Day/Time: Monday, May 10, 4:00 PM to 5 PM
Publishing Undergraduate Research: From Serendipity to Strategy
- Sarah Frankel, University of Louisville
- Rachel Howard, University of Louisville
A combination of ambitious and motivated first-year students, a newly-formed IR Advisory Board including members of a university’s strategic planning subcommittee, and a pandemic led to the rapid expansion of the University of Louisville’s open access offerings of undergraduate research in 2020.
Our small team’s responsiveness to the requests from multiple fronts to showcase undergraduate research meant modifying our institutional repository’s collection policy; adapting author agreements; preparing MOUs; and communicating with stakeholders ranging from the Provost’s office to novice journal editors to software support, all while working remotely.
The juried poster session events and open access journals produced by undergraduates and presented on our repository have brought the library publishing program positive publicity and a mention in the new university strategic plan. The process has prompted us to improve our documentation of other IR procedures and relationships, laying a stronger, more sustainable foundation for the repository as a whole.
Partnering with Student Journals to Increase Visibility and Discoverability
- Omar Dewidar, University of Ottawa Journal of Medicine
- Jeanette Hatherill, University of Ottawa Library
- Zacharie Saint-Georges, University of Ottawa Journal of Medicine
Student-run journals are often significant pieces of an academic library’s publishing or hosting program that offer graduate and undergraduate students valuable experiential learning opportunities related to various aspects of scholarly publishing. However, the student-run nature of these journals can pose unique challenges for their library partners with an often-higher editorial turnover than their faculty counterparts. Since 2013, the University of Ottawa Library and the student-run University of Ottawa Journal of Medicine (UOJM) have been partnering on projects to increase the journal’s visibility and discoverability. This session will highlight some successful past projects and present the progress of a current project that seeks to have the journal indexed in PubMed. Representatives from the journal’s editorial team will share some best practices and current challenges related to managing a journal while pursuing full time studies. Participants will also gain insight into the important role the Library can play as a keeper of institutional memory for student journals.
The Pursuit of High Research Activity Classification: Library/Learning Commons Support for Student Publishing
- Linda Cifelli, Kean University
- Craig Anderson, Kean University
As a university pursues R2 Carnegie research classification, the provision of support for publishing efforts by members of its community plays a significant role in the pursuit of that goal. While faculty members are prime candidates for such services, the university’s research classification goals are also well served by support for student publishing.
This presentation focuses on the development and implementation of an integrated set of strategies by one institution’s library and affiliated learning commons units in an effort to nurture publishing by undergraduate and graduate students. These strategies combine outreach conducted through various modalities, ranging from live virtual meetings and workshops to informational text and multimedia content embedded on the websites and other platforms of various university stakeholders.
A librarian embedded with programs that facilitate faculty-mentored research accomplishes a number of goals, including helping students access library and other information resources and also guiding students to the writing support that will help them successfully share the results of their scholarly and creative projects. In addition, an online library/learning commons module available to all students via their learning management system provides intrusive engagement through easy access to asynchronous resources that support development of information literacy, communication literacies, and related student learning outcomes when they write papers as the culmination of their scholarly research.
Outreach efforts across the university emphasize the publishing opportunities available to students through the university’s own open-access student journal, published on a digital learning commons platform.
By helping students to understand the academic and professional development benefits of publishing their work and by providing a digital platform through which research conducted by undergraduate and graduate students may be shared, the university will advance its efforts to increase overall campus-wide research activity and to achieve recognition for high research activity.