Many librarians make multifaceted attempts to reach their academic communities as a whole. However, despite open access being a relatively mature concept in many disciplines, there is rarely a day that goes by without having to explain the concept to a researcher or research group. Although the message about open access content and resources needs to be adopted by all library staff, the way that message is conveyed may alter depending on the member of academic community. It is good practice to conduct a brief stakeholder analysis so as to be prepared. While many libraries have been able to create scholarly communications positions or else convert an existing position to a scholarly communications role, many also have not. If there is a group of librarians interested in the promotion of open access, it may be possible to work within your library structure to create an open access cohort to be the voice of open access to your campus. In addition, it may be worthwhile to see if you can develop an internship position that may be temporarily funded to support the outreach mission of open access content and policies to your institution.
The ‘Seven Ages of Research’ Model by Moira Bent is a good model to use here, as it identifies different ages, which are accompanied by different attitudes to research and therefore dissemination and open access
The seven ages are defined as:
- Masters students
- Doctoral students
- Contract research staff (CRS)
- Early career researchers
- Established academic staff
- Senior researchers
- Experts
Communication of OA opportunities is not just dependent on the stage in the research career of an academic. Discipline differences are also important, for example, the predominant type of output will often differ. Speaking generally, STM may publish journal articles, engineering may publish conference papers, humanities books and social sciences a mixture of outputs. Art and Design may not publish text at all. Jisc has worked with stakeholders in the United Kingdom to develop a toolkit for the encouragement of deposit by arts faculty and students into institutional repositories. In addition, the Harvard Open Access Project outlines good practices for university open-access policies as well as a web page on “how to make your own work open access”.
There are a variety of ways to co communicate both the goals of open access publication or at least archiving of local scholarship along with resources for their faculty to use to evaluate and determine valuable open access publications. Lastly, one of the most successful paths to open access advocacy has been the running of pilot projects or summer student programs to support funding open access publishing and management of open access content within a given institution.
- Almost all librarians develop web sites that promote ways in which to improve on open access provision.
- Many librarians hold workshops on getting published which explain some of the ways that researchers and professors can publish their work open access.
- It may be possible to partner with a popular publisher to present and promote open access opportunities to faculty
- In some cases, short tutorials are developed to help walk authors through the submission processes or the evaluation process.
- Many subject librarians highlight the local institutional repository in one-on-one meetings with faculty and with departments and stress the importance of local research submission to these gateways.
- Lastly, almost all libraries participate in Open Access Week in (October/November) to help promote both services and options to faculty on open access publication.
1.1 Internal Library Message on Open Access
1.2 Communication of OA Opportunities to Your Academic Community
1.3 Mandates/Policies
1.4 Promotion of Your Repository
1.5 Budgeting for Open Access Publication
1.6 Integration of Open Access Process Management
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