Beyond Faculty Support: How to get Graduate Students Involved in the Open Access Movement

This presentation will be focused on library sessions conducted for a graduate level education course at a large research institution. The sessions were taught once a year in the spring semester and discussed the open access movement, altmetrics, journal impact factor, and organizational/departmental culture, to name a few. Questions addressed include what do graduate students need to know to participate in this conversation now as they work on their dissertations and in their future as faculty members? Most graduate students are focused on the research and methodology portions of their dissertations, but what if we could shift their perspective to think more about publishing in the digital age? What will they do with their dissertations? What will it look like? How about future publications? The library sessions taught were so successful that a full fledged for-credit course was created in the College of Education for all interested graduate students. Attendees will learn how to approach graduate students with this topic, how to get involved in courses to begin with, and how it can look at your institution. Discussion can be focused around what others have done already or how it can be scaled to any kind of institution. If we want to change the landscape of scholarly communication on college campuses, why not start with graduate students before they become faculty