The Serials Librarian

From the Printed Page to the Digital Age

ISSN: 0361-526X (Print) 1541-1095 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wser20

Creation, Transformation, Dissemination,

and Preservation: Advocating for Scholarly
Communication

Anne E. McKee, Christine M. Stamison & Sara Bahnmaier

To cite this article: Anne E. McKee, Christine M. Stamison & Sara Bahnmaier (2014) Creation,
Transformation, Dissemination, and Preservation: Advocating for Scholarly Communication, The
Serials Librarian, 66:1-4, 189-195, DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2014.877298

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The Serials Librarian, 66:189–195, 2014
Published with license by Taylor & Francis
ISSN: 0361-526X print/1541-1095 online
DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2014.877298

Creation, Transformation, Dissemination, and

Preservation: Advocating for Scholarly
Communication

ANNE E. McKEE and CHRISTINE M. STAMISON

Presenters

SARA BAHNMAIER
Recorder

Scholarly communication is often thought of as the preservation

of knowledge. In fact, it also influences the creation, transforma-
tion, and dissemination of knowledge. The new norms of scholarly
communication are multiple authorships, inter-institutional and
international collaboration, and use of social media. The evolv-
ing norms for the librarians and consortial groups are supporting
research data management, aiding discovery of collaborators, and
dissemination and preservation of results, especially in digital for-
mats. Librarians are viewed as experts in scholarly communication
on many campuses but their leadership is not always recognized.

KEYWORDS scholarly communication, data repositories,

EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero, role of library consortia

First, Christine Stamison characterized new norms and evolving tools to

aid the creation and transformation of scholarly knowledge. Next, Anne
McKee discussed the dissemination and preservation of knowledge and what
libraries and consortia are doing to support it.

CREATION AND TRANSFORMATION

Scientists who win the Nobel Prize in their fields epitomize successful schol-
arly communication. Today a hallmark of these top researchers is that they

© Anne E. McKee, Christine M. Stamison, and Sara Bahnmaier

189
190 Program Sessions

collaborate from the four corners of the globe. According to Gazni and
Didegah (2011), 80.5% of papers produced at Harvard in 22 different fields
of science from 2000 to 2005, were products of inter-institutional collabo-
ration. Furthermore, international collaboration1 is spreading. In a study by
the Royal Society, less than 26% of papers studied were produced at one
institution alone. In addition, more than one-third had authors of multiple
nationalities.2
Libraries are viewed as important support for research and scholarly
communication. For librarians to play a role, we need to find and master the
tools to manage workflows, especially social media. The audience members
were asked to consider how they or their institutions are helping researchers.
When Stamison asked, “Does your library have a scholarly communication
librarian or department?,” most of the audience raised their hands.
Social networks are involved in conducting, peer-reviewing, and dissem-
inating research, before and after publication. Online social networks like
Facebook and Twitter help researchers publicize their work. As the tools of
social media develop, librarians will need to meet the growing expectations
of researchers as well. According to a recent report:

Communication software makes it possible to integrate locally dispersed

researchers and research groups. Ideas are being generated in chat rooms
via virtual discourse. Scientific preprints are being reviewed publicly, thus
narrowing the qualitative gap that formerly existed between a preprint
and the final publication.3

The most widely used software that make collaboration easier are EndNote,
Mendeley, and Zotero.4–6 All three are citation managers, but go beyond
with functionalities that allow collaboration. Table 1 compares and con-
trasts these features: basic package; storage; private groups; open groups;
social network; collaboration newsfeed; annotate/highlight; personalized
paper recommendations; mobile app; and institutional edition (i.e., a way
to integrate your library’s services and/or collections into the process).
Stamison asked the audience the big question: Where are libraries in
all of this? Next, Anne McKee further addressed the question by describing
the leading edge and sometimes “bleeding” edge programs and services on
the dissemination and preservation of knowledge. Greater Western Library
Alliance (GWLA), McKee’s consortium, is one of the first consortium for
academic research libraries founded to work on scholarly communication.
GWLA helped found the Tempe Principles: Principles for Emerging Systems
of Scholarly Publishing over a decade ago and today is viewed as an
incubator for many scholarly communication projects.7
An example that McKee gave was collaboration with the Great Plains
Network (GPN), which focuses on really big data.8 GWLA is headquartered
in Kansas City and started talking with GPN when their annual meeting was
 Creation, Transformation, Dissemination, and Preservation 191

