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ABSTRACT
This article outlines instructional strategies for teaching students about scholarly communication and the economic realities that surround scientific information. Exposing students to the business side of academic communication provides a foundation for understanding how Google relates to library-subscription resources, how research is both shared and discovered, what the role of libraries is in providing access to costly information, and how disparities arise in information access. Such instruction contextualizes search tools such as article databases as well as Google Scholar, and thereby serves as an appropriate starting point for teaching students to use such tools.
The authors wish to thank Anna Dahlstein (Syracuse University, formerly North Carolina State University) for providing comments on drafts of this article and her kind assistance in editing. They would also like to thank Daun Daemon, senior lecturer at North Carolina State University, for being the collaborative instructor every librarian hopes for.
Notes
1. This quote is taken from the Physics Forum discussion board: http://www.physicsforums.com. “Graveneworld's” quote comes from his 11:17 AM post, which is not his first post in the exchange in the discussion thread labeled “Students this is why you should use the library” (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=183796).
3. On September 30, 2009, Shockey (2009) gave a Webinar entitled “The Next Level of Student Engagement: Open Access Week and Beyond,” which dealt with “new ways to get student attention—including new messages and tools he's developed, how to connect to the burgeoning student network for Open Access, and how to plug in to the student initiative for Open Access Week.”
5. A final search was done in Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) on September 28, 2009 (2 days before this article was submitted) on the thesaurus terms scholarly communication and information literacy (literally DE [descriptor] = (“information literacy” and “scholarly communication”)). Zero hits were found, meaning that no articles were considered strongly enough about both topics as of that date to warrant both controlled vocabulary terms. For comparison, 519 results were found for DE = “scholarly communication” and 2097 results for DE = “information literacy.”
6. It has been suggested to us that what we mean by eonomics is really the day-to-day business practices of the library world. For lack of a better term, we will continue to use the word economics with the clear understanding that it means money changing hands over academic information.
7. For an extensive set of definitions of information literacy, see Snavely and Cooper (1997, p. 11). While older, this article is fascinating for several reasons. It sums up arguments for and against using the term information literacy in lieu of older terms, such as bibliographic instruction or library skills. As we both began our library careers in 2001, the dust had already settled on that argument, and the term information literacy has always been the accepted parlance in our work. Nonetheless, Snavely and Cooper do touch on concerns we share when they note that “The word skills implies that mastering a precise set of routines will take care of the learning, and does not imply a greater engagement or involvement with the material.” Indeed.
8. From 2002–2003 Scott Warren worked alone on ENG 333. From 2004–2008 we worked together on teaching sessions for the course, including distance-education sections. After Scott Warren moved from North Carolina State University to Syracuse University in the summer of 2008, Kim Duckett continued (and continues) to work on ENG 333.
9. Pricing information is only passed on verbally and in accordance with license agreements. Ballpark figures are sometimes used rather than exact amounts.
10. We acknowledge that editorial duties are sometimes remunerated.
11. It can be argued that collectively, academic publishers do hold a near monopoly on access to highly coveted research results—at least until any of the various Open Access models gains more substantive traction.
12. The astute reader will immediately note that according to CitationSherpa-Romeo (2009), about 29% of publishers now permit green archiving (putting both the preprint and postprint versions of an article into a repository with another 21% allowing postprint versions to be deposited and 11% allow preprint archiving only. These numbers aggregate to 61% of publishers allowing self-archiving of some form of an article and were valid as of September 25, 2009. See http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?stats=yes.
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Thus many articles can now, in theory, be accessed via channels other than the publisher's pay-per-view site. But since the vast majority of institutions or disciplines do not possess a repository and self-archiving via faculty Web pages is extremely hit-or-miss (Poynder [2009] estimates only “15% of research is being self-archived by authors”), many articles in practice are not directly available online except via the publisher.
13. In fact, Ms. Daemon won the 2008 NCSU Libraries Faculty Award for her ongoing commitment to and engagement with the libraries.
14. See also Cantor (2007) for a more extensive argument on all higher education as a public good as viewed through the developments occurring at Syracuse University.