Power of Community of Scholars

The primary purpose of this presentation is to use a scholarly reflection approach to share what we (researchers and the librarian who formed the Bagwell College of Education Research Consortium) have learnt about communication between researchers within the community of practice (CoP).

It seems that most academic librarians are concerned mainly with formal channels of scholarly communication by offering alternative publishing, creating institutional repositories, advocating for open access policies, curating open resources and so on. Less attention is placed on the informal channels of communication: supporting the whole research life-cycle, collaboration in research; communities of practice and social networks. The author of the presentation insists that the conversation about open science, authorship, or evaluation of research should be an organic part of everyday practice and discusses the community of practice that was developed naturally and driven by faculty members. She describes and evaluates the development of a blended (online and face2face) community of researchers.

The results of needs assessment and satisfaction surveys and scientometric analysis indicate that there are a few changes in researchers’ communication behaviour, productivity and interests after the CoP was formed. The community moved from face-to-face to blended communication; there is more interest in discussing issues outside of the research cycle (research impact, scholarly publishing & open access); even if the number of total publications has not grown, the productivity and the quality of research of early career researchers have increased.