TABLE 1 Comparison of Collaboration Software Features

Feature EndNote Mendeley Zotero

Basic Package $250 Free Free

Storage 1 GB 2 GB 300 MB
Private Groups   
Open Groups X  
Social Network X  
Collaboration Newsfeed X  
Annotation/Highlight   X
Personalized Paper Recommendations X  
Mobile App   
Institutional Edition X  X

held there last year. This year, GWLA is partnering with GPN to plan the
next meeting and co-sponsoring the “Big Data Summit” (funded by Institute
of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

DISSEMINATION

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics

(SCOAP3 ), was first conceived as an idea about four or five years ago, and
lately has been making significant progress.9 The high energy physics (HEP)
scientific community started this worldwide effort among library consortia
and countries to promote Open Access (OA). Institutions that purchase sub-
scriptions to HEP journals agree to cover the cost of publishing them, while
publishers agree to make them freely available to everyone. Authors are not
charged to publish. Each SCOAP3 institutional member will cancel current
subscriptions and contribute the same amount to SCOAP3 , which in turn
supplies money to publishers. Library consortia are signing on and publish-
ers are behind it, too. The laborious process facing SCOAP3 is the need to
negotiate with so many different consortia. Other parts of the world have
national consortia, which the United States does not.
ScienceEurope is interesting too.10 Britain has mandated in the past year
that all publicly funded research become OA. ScienceEurope is trying to do
same thing all over Europe.
Visiting Scholar-Eduroam is advancing fast.11 Institutions sign up as a hot
spot to offer immediate connectivity to anyone visiting campus as an educa-
tor, researcher, student, or simply a member of the community. Scholars no
longer have to sign up for a guest account. GWLA is hoping to extend it to
more campuses.
Educause is working on an Internet2 e-content pilot, trying to under-
stand what is necessary for online materials to attain and surpass the
192 Program Sessions

effectiveness, accessibility and economy, and other relevant outcomes asso-

ciated with traditional textbooks.12 Educational and library consortial groups,
campus information technology (IT) departments, college bookstores, and
more are working with Educause to produce e-textbooks that students can
afford. The first year for this pilot project was 2013 and it will continue in
2014.
The virtual community named Future of Research Communications and
e-Scholarship, better known as FORCE11, wrote a manifesto in 2011 and
started efforts to improve the creation and dissemination of scholarly
knowledge.13 FORCE11 is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation.

PRESERVATION

Many consortia offer services that focus on the preservation of scholarly

knowledge. HathiTrust at this time has 72 research institution and library
members, many of them international.14 HathiTrust preserves and provides
full-text search of content, mainly monographs, digitized from the collec-
tions of its members. The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) at the
California Digital Library is a distributed print journal repository program.15
Although different in scope and purpose, both projects are developing stan-
dards and best practices for long-term archiving, as well as new tools for
access.
GWLA and five other consortia have begun talking about what could
be a very long process of digitizing large amounts of government docu-
ments. For now, it is a strategic objective and one can only imagine the
expense and massive data management it will take. Hopefully it will succeed,
because many depository libraries need the space and are de-accessioning
government documents to make room.
BioOne is a not-for-profit collaborative created to address inequities
in science, technical, and medical (STM) publishing, which was initially
formed by a collaboration among the Allen Press, the American Institute
of Biological Sciences, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition (SPARC© ), the University of Kansas and GWLA.16 BioOne.1 and
BioOne.2 are relatively low-cost journal collections offered by participating
publishers and libraries to users.
Technical Reports Archives and Image Library (TRAIL) is a digitization
initiative for technical reports and images issued primarily before 1976.17 It
was supported by a grant from GWLA, and then was transferred to the Center
for Research Libraries about a year and a half ago. Maliaca Oxnam won
the 2010 Congressional Information Services/Government Document Round
Table-American Library Association (CIS/GODORT/ALA) “Documents to the
People Award” for directing the TRAIL project.18
 Creation, Transformation, Dissemination, and Preservation 193

