The aim of this toolkit is to support early career researchers in finding a journal that publishes their paper and optimally promotes the visibility of their research. How can they find a journal with a good journal ranking score that is perceived in the respective research community? How can they find a journal that perfectly matches their topic? Should they consider publishing open access? What are predatory journals and how can they detect them?

The goal of this resource is to support scholarly communication librarians wanting to implement accessibility measures in their open access, open education, and open data initiatives.

Author Carpentry is a researcher-to-researcher training and outreach program in open authoring and publishing. It was initiated at the Caltech Library to enhance scientific authorship and publishing in the digital age. The aim of Author Carpentry is to promote and support good information handling tools, practices, and skills that help researchers prepare, submit, and publish contributions that add value to the scholarly record and invite others to adapt and build upon. Ideally, that means contributions that fulfill not only the original Big Four of the scholarly record – Registration, Validation, Dissemination, and Preservation - but also enable an essential fifth component of knowledge management in the digital age: Replication, Reuse, and Remixing.

Philip N. Cohen gives an overview of the scientific information ecosystem in the context of COVID-19, with an emphasis on the role of preprints.

Digital culture is changing. Social technologies are impacting how scholars work, learn and engage with one another both inside and outside of their institutions. In postsecondary education, it is becoming increasingly vital to share your work and practice online. Open and digital channels help colleagues solicit advice, seek out support/collaboration, offer free professional development, share information and resources, and learn in networked communities with common interests. Besides developing a digital presence, higher education staff, administrators and scholars are utilizing social media and digital technologies to support their work, add to their professional development, engage with peers, learn in the collective and publicly in digital spaces and places. Using openly licensed content, this OER helps fill the gap between the digital divide and familiarizes users with the digital publishing world. By using this OER, students and professional scholars alike will gain insight into how to use digital publishing tools to their advantage, have a better understanding of the challenges surrounding digital publishing, and learn how to create and engage in innovative and collaborative digital projects. 

Unit Summary
This unit provides a primer on aspects of United States copyright law that relate to library publishing and provides guidance on creating two essential copyright policies: 1. An externally facing copyright policy for authors considering publishing with the library publishing unit; and 2. A copyright review policy for internal purposes (i.e. how to review submitted publications for copyright issues). Nothing in this unit substitutes for legal advice or constitutes legal advice. It is important to work closely with University Counsel when working to comply with University copyright policies, legal requirements, and the needs of the publishing group.

Learning Objectives
At the end of the session, participants will be able to…
Understand basic copyright principles, including the length and scope of authors’ rights
Identify and create copyright policies that support publishing unit goals and authors’ rights
Apply the principle of fair use in publishing
Make informed decisions about when and how to register a copyright with the US Copyright Office

Knowledge of open access stakes and initiatives is critical for understanding and promoting the fundamental role of faculty and librarians in the scholarly information cycle as academia aims to become diverse, equitable, and inclusive and make scholarship more accessible. Despite the open movement being decades old, there is still a gap in research on Black, Indigenous, and faculty of color (BIPOC) in the context of open access. Understanding the motivations for and barriers against Open Access (OA) publishing (and the relationships between them) among BIPOC faculty helps LIS practitioners and Open advocates design incentives to increase participation and decrease lack of knowledge and stigma around OA.

In 2020, Principle Investigator, Tatiana Bryant and her research team designed an original qualitative study that uncovers ways in which pre-tenure and tenured BIPOC perceive attitudes towards the legitimacy of open access publishing, especially as it relates to their own tenure and promotion processes. To advance this research, select study instruments are available in the Scholarly Communication Notebook for reuse and adaptation as part of a lesson plan designed to teach LIS students and professionals to consider how qualitative research methods can support their praxis.

This handout provides a brief overview of open access to scholarly literature. It looks at the problems with traditional journal publishing, the promise of open access as a solution, and the different paths to open access.

