Community-Led Teaching and Learning: Designing an Open Educational Resource for Scholarly Communication and Legal Issues

Abstract

The open educational resources (OER) movement is growing at a rapid pace - not as rapidly as prices for textbooks have risen over the course of the last decades, and not rapidly enough to yet meet the exigent needs of students, many of whom take educational risks to alleviate costs by forgoing required materials. In order to support those students, libraries and librarians have become staunch advocates for open education and open textbooks. Yet, our community often still relies upon commercial textbooks for our own professionalization. With the rise of library publishing capabilities, interest in providing more open access to LIS literature, and publishers experimenting with open book publishing, it’s time for LIS professionals to take a more active role in defining and describing our fields for our future colleagues, and collectively maintaining that knowledge to keep up with rapid change. To that end, and to demonstrate proof of concept as well as begin to develop methods and learn some lessons, the authors propose the creation of an open textbook about scholarly communication librarianship which, among other things, will cover copyright and other relevant legal issues in libraries.