Introducing Undergraduates to Open Access and the Power of Collaboration Between Scholarly Communications and Instruction Librarians

Undergraduates are often left out of conversations surrounding open access. While they may not share the same concerns about publishing and prestige as faculty and graduate students, they do consume vast amounts of information, and thus can benefit just as much as those farther in their academic careers by knowing how to find, evaluate, and use open access resources. This presentation highlights a successful collaboration between the presenters in their respective roles as scholarly communications librarian and course developer to create and implement curriculum for a 3-unit information literacy course to teach undergraduate students about open access principles. Once the curriculum was taught in different sections of the course by various faculty, focus groups were conducted to assess curriculum efficacy. Highlights from the focus group feedback will be shared. The presenters will also explain how this experience prepared them to expand their respective roles into the realms of supporting undergraduate production of open access materials and the utilization of OERs by faculty