Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics
ACRL is extending the reach of this half-day workshop offered at the ACRL 14th National Conference in Seattle and subsequently offered to five locations around the country in summer 2009. We encourage librarians to make use of these materials to enhance their own knowledge or adapt them to offer related workshops on their own campuses. Handouts:

• Workshop overview & outline
  
• Ten things you should know
  
• Assessing copyright management exercise
  
• Copyright MadLibs story exercise
  
• Copyright transfer agreement comparison exercise
  
• Openness exercise
  
• Final reflection activity
  
• Workshop evaluation

Create Change Bookmarks and brochure

As part of the campaign to create change in scholarly communication, SPARC, ARL, and ACRL have developed bookmarks suitable for library outreach to scholars in many disciplines. The bookmarks support scholarly communication programs, such as campus mailings and meetings with academic departments.

The Create Change brochure, last revised in 2003, is a general look at scholarly publishing challenges and options for faculty action.

SPARC Brochures

SPARC has issued several handouts for librarians to use in their ourtreach programs on campus. The “Right to Research” open access teaser cards and student guide, along with the open access brochure, describe the benefits of open access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists. Facts and figures demonstrate how open access to scholarly research capitalizes on Internet connectivity to increase a research article's use and impact. The brochures suggest steps authors of journal articles can take to provide open access to their work.

The author rights brochure introduces the SPARC Author Addendum, a legal form that enables authors of journal articles to modify publishers’ copyright transfer agreements and allow authors to keep key rights to their articles. A companion poster is also available.

Brown-Bag Discussion Guide Series: Issues in Scholarly Communication

Designed to aid library staff development efforts, this series of Discussion Leader’s Guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations. Each guide offers prework and discussion questions along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session.

Using the discussion guides, library leaders can launch a program quickly, without requiring special expertise on the topics. A brown-bag series could be initiated by a library director, a group of staff, or by any staff person with an interest in the scholarly communication system. The only requirements are the willingness to organize the gatherings and facilitate each meeting’s discussion.

Freely Accessible Institute Resources

Designed to promote the development of library-led outreach on scholarly communication issues, the ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication shares resources developed for its events with the broader library community. These include handouts for outreach, program planning & development, and sample position descriptions.

In particular, note the environmental scan exercise which helps libraries lay a foundation for developing scholarly communication programs on campus. Additionally, the opportunity assessment instrument helps librarians working as department liaisons to identify promising areas where the faculty might be willing to explore new behaviors and learn more about the scholarly communication issues they see as having relevance or urgency.