Academic Libraries’ Contributions to Research and Scholarly Communications: One of the areas of growth for librarians in the academic library landscape today is their contributions to faculty research and scholarly communications. This white paper includes a literature review that makes note of the dramatic growth in institutional repositories and open access mandates on campuses, and of the high priority academic library directors put on research and subject expertise, open access, copyright and intellectual property knowledge, digital humanities, and using librarians in campus research centers. I make the following recommendations: 1) aligning library and university research goals; 2) developing library staff and resources to support research and publishing; 3) identifying the unique research output of the university and branding it; 4) making the library a more visible internal and external research and publishing partner through networking and strategic partnerships.

Journal Publishing Advice to Junior Faculty: We were asked to write a short discussion post on giving journal submission advice to a junior faculty member. I chose to focus on three suggestions: 1) submit to a variety of journal types–high impact, open access, and the silo journals in the author’s specialty within their discipline; 2) educate yourself (with your academic librarian’s help) about copyright, publishing contracts, open access, author rights, predatory publishing, altmetrics (alternative metrics) in addition to Journal Impact Factor and other standard metrics), press releases, data curation, and journal policies and requirements; 3) consider collaboration to increase chances of article acceptance, including cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Kathleen Erickson expects to graduate in May 2021 with her MLIS. For her last semester, she will be interning at a open access journal published at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. She has been involved in scholarly publishing for the last 15 years, mostly with open access journals as a managing editor and in other roles. Inspired by the librarians at her local public library in Sonoma County, California, she joined the SJSU program in 2019 as a full-time student, and as she moved through the program she became attracted to academic librarianship and the possible contributions she could make there.