Scholarly Publishing Education for Academic Authors: Reframing the Library’s Instruction Role - Scholarly Publishing, Information Literacy, and Social Justice

Scholarly publishing has made great strides in fulfilling the vision of open access, with more journals and papers now freely available to read and reference on the Internet. Yet that achievement falls short of a truly global open, trusted, and reuseable scholarly record. What are the next steps in openness and the pain points in providing completely open scholarship? Education about the publishing process is still developing, particularly when the publishing infrastructure includes the same colonial systems and biases in academic research and publishing that persist throughout academia. These biases influence what gets published, who gets tenure, what research gets funded, and what scholarship and knowledge is prioritized in the world. The University of San Francisco has an explicitly social justice mission, and addresses its scholarly communication efforts directly at the intersection of social justice and scholarly communication. To address this intersection, librarians can work to help researchers build new competencies to understand and evaluate the diversity of innovative authoring and publishing choices and requirements; choose those that best meet their needs; and implement the changes required in other parts of their work. At Caltech, efforts are made to make research more transparent, reusable, and repeatable through the Author Carpentry program, a campus researcher training initiative focusing on 21st century authoring and publishing skills, practices and tools. Adapted from the highly successful and globally-engaging Software and Data Carpentry researcher training program, Author Carpentry develops, maintains, and delivers high-quality lessons and training sessions for researchers that offer high impact, interactive learning opportunities for researchers at all career stages