Scholarly Communications

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

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Advocacy

Because existing models of publishing put at serious risk scholarly communication, academic organizations, librarians, and scholars are joining together to create change in how scholarly publishing is created, evaluated, accessed, and distributed. Principal areas of advocacy include:

Educating stakeholders regarding the growing crisis in scholarly communications
Counteracting pricing or publishing policies which restrict or reduce scholarly communication
Advocating alternative publishing models
Adovcating open access standards for digital publications (see OAWG, below)
Advocating electronic academic publishing and the creation of "born digital" scholarship
Educating decision makers to make informed evaluation of digital scholarship for purposes of tenure and promotion assessment.

Organized Advocacy Efforts
Create Change organizes advocacy in scholarly communications for its co-sponsors, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Association of College and Research Libraries(ACRL), and SPARC (see Organizations and Initiatives), and provides an advocacy kit for this purpose.

The Association of College and Research Libraries provides this Scholarly Communication Toolkit to help administrators, faculty, and librarians bring about needed changes.

The Open Access Working Group (OAWG), organized by SPARC (see Organizations and Initiatives) is organized for "collective advocacy of open access to research. The group seeks to build broad-based recognition that the economic and societal benefits of scientific and scholarly research investments are maximized through open access to the results of that research. OAWG aims to bring about changes within stakeholder institutions enabling viable open access models to be widely and successfully implemented and accepted." <http://www.arl.org/sparc/oa/oawg.html>