The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Office of Scholarly Communication has announced that it has enhanced its popular series of free discussion guides on current scholarly communication issues to facilitate summer discussion programmes among library staff.
As the scholarly communication system continues to change rapidly, the Library Brown-Bag Lunch Series on Issues in Scholarly Communication is seen to be a valuable resource for library staff to use in expanding their own awareness of key issues and preparing for campus outreach. The series now offers eight guides and a discussion leader's introduction. Entirely new discussion guides on new model publications and author rights have been created. The series now includes both an introductory guide for discussions of author rights and a second guide for discussions of institutional policies on author rights. Several of the original guides have been revised to reflect advancements occurring in the past year and new suggestions for further reading have been added.
Developed by Karla Hahn, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication, ARL's discussion series covers starting discussions of scholarly communication; talking with faculty; access to publicly funded research; author rights; institutional strategies for rights management; scholarly society roles; peer review; and new model publications.
Each guide offers prework and discussion questions for a meeting, along with resources that provide further background for the discussion leader of an hour-long session. The guides can serve as a starting point for a single discussion or for a series of conversations.
Electronic copies of the guides are freely available at http://www.arl.org/sc/brownbag/.
