SPARC is excited to announce a second round of our Open Access 101 series, building on the significant response from the community to the first series hosted last year. These upcoming OA 101 sessions will deepen the conversation around key topics related to open access, including visibility and impact, problematizing “predatory” publishing, and authors rights. See full details below.
We are grateful to once again collaborate closely with the team behind the Scholarly Communications Notebook (Josh Bolick, Maria Bonn, and Will Cross) to organize these sessions, and the events in this second series will feature expert speakers to guide the discussion around each topic.
Recordings of each session will be made available afterward. These sessions are intended to provide lightweight professional development for librarians whose work intersects with open access or may do so in the future.
These sessions are open to anyone working in libraries, and participants can register for just those sessions that are of interest. SPARC membership is NOT required, and our goal in this series is to support the wider community, particularly those at institutions with fewer resources to support OA-related work.
Session 1: Open Access, Visibility, and Research Impact: An Introduction
April 30th from 1:00-2:30pm ET / 10:00-11:30am PT | Register Here
Speaker: Rachel Borchardt, Scholarly Communication Librarian, American University
There are many visibility and impact benefits associated with publishing open access research, but researchers do not always prioritize open access when disseminating research. However, visibility and impact are vital to researchers, as well as grant funders and research institutions. In this webinar, we’ll discuss the relationships between open access and impact, starting with traditional scholarly impact metrics and moving into other types of impact, as well as the current landscape of research promotion and visibility. Aligning open access advocacy with researcher incentives as well as recent impact initiatives and movements will also be discussed.
Session 2: Problematizing “Predatory” Publishing
May 14th from 1:00-2:30pm ET / 10:00-11:30am PT | Register Here
Speakers: Matt Ruen, Head of Collections and Digital Scholarship, Grand Valley State University; Teresa Schultz, Scholarly Communication and Social Sciences Librarian, University of Nevada Reno
“Predatory” publishing, which generally refers to a set of practices in academic publishing aimed at deception for financial gain at the expense of rigor, remains a hot topic among researchers and scholarly communication specialists. There are disagreements on how to define it and to whom and what it applies. This session will explore a variety of publishing practices that could be considered predatory – including ones that are applicable to well established subscription publishers and journals – and problems with lists that claim to make clear-cut decisions on “good” and “bad” journals. Finally, we’ll discuss how librarians can help researchers evaluate scholarly journals based on their needs.
Session 3: Who Owns Scholarly Work? Copyright and Open Access
June 4th from 1:00-2:30pm ET / 10:00-11:30am PT | Register Here
Speaker: Dave Hansen, Executive Director, Author’s Alliance
Who owns the copyright in scholarly work has been one of the most confusing, yet most important, legal questions in the move toward open access. While the answer might seem like it should be obvious (“authors!”), the reality is that layers of university copyright policies, copyright’s “work for hire” doctrine, publisher copyright transfer agreements, and funder licensing requirements make this a complex issue. This session will address how these different layers of rights, copyright transfers, and licenses affect the ability of authors and their institutions to make their works available openly as well as emerging issues such as AI usage of scholarly works and how open licensing and copyright can support or inhibit those uses.
We welcome your feedback, which will inform our decisions about future sessions and how to best support our community with accessible professional development opportunities.