INTRODUCTION A shared concern among librarians who work in an academic environment is finding effective mechanisms to help faculty identify suitable publication venues. Determining the suitability is now also complicated by the need to determine the credibility of the venue itself, to ensure that faculty select a venue that is held in esteem. DESCRIPTION OF PROJECT At Loyola Marymount University (LMU), a medium-sized, private institution in the United States, three librarians developed a tool to assist faculty in determining the credibility of a publication venue, specifically for open access journals. This article outlines the development of a tool to evaluate journals, the pilot testing process, and some of the measures taken for the promotion, outreach, and implementation of the tool. The goal of the tool is to inform publishing decisions using an objective measure of credibility and to empower authors to make publishing decisions for themselves. NEXT STEPS The authors have released the tool with a Creative Commons CC-BY license in order to enable the broad dissemination, use, and enhancement of it by anyone interested in using or developing the tool further. It will be valuable to understand the adapted use cases of the tool and learn about experiences from other librarians using this tool at their institutions.
Rowan University has seen rapid expansion in terms of enrollments, undergraduate and graduate programs, and research activity over the last decade and has grown from a state college into Rowan University. It is a unique academic institution in that it is one of only three in the United States with both allopathic and osteopathic medical schools. Its acquisition of the Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine and establishment of the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University were significant factors in the university's research-intensive Carnegie classification R3 in 2017 and R2 classification in 2018 respectively.Until May 2022, I was the scholarly communication and data curation librarian at Rowan University Libraries (RUL), specifically at the Campbell Library, which is one of three libraries that comprises RUL on the main campus in Glassboro, New Jersey. RUL serves 22,640 students and has about 53 staff across three libraries.In this role, I was responsible for overseeing the Campbell Library's Open Access Publishing Fund (OAPF). It was established in 2017 (soon after I started working at Rowan) with the intention to support Rowan faculty with their open access publishing efforts. With Rowan University's updated research-intensive Carnegie classifications, the library determined that Rowan researchers and faculty would be engaged in increased research and scholarly publication efforts and felt it important to create a fund that would help offset the cost of article processing charges (APCs). With an increased focus on research, we thought funding from external agencies would be needed to meet open access publishing requirements. We were also curious to understand what the open access publishing needs were on campus.The OAPF was established with an initial funding of $20,000, and this amount was allocated from the Campbell Library's collection budget. Since the funding came primarily from Campbell Library, the OAPF was only available to faculty at the Glassboro campus. Initially, applications were limited only to tenured and tenure-track faculty members, but in 2021, application eligibility was extended to professional staff as well. The OAPF makes awards towards articles published in gold open access journals only, which are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and to authors who do not have other funding sources to offset the cost of the APCs.I chaired the library's OAPF Committee, which oversaw implementation of the fund and provided oversight for its daily management. It was composed of four librarians (including Shilpa Rele, formerly of Rowan University, is now program manager at Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR),
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.