New book provides guide to librarians, scholars on open access, scholarly communication

LAWRENCE — There has been a significant push in recent decades among academic libraries to make information as freely available as possible and as appropriate. So when a group of scholarly communications experts wrote a book on the topic, they couldn’t hide it behind a paywall. That book, “Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge,” is an open access text to guide librarians, scholars and students interested in scholarly communications and open knowledge through theory, practice and case studies in the movement.

Edited by Maria Bonn of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, Josh Bolick of the University of Kansas and Will Cross of North Carolina State University, the book addresses issues in scholarly publishing and open knowledge movements.

Bolick, head of the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright in KU Libraries, said the collaborative book was about seven years in the making and the idea was hatched when he started his position at KU in 2015, then scholarly communication librarian, and became responsible for leading open education initiatives.

“Open education was an area I was less knowledgeable about, so I set about learning as much as I could, as quickly as possible. I saw an intersection of scholarly communication and open education, where they could be a vehicle for learning about both: an open textbook for scholarly communication work,” Bolick said. “Almost everyone in an academic library is engaging in this work in some form, so broader literacy on the issues is important to supporting our mission and having agency in the evolving landscape.”

Open access, which refers to scholarly literature that is digital, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, has roots in the early internet and has accelerated in recent years. The book, published by the Association of College and Research Libraries and available in an open access edition examines that concept as well as scholarly communication, open data, open education and open science and infrastructure.

The text is divided into three parts:

• What is scholarly communication?
• Scholarly communication and open culture
• Voices from the field: Perspectives, intersections and case studies

The opening section, written by Bonn, Bolick and Cross, defines topics and explores how the economic, technological, social, and policy and legal forces shape scholarly communication work in libraries. Part one’s chapters also consider how these forces affect higher education and academic publishing more broadly.

“The internet created an opportunity to share knowledge in a new way, and it changed things immediately.  Open access arose from a crisis in scholarly publishing, where increasing costs for access to the literature coincided with flat or declining higher education budgets and have sometimes forced reductions of library acquisitions,” Bolick said. “The entire landscape is highly dynamic. We’re looking at how libraries, researchers and publishers are adapting to new realities and how we practice as a result.”

Part two takes a deep dive into open culture and how it is operationalized in libraries, with contributions from librarians and allies in the U.S. and Canada. The section is divided into subsections focused on open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Each subsection is edited by an expert in that area who selected authors and framed their chapters according to their expertise.

“We didn’t want to present the field according to Maria, Josh and Will,” Bolick said of his co-editors. “Rather, here is our field according to a broad subset of experts working in it.”

Part three gives features practitioner case studies, perspectives on aspects of scholarly communication work and essays on how scholarly communication intersects with other areas of academic librarianship.

While the book is a collection of knowledge on a rapidly evolving field, it is not neutral, and Bolick said it does take positions, including advocating for greater openness in the higher education landscape and for libraries and educational institutions to participate in the shift to open knowledge. A downloadable PDF version of the book is free, and costs are only associated with an order of the print version. The co-editors do not stand to profit financially from the book, having waived royalties, and said they welcome readers to engage with it broadly by adapting it, improving it and sharing it wherever they wish, all possible because it is published under an open license.

“In the end, we can only write to our knowledge and expertise, but we can’t pretend that is the entirety of knowledge on the subject, or that our way of doing is the only way of doing,” Bolick said.

KU Libraries will mark the celebration of Open Access Week with a special edition of "Fridays on Fourth," a weekly, collaborative graduate student engagement initiative in Watson Library on Oct. 27. The University of Kansas and KU Libraries are longtime leaders in the field of open access and knowledge, but the new book includes a wide range of perspectives from practitioners at Research I institutions as well as from community colleges, K-12 libraries and others.

“Openness has become something that libraries, in particular, have embraced,” Bolick said. “I often tell researchers that if you’re not making your work open, there is an audience that can’t access it, cite it or learn from it. We saw openness as integral to this project and is a baked-in value of the book.”