Joint webinar with ASAPbio, Sumeet Pal Singh and Europe PMC

Preprints enable researchers to rapidly share their work publicly before the formal peer review process. In this webinar you will learn more about preprints and their benefits for the research community from ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in biology); will hear an author’s perspective on posting preprints from Sumeet Pal Singh, a group leader at IRIBHM, ULB; and will find out how to incorporate preprints in your literature search routine by using the preprint discovery tools developed by Europe PMC.

ASAPbio is a scientist-driven nonprofit that promotes the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. ASAPbio coordinates a global community of researchers and stakeholders interested in preprints and develops resources to advance best practices and help researchers make informed decisions about communicating their work via preprints. Iratxe Puebla, Associate Director at ASAPbio, will provide an overview of preprints and their growth in the life sciences, and cover things researchers should consider before posting a preprint.

Sumeet Pal Singh is a group leader at IRIBHM, ULB and an ASAPbio fellow. Sumeet will describe the journey of publishing his first senior author paper from a preprint to a peer-reviewed article, as well as the details related to the timing of posting a preprint and its relationship to the peer-review process. He will outline a new path provided by Review Commons that allows the authors to receive peer reviews for their manuscript prior to a journal submission, as well as post the reviewer’s comments and the authors’ response on preprint server (bioRxiv).

Europe PMC indexes over 300,000 preprints abstracts and full text COVID-19 preprints from 20 life sciences preprint servers alongside published journal articles. Preprints in Europe PMC are linked to citations, data, community peer reviews and more. In this part of the talk we will demonstrate how to find relevant preprints, cite and track preprint citations, claim preprints to ORCID, or discover relevant resources.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is suitable to any biological researchers who wish to learn more about incorporating preprints into their research. No prior knowledge is required.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Define what a preprint is
Choose a suitable preprint server for your work
Maximise the options for publication of the preprint at a journal
Decide when to post your manuscript as a preprint
Deal with community reviews and comments
Identify how to search for relevant preprints
Find data behind the preprint
Find comments or reviews associated with a preprint
Add a preprint publication to your publication list
Cite a preprint

Preprints enable researchers to rapidly share their work publicly before the formal peer review process. This webinar will demonstrate how to incorporate preprints in your literature search routine by using the discovery tools developed by Europe PMC.

Europe PMC indexes preprints abstracts and full text COVID-19 preprints from many life sciences preprint servers alongside published articles. Preprints in Europe PMC are linked to data and platforms that comment on or peer review preprints. We will demonstrate how to find the data behind preprints as well as comments and reviews associated with a given preprint. We will also share useful tips for posting your pre-prints, claiming a pre-print to your ORCID and tracking your pre-prints’ citations, revisions or recommendations by readers.

To learn more about using Europe PMC in your research try our Europe PMC: Quick tour or our webinar Using Europe PMC for effective literature research.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is suitable to any biological researchers who wish to learn more about incorporating pre-prints into their research. No prior knowledge is required.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

Define what a preprint is
Identify how to search for relevant preprints
Find data behind the preprint
Find comments or reviews associated with a preprint
Demonstrate how to add a preprint publication to your publication list
Describe how to cite a preprint

Psychological sciences preprints from PsyArXiv are now searchable in Europe PMC, an open database of life sciences literature. Join us for this live demo to learn how to find PsyArXiv preprints in Europe PMC, how to explore links to data, citations, comments or open peer reviews, how to claim preprints to your ORCID record, and more.

Who is this course for?
This webinar is aimed at psychology researchers.

