With the acquisition and creation of scholarly communication platforms/infrastructure by major commercial entities, the balance of influence continues to shift. The ACRL/SPARC Forum at the 2018 ALA Midwinter Meeting brought together library stakeholders for a conversation about how the library community can reassert its influence to shape the open access publishing landscape. Panelists focused on 1) Individual action: “What can one person do?” 2) Local coordinated action: “How can one group or institution effect change?” and 3) Collective action: “How can libraries work together to provide sustainable alternatives?”1
Lighting talk given at the Southern Mississippi Institutional Repository Conference. // Managing a repository can be a daunting task. Outreach can be difficult. Cold emailing faculty members often results in no answer or a no. But what if librarians could get leads on researchers at their institution who having been receiving article and data requests? That’s exactly what the Open Access Button’s Librarian Notification System aims to do. A cold call would instead be turned into, “Hi, Professor Smith, I heard that your article was requested by an Open Access Button user. I’d love to help you share that per your publishing agreement!” This can help a librarian turn a problem a professor is encountering into a solution, and potentially add additional scholarship to the repository — and help fulfill more Open Access Button requests to strengthen the public’s access to open access materials. The Open Access Button is piloting the Librarian Notification System in spring 2018 and this lightning will discuss the results, and future plans to improve the system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.