GWLA members are located in the Western United States, where water
resources are often scarce and treasured. GWLA received an IMLS grant sev-
eral years ago to digitize documents and images from four river basins—the
Colorado, the Columbia, the Platte, and the Rio Grande. The project, named
the Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL), has grown beyond the initial
four targets and is housed at the University of Utah. McKee invited the audi-
ence to browse there and view some amazing water-related digital images.19
Occam’s Reader: Here is something new that no one knows much about
yet except within GWLA, Texas Tech University, and University of Hawaii at
Manoa. It fits within our resource-sharing guidelines, trying to make e-books
accessible to consortial membership. It also fits within our strategic initiative.
GWLA is working with Jonathan Band from Policy Bandwidth organization
on copyright. Within a year, more information will be forthcoming but McKee
was not at liberty to say any more at this time.20

RESULTS FROM RECENT SURVEYS ON SCHOLARLY

COMMUNICATION

McKee conducted a survey of GWLA members asking what they are doing
with scholarly communication. There were many responses, and following
are a chosen few that were especially interesting:

● Colorado State is funding OA publishing by offering grants to faculty and

students to defray the author fees and page charges.21
● At Oregon State University (OSU) the scholarly communication librarian
searches the Web of Science for any OSU faculty publications, then offers
to help them deposit in the institutional repository.22
● Five cohorts, including GWLA members University of Colorado–Boulder
and University of Washington–Seattle, are involved in setting up Elementa,
a brand new, BioOne OA journal.23
● K-State is actually doing something about the high cost of textbooks. The
K-State Library is granting money up to $1,500 or $2,000 for faculty to
develop open access textbooks.24
● University of Illinois–Chicago has been hosting and publishing OA
journals, including First Monday, since 1996.25,26
● University of Kansas (KU) co-founded the Coalition of Open Access Policy
Institutions (COAPI), a group of academic research institutions trying to get
OA policies adopted on more campuses. Their dean Lorraine Haricombe
won Kansas Librarian of the Year partly as a result of her work on this.27

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Spec Kit 332 on Scholarly

Communication Services came out in November 2012.28 Half of the ARL
194 Program Sessions

membership responded to a survey. Of those, 93% said they are involved

in scholarly communication services, and all but three said they have a
devoted librarian position, department, or something similar. When asked
if their librarian or department was the primary scholarly communication
center on campus, there was hesitation about staking a definitive leadership
claim. Many campuses look to libraries to do this. Some said other offices
on campus do this, not just the libraries. Some said the library was only one
on campus doing something, and yet are not recognized as the leader on
campus. Why this hesitation? All of the respondents said that they offer non-
legal advice to faculty about copyright. Although they are viewed as experts
on copyright, only 25% of librarians with copyright responsibilities had law
degrees or had attended a copyright conference. Using the sport of volleyball
as a metaphor, we as librarians need to ensure we are controlling the schol-
arly communication ball, instead of waiting for it to come to us. We need to
educate other offices on campus and we definitely need copyright training.
The presentation stimulated a lively question and answer period dur-
ing which many in the audience remarked on what is happening around
scholarly communication in their organizations.