Outcomes
By the end of the webinar you will be able to:

find PsyArXiv preprints in Europe PMC
explore links to data, citations, comments or open peer reviews
claim preprints to your ORCID record

Researchers, scholars and scientists main business is scholarly communication. We communicate about our work to others, as we push the boundaries of what we know and the society knows. We question established notions and truths about science. We share our findings with others, and in a way that is popularly known as scholarly communication which emerged with the publication of first journal in 1665. However, the term gained popularity only in the 1970s, as access to peer reviewed and scholarly communication became difficult. This module has four units covering introduction to scholarly communication, peer reviewed journals, electronica journals and databases and the Serials Crisis. At the end of this module, the learner is expected to be able to:
- Explain philosophy, mission, and objectives of scholarly communication
- Describe the process of scholarly communication
- Identify different channels of scholarly communication
- Discuss the dysfunctioning of the scholarly communication
In Unit 1, Introduction to scholarly communication, we have discussed different aspects of scholarly communication – particularly its genesis, importance and ethics of academic publishing, and different communication channels available in academic publishing. Some of these channels are commonly described as primary sources as they provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. Historically, scientific journals were initiated by learned societies and other scholarly communities for reporting results of concluded research works or scientific discoveries. Now many forprofit publishers have started publishing research journals.
Unit 2, Communicating with Peer Review Journals, covers two important academic publishing channels, namely peer reviewed journals, conferences and their proceedings. This Unit also highlights different methods and procedures of peer reviewing for publishing primary literature emanated from research studies. The peer reviewing is essential for validating quality of research findings conveyed by researchers, which are subject to fulfilment of ethical standards and appropriate research design, sampling and other methodological issues.
In Unit 3, Electronic journals and databases, we have discussed the emergence of electronic journals in academic and research environment due to wide proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICT) in research communications and academic publishing. Scientific communities and scientific communications from the global South are getting substantive attentions through adaptation of electronic journals and electronic academic databases in the process of research communications.
In Unit 4, the Serials Crisis, we discuss the cost of peer reviewed publications and the problems faced by researchers in developing countries. The focus of this unit is on highlighting the problems and discusses possible solutions including the emergence of open access as one of the solutions. Open access journal publishing helps in mitigating some of the problems associated with serials crisis.
This is Module One of the UNESCO's Open Access Curriculum for Researchers.
Full-Text is available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002319/231938e.pdf

This is the last Module of the course on Open Access for researchers. So far you have studied about Open Access, its history, advantages, initiatives, copyrights and licensing, evaluation matrix for research – all in the context of scholarly communication. In this Module with just two units, we would like to help you share your work in Open Access though repositories and journals. At the end of this module, you are expected to be able to:
- Understand the publication process involved in dissemination of scholarly works;
- Choose appropriate Open Access journals and repositories for sharing research results;
- Use social media to promote personal research work and build reputation.
In Unit 1, we discuss the research publication process at five stages – planning stage, preparing stage, pre-publication stage, publication stage and postpublication stage. We emphasize the importance of social media in sharing and making your work visible to the target groups.
In Unit 2, we focus on sharing your research through OA repositories and Journals. First we discussed the different types of repositories to select and highlighted the steps that you may consider including deposit in your own institutional repositories or in global open repositories. We then discuss the sources of finding and deciding on OA journals. This unit also provides guidance on choosing the right OA journals, as the quality of OA journals is often questioned.
This is Module Five of the UNESCO's Open Access Curriculum for Researchers.
Full-Text is available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002322/232211E.pdf

Websites for scholarly publications and digital scholarship are expected to be stable for long-term access, citation, and archiving. Static websites provide a durable and low-cost solution for making and distributing scholarly works. In library and academic contexts, static websites have been used for conference websites, digitization projects, archival metadata, academic journals, edited monographs, and open textbooks. The resources presented here introduce this powerful technology for scholarly communications librarianship.

Contents include: a lesson plan for learning about static web publishing for digital scholarship projects; an annotated bibliography of articles, tutorials, and podcasts about static websites in academic contexts; a quick demonstration of GitHub as a static website hosting platform; an introduction to static site generators tutorial.

Open Research Action Plan, Data Sharing, Open Access, Open Code & Software, Open Resarch Awards, Preprints, Preregistration & Registered Reports