Supporting publication choices in an open research context

Abstract

Scholars are confronted with myriad options when publishing: taking into account their topic, their publishing goals, intended audience, institutional and funder policies and collaborator preferences. Libraries and their institutions are there to support their authors in this process. In this session we will discuss potential new ways to help researchers, teams and department leadership to make choices and formulate publication strategies. We will do this using two resources created recently at Utrecht University Library (the Open Access Faculty Toolkit (De Boer et al. 2024) and the Publication Strategy Tool (Bosman & Kramer 2022)). Together they provide both top-down and bottom-up approaches to support changing publication practices. This session will address both the range of choices researchers and their institutions need to make (why, what, when, how and where to publish, open access types) and how to support this informed publication strategy as a library or librarian. In doing so, we will differentiate between individual, departmental/team and institutional levels. We invite participants to bring in their own disciplinary and research policy contexts and will then discuss the different publishing options. We will also discuss the balance libraries need to strike between supporting whatever choices researchers make, supporting institutional and funder polices and advocating to bring open science into publishing and make publishing more equitable. The session aims to inspire and help participants in creating and using informed approaches to supporting open publishing.

Participant preparation: we ask the participants to in advance briefly take a look at the two resources mentioned and think about how using these could be beneficial in their function or for their organisation.