Engaging Small Group Open Access Education for STEM Students and Faculty

Abstract

Open access (OA) is one of the signature dishes of open science. Yet, engaging STEM departments in OA and the library’s supporting resources can present a challenge. Motivating faculty and graduate students to attend a lecture or workshop facilitated by the libraries can be difficult as participants often have neither the time nor interest in attending a generalized event. Furthermore, these stakeholders often feel the specific concerns of their discipline or department will not be addressed. Therefore, there are many advantages to conducting OA education in extant cohort-specific environments such as department meetings, graduate affinity groups, small discussion settings, or classrooms. For participants, education conducted in these environments accommodates their busy schedules and creates space for peer-to-peer and discipline-specific conversations, questions, and concerns. For librarians, these can be unique opportunities to engage with faculty and students on issues of open access and to present library resources to audiences that are otherwise difficult to access. Our recipe, for effective OA education in support of open science, is a winner for libraries and the patrons they serve. Based on sessions conducted at the University of Maryland, College Park to several engineering departments, our recipe covers how to develop and deliver effective open access education targeted towards individual communities. In it, liaison librarians and specialists in open scholarship, scholarly communications, or publishing collaborate to whip up effective outreach to different STEM departments. Librarians can then customize the recipe to develop open access education targeted towards individual communities’ tastes. Building on a set of clear and accessible OA teaching materials, we explore the role of a liaison librarian in opening discussions with cohorts of faculty and students around campus. We combine this with suggestions of how to utilize knowledge of constituent communities’ goals, concerns, (and possibly, misconceptions) around open access and open science to most effectively engage with them. Those from libraries without access to all of the ingredients need not worry, this recipe can be adapted to smaller academic settings that may not have an open scholarship or publishing librarian. It can also be tailored for larger institutions with publishing departments and multiple specialized staff. For those with different dietary requirements, the format of the outreach is customizable from department presentation, to lunch seminar, to classroom instruction, to informal discussion. This recipe will provide: A set of teaching materials, published under a CC0 license, including information on the different OA publishing models (ie green, gold, diamond), benefits and concerns around OA publishing, common misconceptions, and how OA and, more generally, open science practices are becoming increasingly encouraged if not required Supplemental materials to help librarians engage in preparatory conversations with audiences or their representatives in order to adapt the materials A checklist and guidance to research departmental and cohort activities related to OA and open science such as the use of library resources, publishing behaviors, etc. We hope our recipe can be used and adapted to accommodate OA education for varied STEM audiences, making it a timely, practical, useful plate that belongs in pretty much any library’s recipe box.