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. In crafting the Toolkit, the following objectives were foremost in our minds:

• Provide an educational resource. We wanted to offer librarians a central hub for background information about scholarly publishing, journal economics, digital repositories, authors’ rights, and other issues in the realm of scholarly communication.
• Offer tools and practical resources. The toolkit contains a collection of tested and replicable tools for talking with faculty, administrators, students, and other campus stakeholders about the issues. These tools include handouts, talking points, presentations, videos, and a glossary, all designed to help librarians articulate a clear and thoughtful message about the changes needed in our scholarly communication system.
• Construct a repository which encourages sharing and reusing content. We believe that this toolkit will grow stronger from contributions by people working on these issues on their campuses. By creating an account, users can post comments and contribute new materials by linking to resources. With the constant addition of resources, we hope there is always something new to learn and use.

The Scholarly Communication Committee first presented an online Toolkit in 2003, with information targeted to several different audiences including faculty and administrators. With this edition of the toolkit, we have honed in on librarians as our audience, with an emphasis on moving from education efforts towards action. Scholarly communication efforts are core to the work of academic librarians; however, in many libraries, work on these issues has yet to be integrated into everyone’s vocabulary or day-to-day library operations. By providing tools and a forum for sharing ideas and networking, we hope to accelerate and encourage creative thinking about advocating for real change.

The tools page begins with a modest number of offerings and will grow as librarians and others submit materials. Creators will retain copyright to all materials accepted. Materials will be accepted by this site if the creator agrees to allow others to copy, distribute, or modify materials for local use, for educational purposes, with attribution. See the Creative Commons Publish tool for more information about choosing a license. We suggest Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The ACRL Scholarly Communication Committee is coordinating additional campaigns designed to transform the current system of scholarly communication, focusing on areas of education, advocacy, coalition building, and research. 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. These committee members are among the many librarians, publishers, and scholars who are devoted to the task of reshaping the scholarly communication landscape. Find out more about the work of the committee on its web site.

Editors: Karen Williams and Kara Malenfant
Designer: Romel Espinel