The Scholarly Communication Toolkit was designed by the Scholarly Communication Committee of The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to support advocacy efforts designed to transform the scholarly communication landscape. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Toolkit is an educational resource primarily directed to librarians. It complements (and attempts not to duplicate but may link to) scholarly communication web sites of partner organizations like SPARC and the Association of Research Libraries. Its primary purpose is to assist librarians in (1) integrating a scholarly communication perspective into library operations and programs and (2) preparing presentations on scholarly communication issues for administrators, faculty, staff, students, or other librarians. The toolkit includes short overview essays on key aspects of the relationship between libraries and scholarly communication, highly selective lists of other sources of information on these topics, and copies of presentations, handouts, and similar material including (but not limited to) the teaching materials from the programs Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics. All materials that are prepared for and directly part of the toolkit are made available under a Creative Commons attribution/no-commercial-use/share-alike license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).

Each section of the Toolkit is written and edited by a member of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, and the Toolkit as a whole is guided by an Oversight Committee that includes one of the two Committee co-chairs, the Vice-chair, and the Staff Liaison.

The ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee was formed in 2001. Its charge is to formulate and advance ACRL’s scholarly communications agenda, which is designed to help reshape the system of scholarly communication in partnership with other library and higher education organizations; to address educational programming, advocacy, coalition-building, and research in scholarly communication; to work with the ACRL Board, other ACRL units, and ACRL staff to accomplish the objectives of the agenda; and to inform and advise the ACRL Board on issues related to scholarly communication. The Committee makes formal recommendations to the Government Relations Committee, prior to Midwinter, for the ACRL Legislative Agenda. Committee members collaborate on projects such as regional and national ACRL/ARL Institute on Scholarly Communication and professional development opportunities as well as e-mail lists and a regular column in C&RL News (http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/index.cfm). These committee members are among the many librarians, publishers, and scholars who are devoted to the task of reshaping the scholarly communication landscape.

For further information about the Scholarly Communications Committee please see the ACRL Web site.