NOTES

1. Ali Gazni and Fereshteh Didegah, “Investigating Different Types of Research Collaboration and
Citation Impact: A Case Study of Harvard University’s Publications,” Scientometrics 87 (2011): 251–265,
doi:10.1007/s11192-011-0343-8.
2. “Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century,” The
Royal Society, last modified March 28, 2011, http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/knowledge-networks-
nations/report/.
3. Rafael Ball, “The Scholarly Communication of the Future: From Book Information to Problem
Solving,” Publishing Research Quarterly 27 (2011), 9, doi:10.1007/s12109-011-9202-y.
4. Thomson Reuters, “Endnote,” Ibid. http://endnote.com/ (accessed July 30, 2013).
5. Mendeley, Ltd., www.mendeley.com (accessed July 30, 2013).
6. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, “Zotero,” www.zotero.org (accessed July 30,
2013).
7. Julia Blixrud, Association of Research Libraries, “Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly
Publishing (a.k.a. the Tempe Principles),” last modified May 10, 2000, http://www.arl.org/news/arl-news/
1200-principles-for-emerging-systems-of-scholarly-publishing.
8. Great Plains Network, http://www.greatplains.net/display/Home/Great+Plains+Network
(accessed July 30, 2013).
9. Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3 ), http://scoap3.
org/index.html (accessed July 30, 2013).
10. Science Europe, http://www.scienceeurope.org/ (accessed July 30, 2013).
11. Eduroam® , https://www.eduroam.org/ (accessed July 30, 2013).
12. Ellis Booker, “E-Textbook Pilot puts College Books in Cloud,” Information Week (March 6,
2013), http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/e-textbook-pilot-puts-college-books-
in-c/240150097.
13. The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship (FORCE11), “Force 11 Manifesto,”
last modified October 28, 2011. http://www.force11.org/white_paper.
14. HathiTrust Digital Library, www.hathitrust.org/ (accessed August 6, 2013).
 Creation, Transformation, Dissemination, and Preservation 195

15. California Digital Library, “WEST: Western Regional Storage Trust,” last modified December 14,
2012, www.cdlib.org/west.
16. BioOne, www.bioone.org/ (accessed August 6, 2013).
17. Center for Research Libraries Global Resources Network, “TRAIL Technical Report Archive &
Image Library,” www.crl.edu/grn/trail (accessed August 6, 2013).
18. American Library Association, “CIS/ALA/GODORT ‘Documents to the People’ Award,” http://
www.ala.org/awardsgrants/cisalagodort-documents-people-award (accessed August 6, 2013).
19. Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL)–GWLA member projects, www.westernwater.org
(accessed August 6, 2013).
20. Texas Tech University, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Greater Western Library Alliance,
“Occam’s Reader,” www.occamsreader.org (accessed August 6, 2013).
21. Colorado State University Libraries, “Open Access Research & Scholarships (OARS) Fund,” last
modified July 25, 2013, libguides.colostate.edu/oars
22. Oregon State Center for Digital Scholarship and Services, “Web of Science RSS Feed— OSU
Authors,” last updated February 8, 2013, https://wiki.library.oregonstate.edu/confluence/x/hYYKAQ
23. BioOne, “Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene,” http://elementascience.org/ (accessed
August 6, 2013).
24. Kansas State University, “The Open/Alternative Textbook Initiative,” last modified April 16, 2013,
http://www.lib.k-state.edu/open-textbook
25. University of Illinois at Chicago, “Journals@UIC,” http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/ (acc-
essed August 6, 2013).
26. First Monday: Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, http://firstmonday.org/index (accessed
August 6, 2013).
27. SPARC® Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, “Coalition of Open Access
Policy Institutions (COAPI),” http://sparc.arl.org/COAPI (accessed August 6, 2013).
28. Association of Research Libraries, “SPEC Kit 332: Organization of Scholarly Communication
Services (November 2012),” http://publications.arl.org/Organization-of-Scholarly-Communication-
Services-SPEC-Kit-332/ (accessed August 6, 2013).

CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

Anne E. McKee is a librarian and Program Office for Sharing Resources,

Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA).
Christine M. Stamison is a librarian and formerly Senior Customer
Relationships Manager, Swets Information Services, New Jersey. Since
September, 2013, she is the Director of the NorthEast Research Libraries
(NERL) Consortium.
Sara Bahnmaier is a librarian and Head of Electronic Resources Acquisitions
and Licensing, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.