Jennifer Beamer is the Scholarly Communications Librarian and Coordinator at The Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California. She assists faculty and students in publishing their scholarship in the open environment, including, open access, open science practices, open educational resources, copyright, fair use, and research impact. Jennifer has also designed and taught a series of scholarly communication workshops for graduate students. Jennifer is passionate about open access advocacy and has been involved with SPARC and OpenCon 2014 and 2016. Jennifer holds an MLISc. degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a Master of Science degree from the University of Alberta.
As part of the preparatory work for Jennifer’s Spring 2020 capstone project, she began working with her subject librarians to teach them and empower them to help faculty with finding and using OER. They assisted her with workshops for their Open Education Faculty Fellowship Pilot Program in collaboration with the Center for Teaching and Learning. They helped with a week long #Textbookbroke campaign on the five undergraduate campuses of The Claremont College, during Open Education Week where together they informed students on how they could advocate with their faculty to find OERs and lower the cost of textbooks. Jennifer’s capstone project entailed meeting with multiple stakeholders on seven campuses of their consortium to understand the dynamics of faculty, administration, and library involvement in the textbook endeavor. Ultimately she realized that the most effective and sustainable relationships were built through the subject librarians work, and therefore she created an OER Manual for Subject Librarians to refer as they navigated OERs with their faculty and students. Marylin Billings, Head, Office of Scholarly Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst, served as a mentor and provided invaluable input and oversight.