Our Year in Review

Last December, the Scholarly Communication Department carved time out of our annual retreat to reflect on our successes from 2017 and our goals for the coming year.

Greatest Accomplishments of 2017

• We contributed to the development and adoption of the IU Bloomington Open Access Policy.
• We extended our repository to create IUScholarWorks Open – a self-service repository for IUB faculty to make work that is subject to the Open Access Policy publically available.
• We welcomed four new journals to our journal publishing programs:
  • Hoosier Science Teacher
  • Journal of Academic Advising
  • Journal of Student Research at IU East
  • Studies in Digital Heritage
• We started development in collaboration with the Office of Scholarly Publishing to support innovative publishing practices like publishing digital 3D objects and publishing in XML.
• Built a new website (https://openscholarship.indiana.edu/) to provide resources about all things open access, open data, and open journals
• In the 2016-2017 fiscal year, we conducted 248 consultations with faculty, students, and staff.
• We grew! Department Head Jamie Wittenberg and Scholarly Communication Librarian Sarah Hare joined the department in 2017.

Scholarly Communication Major Goals for 2018

• Complete our implementation of the Open Access Policy to ensure that every IUB faculty member is able to effortlessly make open versions of their journal articles available. You can learn more about our implementation here.
• Upgrade all the journals we host to the newest version of our publishing software, enabling more streamlined editorial processes and improved user interfaces.
• Improve and expand website content to better meet user needs – including the development of video tutorials to demonstrate use of our services.
• Work in collaboration with the OVPR to provide support for researchers publishing in Gold Open Access journals, which often charge article processing fees to authors.
• Provide more robust support for campus’ data publishing needs
• Continue to publish weekly blog posts and expand our engagement with the IU research community on social media platforms – starting in 2018 we are tweeting from @iulibraries
• In partnership with UITS and the eText program, raise awareness about how course material costs affect students and encourage the adoption of affordable course materials