Scholarly Communication Coaches

The Open Access (OA) movement’s impact on scholarly communication has reached a tipping point. Increasingly, legal requirements such as the Illinois Open Access law (Public Act 098-0925) mandate open access to state funded research, and funding agencies are obliging researchers to preserve data in accessible platforms. In addition, publisher-driven “gold OA” and free-access “green OA” require researchers to navigate complicated options for copyright control. Meanwhile, new OA “scholars networks” offer possibilities for collaboration of which scholars may be unaware. These growing trends have ramifications across many disciplines and they create a need that librarians can fill. Subject librarians trained in these skills can provide much needed assistance with these issues to their faculty, thereby reinforcing the library’s central role in research and scholarship. This case study at Eastern Illinois University describes how subject liaisons became “Scholarly Communication Coaches.