Peer Review

This Scholarly Communication Toolkit was designed by ACRL’s Research and Scholarly Environment Committee as a resource for education and advocacy efforts in transforming the scholarly communication landscape. It includes vast amounts of content in the form of text and links to other sites on the following: economics of scholarly publishing, copyright and fair use, open access, institutional repositories, and data management. It has a smaller amount of content on digital humanities and open educational resources, which are related but often addressed independently. This toolkit provides the context and background, along with exemplars of specific tools to engage faculty and students in conversations on campus or begin taking action in library settings. Users can also contribute their tools to the site, thereby providing colleagues with the benefits of your library’s lessons learned.

Collection

Recommended uses include:

• Librarians and library staff needing to learn more about scholarly communication for professional development
• Librarians and other experts trying to create professional development training for an academic audience (faculty, staff, administrators)
• Graduate students in library and information science courses looking to increase their understanding of scholarly communication for an assignment or potential job opening
• Instructors assigning the resource as reading material for a graduate-level library and information science course. Instructors could use a flipped instruction approach where participants would review material from the toolkit prior to the in-person session-- the face-to-face session would then involve more active engagement around brainstorming, problem-solving, creating something, etc.
• Librarians or other advocates of open scholarship making a case for more open and inclusive academic practices to their department chairs, deans, and higher-level administration

Browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer was used for testing). One linked resource required that Flash be enabled.

If used by a librarian audience, the learning objectives as specified on the site are:

"The toolkit is an educational resource primarily directed to librarians to assist them with:

1. integrating a scholarly communication perspective into library operations and programs and
2. preparing presentations on scholarly communication issues for administrators, faculty, staff, students, or other librarians."

Because this is a vast collection of materials, there are arguably different learning objectives for each of the materials included or at least for each category of materials included. 

Overall learning goals for the entire toolkit if it were to be used with a broader audience than just librarians could include:

• Learners will be able to describe the origins of scholarly publishing, the ways it has changed through history, plus how it is continuing to evolve.
• Learners will be able to articulate the reasons behind advocated changes in the ways scholarly research and other scholarly works are reviewed, published, and made available for users 
• Learners will be aware of resources related to open access publication, open data, institutional and other repositories, and open peer review; and they will be motivated to share these resources with other stakeholders.
• Learners will seek to advocate for the evolution of more open scholarship.
• Learners will understand the basics of copyright and fair use and be able to explain their roles in academic scholarship and open access.

This guide would be useful for graduate students (specifically in library and information science courses) as well as professionals (librarians and other academic faculty, staff, and administrators).

No prerequisite knowledge is technically needed, as the resource provides an introduction to scholarly communication and its various components. It would be beneficial for users to have some familiarity with academic language commonly used in the discussion of scholarly publication. While there is an attempt in the toolkit's content to explain fundamental concepts related to scholarly communication, a non-academic audience may find it difficult to find an entry point into this discourse.