond the issue of cost containment. Although the toolkit does contain talking points on the issue of skyrocketing journal prices, it also points the way toward broader discussions of changes to copyright law, management of personal copyrights as an author, and the opportunities for dissemination and preservation of scholarly work presented by new business models, such as open-access journal publishing, and new initiatives, such as institutional and disciplinary repositories.2
What many librarians need, however, is a forum in which these broader issues can be raised for discussion. At the University of Kansas (KU), we have found that one effective approach is to promote discussions of the scholarly communication environment among the graduate student and faculty audiences already coming together for regular discussions of their professional work through programs such as Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) and Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). Just as undergraduate information literacy initiatives have found some of their most important partners through campus discussions of general education and writing across the curriculum, we have found that programs like PFF and RCR provide fertile ground for collaboration on a cluster of issues related to scholarly communication.
The PFF program
According to its Web site, the PFF program is “a national movement to transform the way aspiring faculty members are prepared for their careers.” Now in place for more than ten years, PFF initiatives have been supported by the Council of Graduate Schools, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the National Science Foundation. With more than 300 institutions serving either as host schools or partner schools, PFF is a national initiative aimed at helping graduate students prepare for the full range of faculty responsibilities, including teaching, research, and service.3 In addition, some schools have built on the PFF model to develop programs focused more specifically on preparing graduate students for college-level teaching, or to encourage graduate students to consider how their education might benefit them outside the academy through broadly conceived Preparing Future Professionals (PFP) programs. At KU, we are lucky to have a PFF initiative that is also open to students considering a career in research outside the academy, which might be called a PFF/PFP initiative.4
Over the past year, we have twice been invited to address the seminar program attended by active members of the PFF/PFP program at KU. Our most recent presentation, which we called “Copyright 102: Challenges and Changes to ‘Fair Use’ in the Electronic Environment,” addressed a number of the issues highlighted in the Scholarly Communication Toolkit, including:
• the impact that licensing agreements can have on access to scholarly material that would have previously been protected by common exceptions to exclusive copyrights, such as the doctrine of fair use;
• the responsibility that scholars and professionals now have for managing their rights to their own intellectual property; and
• the availability of alternatives to the copyright agreements provided by publishers (such as the Creative Commons licensing models5 and the SPARC contract addendum6), alternative mechanisms for the dissemination of scholarly work (e.g., open-access journals), and opportunities to assure both open access to scholarly work and responsible stewardship of intellectual property through the use of institutional and disciplinary repositories.
Because this seminar represented an opportunity to discuss broader initiatives at the KU Libraries, we also introduced issues related to scholarly communication, such as:
• incorporating instruction in the ethics of information use into future teaching;
• planning for the preservation of digital information; and
• the significance of digital media and open-access dissemination for the appointment, promotion, and tenure process.
Obviously, these are topics too rich for substantial discussion in one or two meetings with future faculty and professionals, but PFF/PFP is an ongoing program with the promise for an evolving collaboration between the KU Libraries and the Graduate School.
The RCR program
Our participation in the PFF/PFP program provided an entrance into another national initiative in graduate education and faculty development—the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) program. RCR is an umbrella term used for over a decade to describe instruction for graduate students in the physical and life sciences on a range of topics, including: allocation of credit for scholarly work; data management; ethical use of human and animal subjects; and peer review, authorship, and publication.7
KU is one of ten institutions across the country awarded a 2004 grant to develop demonstration programs in RCR education by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). Just as the KU Graduate School has taken a broad approach to the development of its PFF/PFP program, it has been equally inclusive in the development of its RCR program, which is designed to appeal not only to bench scientists, but also to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences.8 Again, the local version of this national initiative provided an opportunity for us to discuss scholarly communication within an established context.
The Digital Difference
For the demonstration program sponsored by our local CGS grant, we were invited to write a 70-page handbook entitled The Digital Difference: Responsible Conduct of Research in a Networked World and to present a seminar on its contents during “RCR Awareness Week.” Freely available through the KU institutional repository, KU ScholarWorks,9 The Digital Difference provides another example of how a broadly pitched discussion of scholarly communication issues may find an audience and an outlet through existing faculty development programs.
