The future of scholarly communications professionals

The scholarly communications profession is constantly changing, and a wide range of skills are required in the advertised job descriptions. In an effort to investigate what kind of skills future information professionals need, during the period March 2015 to September 2017 job postings advertising positions relating to Open Access were collected. The total number of the collected job postings was 72. The collection was done manually throughout this whole period from job advertising sites, such as Jobs.ac.uk, CILIP Lisjobnet and the Times of Higher Education. In addition, the author is subscribing to open listserves, such as the Jisc-Repositories, OAGoodPractice and a closed one, the UKCoRR-Discussion list, and managed to collect job descriptions from those list servers as well. The aim of this work is to identify the most important skills required in the jobs advertised in our field, educate the new comers in the field and identify how our profession is evolving.