Publishing Undergraduate Scholarship: Should you be afraid?

With a growing emphasis on undergraduate engagement in academia, library publishers are discovering that it is vital to negotiate the conflicting directives of publishing, protecting, and promoting undergraduate scholarship. Some faculty are concerned that publishing student work online is harmful to both the student and faculty publishing prospects; while others may make publication a course requirement with little concern about copyright or reputation. Students themselves often have little understanding of privacy and intellectual property. This panel will explore some of the questions and concerns libraries must answer in order to build stronger relationships and successful publishing opportunities for all Emily Stenberg, Washington University in St. Louis. While the repository at Washington University in St. Louis was created in response to a faculty open access initiative, the majority of the materials and publications hosted on the site have been created by students. More undergraduate course collections are being developed in the repository; at the same time, the Libraries and Scholarly Publishing have a growing relationship with the university’s Office of Undergraduate Research. Scholarly Publishing, a unit within the University Libraries, offers customized, flexible publishing options, including copyright assistance, platform hosting, editorial and design services, preservation, and education and training. However, connecting with the university’s undergraduate publications has been a challenge. This points to a continuing issue: how to demonstrate the library’s value as a publishing resource to undergraduates who are developing themselves as independent scholars while not alienating faculty, some of whom have expressed growing concern about students publicly sharing highly personal work or research that may contain sensitive data. The speaker will discuss the issues and opportunities the Scholarly Publishing unit at Washington University and other libraries face when engaging with and educating students about publishing, whether the publications are capstone projects, senior papers, or journals.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/lib_present/1021/thumbnail.jp