Divided into five chapters, the handbook introduces a number of issues related to information literacy instruction and education about the evolving landscape of scholarly communication, including:
• Internet plagiarism and the integration of instruction in the ethics of information use as a foundation for the responsible conduct of research;
• the impact of information technology on the responsible design of survey research and the implications for protection of privacy rights in the digital environment;
• the responsible use of work whose rights are owned or controlled by others, including an overview of issues related to copyright, fair use, and licensing agreements; the use of digital images and digital representations of artifacts housed in museums, archives, and special collections; and appropriate citation of sources;
• effective stewardship of intellectual property in the contemporary scholarly communications environment, and the use of copyright agreements, open-access journals, and institutional and disciplinary repositories to assure broad dissemination of scholarly work; and
• how to plan for the long-term preservation of scholarship that is “born digital.”
Although the handbook was specifically designed for use as part of KU’s RCR Awareness program (with reference to a number of local examples and resources), its use is governed by a Creative Commons “Share Alike” license so that our colleagues on other campuses with RCR education programs may adapt it for use with their own local audiences.
Over the past several years, ACRL and its member librarians have done an effective job of outlining core competencies by which undergraduate (and graduate) students might demonstrate their mastery of a variety of information literacy skills. While we know that efforts in this arena must continue, we believe that our work in collaboration with KU graduate education and faculty development programs like PFF and RCR demonstrates that the instructional outreach model that has proven successful for librarians seeking to develop collaborative programming with campus initiatives in first-year instruction, critical thinking instruction, and writing instruction also has potential for engaging a broad range of faculty (present and future) in discussions of scholarly communication.
These discussions must transcend the collective hand-wringing over journal prices that has defined much (though not all) of our local discussions of the “scholarly communication crisis” in order to present a multifaceted professional development program that can be embraced by our colleagues in graduate education, research compliance, faculty development, and campus administration.
The two examples described briefly above are among the opportunities that we have pursued at KU, but both are simply local variants of national initiatives that can be found on the campuses of hundreds of ACRL member institutions.
We encourage you to look carefully at the full scope of issues identified as germane to the discussion of scholarly communication in the Scholarly Communication Toolkit and to begin looking for local programs (especially in the areas of undergraduate research, graduate education, and faculty development) to which you might contribute.
As the ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit recognizes, the question of how to foster changes in the scholarly communication environment must ultimately be addressed by teaching faculty, university administrators, and librarians alike. By building on the model of instructional outreach already established on many of our campuses in support of information literacy initiatives, we may find that the audience for this related discussion is simply waiting for us to ask.
Notes
1. “To Publish and Perish,” 1998. Policy Perspectives 7, no. 4 (March 1998), www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html (accessed April 14, 2005).
2. ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit, 11 March 2005,
www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/scholarlycomm/scholarlycommunicationtoolkit/toolkit.htm (accessed March 28, 2005).
3. Preparing Future Faculty Program, PFF Web—Preparing Future Faculty, www.preparing-faculty.org/ (28 March 2005).
4. University of California-Santa Barbara Graduate Division, Certificate in College and University Teaching (CCUT), www.graddiv.ucsb.edu/academic/ccut/ (accessed March 28, 2005); Arizona State University Division of Graduate Studies, Preparing Future Professionals, 4 January 2005, http://www.asu.edu/graduate/pfp/ (accessed March 28, 2005); University of Kansas Graduate School, KU Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Home Page, www.ku.edu/~graduate/PFF/ (accessed March 28, 2005). For additional program links, visit the PFF Web at www.preparing-faculty.org/PFFWeb.Like.htm.
5. Creative Commons, www.creativecommons.org (accessed April 14, 2005).
6. SPARC, Author’s Addendum, www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.html (accessed April 16, 2005).
7. For an introduction to RCR and RCR-related instruction, see, for example: Nicholas H. Steneck, ORI Introduction to the Responsible Conduct of Research. Washington, D.C.: Department of Heath and Human Services, Office of Research Integrity, 2004; Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research (2nd ed.), 1995, www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/obas/ (accessed March 28, 2005); and Responsible Conduct of Research Education Consortium, RCR Education Resources—Online Resources for RCR Instructors, rcrec.org/r/index.php (accessed March 28, 2005).
8. Council of Graduate Schools, Graduate Education for Responsible Conduct of Research, www.cgsnet.org/ProgramsServices/conductresearch.htm (accessed March 28, 2005); University of Kansas Graduate School, KU Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) Home Page, www.graduate.ku.edu/RCR/(accessed March 28, 2005).
9. The KU ScholarWorks can be viewed at hdl.handle.net/1808/230.
Richard Fyffe is assistant dean for scholarly communication, e-mail: rfyffe@ku.edu, and Scott Walter is assistant dean for information and instructional services, e-mail: slwalter@ku.edu, at the University of Kansas
© 2005 Richard Fyffe and Scott Walter
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