Page 12 - Windows Spring 2015

Library hosts well-known speakers

Scholars communicate research to the world

On October 22 and 23, the TCU Mary Couts Burnett Library hosted a scholarly
communication workshop on the TCU campus for TCU faculty and graduate students. The
purpose of the workshop was to explore recent developments with scholarly communication
and showcase examples of faculty partnerships with TCU librarians. Panels and invited
speakers offered practical and philosophical insight about open access journals, which are
available online to the reader.

The workshop featured two well-known speakers in scholarly communication. The first day Keynote Speaker; Dr. Eric Martens
began with keynote speaker,
Dr. Eric Martens, Senior Editor of the journal PLOS One. Martens gave an interesting
overview of the history and inner workings of PLOS One and other journals hosted by its
parent organization, the Public Library of Science. Additionally, he spoke about the future of
these types of journals, commonly called “open access” journals and that more journals in
academia will be open access in the future. Martens also discussed how researchers generate
and preserve raw data from their research.

On day two, keynote speaker, Dr. John Willinsky, a member of the faculty at Stanford
University, talked about the history and current state of scholarly publishing, university
presses and scholarly content. He also spoke on various models of open access publishing
and how organizations such as libraries have a key role to play in this area. Dr. Willinsky is the
founder and director of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which serves to promote the
reach of scholarly publishing through the development of open-source software.

A variety of speakers also provided focus and purpose for scholarly communication to the Keynote Speaker, Dr. John Willinsky
audience, touching on topics related to scholarly communication and open access:

• Dr. Nowell Donovan, TCU Provost; Dr. Phil Hartman, Dean of the College of Science
and Engineering; Dr. Sarah Robbins, Acting Dean of the John V. Roach Honors
College; and Dr. David Whillock, Dean of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication
presented a panel discussion on campus changes in scholarly communication.

• Mr. Jeff Bond, Science Librarian, spoke about assessing the impact of scholarly research.
He reviewed traditional metrics such as citations from other scholarly articles and
displayed a new metric that depends on factors such as overall usage, mentions in news
outlets, and mentions in social media.

12 TCU Library