Beyond the Grey Zone: Organization Research Publishing and Bibliodiversity in the Research Communication System

Research publishing involves the production, use and management of research in a variety of genres and formats by commercial and non-profit academic publishers, and by organizations in government, civil society, university and industry sectors. However discussion of research publishing mainly tends to focus on the production and circulation of peer-reviewed academic journals and to a lesser extent books produced by commercial academic publishers. Research reports and papers produced by organizations outside the formal publishing system play a critical role in the research and development (R&D) system, yet they are often overlooked in studies on open scholarship and research communication. This is partly due to a lack of terminology to adequately describe the diverse publishing practices of organizations which operate across a spectrum from formal to informal economic activity. In this article I define and contextualise research publishing by organizations in relation to other forms of academic publishing and recent calls for greater bibliodiversity in scholarly communication. Commonly used terms such as ‘grey literature’ or ‘unpublished literature’ are inadequate to describe and account for the proliferation and importance of diverse research genres and formats able to be produced, published and disseminated in print and online by think tanks, government agencies, industry bodies and research centres. By taking a more holistic, systems-oriented approach to research publishing we can begin to understand the diverse actors, institutions and practices involved in knowledge production and develop appropriate policies, infrastructure and management practices to support an effective, efficient, equitable, credible and sustainable research knowledge commons in the public interest.

A Call to Develop Standards for Those Delivering ‘Research Practice’ Training

The nature of the research endeavour is changing rapidly and requires a wide set of skills beyond the research focus. The delivery of aspects of researcher training ‘beyond the bench’ is met by different sections of an institution, including the research office, the media office and the library. In Australia researcher training in open access, research data management and other aspects of open science is primarily offered by librarians. But what training do librarians receive in scholarly communication within their librarianship degrees? For a degree to be offered in librarianship and information science, it must be accredited by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), with a curriculum that is based on ALIA’s lists of skills and attributes. However, these lists do not contain any reference to key open research terms and are almost mutually exclusive with core competencies in scholarly communication as identified by the North American Serials Interest Group and an international Joint Task Force. Over the past decade teaching by academics in universities has been professionalised with courses and qualifications. Those responsible for researcher training within universities and the material that is being offered should also meet an agreed accreditation. This paper is arguing that there is a clear need to develop parallel standards around ‘research practice’ training for PhD students and Early Career Researchers, and those delivering this training should be able to demonstrate their skills against these standards. Models to begin developing accreditation standards are starting to emerge, with the recent launch of the Centre for Academic Research Quality and Improvement in the UK. There are multiple organisations, both grassroots and long-established that would be able to contribute to this project.

From Orality to Open: Innovations in Multimedia Monograph Publishing in the Humanities

This article shares the story of the purpose and methods of the World Oral Literature series, an open access monograph series supported, hosted, and published by Open Book Publishers. The publication series emerged as a response to the increasingly problematic nature of certain sectors of academic monograph publishing in which production costs are kept low by exploiting free or subsidized labour by scholars, while profits are kept high and public access heavily restricted. In a move to counter this process, the fully open access World Oral Literature series was established to preserve and promote the dissemination of endangered oral literatures in innovative, ethical, and culturally-appropriate ways.

Supporting Positive Collaboration in Digital Online Projects

Online digital projects can become inherently complex, both in their development and in their long-term maintenance, and as products of collaboration between a humanities researcher and developer. There are positive aspects of this collaboration that support the development of a successful project. However, structures and policies must be in place to achieve the project’s objectives. This article will consider these structures and policies within the context of two specific projects through Iter Community. The supporting structures include the development of workplans and common interests between the researcher and developer, communication channels, and measurements of success.

Persistent Identifiers as Open Research Infrastructure to Reduce Administrative Burden

Persistent Identifiers, or PIDs, are emerging as a key aspect of research infrastructure. They act as connective tissue, exposing the relationships between different entities that make up the research ecosystem. One of the major promises of PIDs is that they can help to reduce researcher administrative burden by automating the exchange of information that currently relies on manual entry. This benefit is not well understood by researchers, in part because it can only be realized when PIDs are adopted by a critical mass of researchers, funders, and research administrators. This article will outline the defining characteristics of identifiers, articulate the major benefits of research identifiers, discuss some of the main implementation challenges, provide an overview of existing and emerging identifiers, and summarize some key recommendations for expediting the adoption of PIDs around the globe.

Digital Theses: A Revolution Through the Lens of Boadicea

Theses are an extraordinarily significant part of the scholarly ecosystem. For researchers, they are often the cornerstone of their career by establishing and communicating their professional knowledge. Boadicea’s journey and contribution to the overthrow of the Romans is used as a metaphor for the transition of theses to participate in and conquer the new digital environment through the activities libraries. The contemporary scholarly ecosystem provides for a transformation that takes theses from a place on the “dusty shelves” of libraries to works which have high impact and achieve international visibility. This paper reports on activities across Australia and New Zealand to open access to theses, together with a deep dive to reveal the community demand for theses in the fields of humanities and social science. The relationship of theses to the scholarly knowledge system and perceived barriers are assessed using a survey of academics. Key issues for the future in terms of the open access policy environment in the context of researchers’ careers are identified.

Enabling Public Scholars through Faculty Development

To support faculty as they remained civically engaged during the pandemic, the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of South Dakota (CTL) launched a training series on public scholarship partnering with facilitators from Emory, Baylor, and Harvard. Core outcome of the series were for faculty to find a home for themselves in public engagement and to support students in their own public-facing work. The series introduced faculty to public scholarship as a dialogical partnership and offered workshops on facilitating public-facing student work and organizing virtual conferences, concluding each term with a panel featuring academics who promote the common good in different ways. This article explains the development of this series with the theoretical underpinnings that guided it and concludes by proposing a definition of public scholarship that includes student voices and repositions universities within the communities they inhabit.

Building Virtual Community through Digital Scholarship Meetups

With the launch of a newly created Digital Scholarship Program at our University Library, digital scholarship meetup events were designed and held with the intent to connect with campus stakeholders and begin to build community. This case-study paper describes the context around the development of the Digital Scholarship Program within our library and across our research institution’s community, and outlines the iterative process of identifying our core values and goals for a community-building meetup series. We discuss both the initial implementation of the series, highlighting successful strategies and the challenges we faced building community in a virtual format, as well as ways the series was modified over the course of several academic terms in response to community feedback. Our overview of the meetups includes a description of our planning, collaboration, and meeting facilitation techniques. We conclude with lessons learned and next steps to further reflect on and grow this broad-reaching virtual community of practice.

Political Economy and Diplomatics of Open Social Scholarship

This review essay investigates three areas of academic study in order to better answer the question of what the political economy of open social scholarship might look like in the future. By synthesizing research in the areas of history, sociology, and diplomatics (a subdiscipline within the field of information science), this article suggests that an integration of the three will be necessary in order to better address the ways scholarship should be regulated in the future. Fundamentally, scholarly communication is about “documents” and how they are evaluated and authenticated over time. Diplomatics is a discipline grounded in history that studies documents, and, when combined with the insights of history and sociology, can perhaps provide a useful theoretical framework for understanding the political economy of scholarly communication.