Open Up the Open Access Conversation at a STEM-focused University

This is a presentation delivered at the 253rd ACS National Meeting & Exposition, San Francisco, CA, April 2017 during the Open Access: Current Landscape, Challenges & Future Directions Symposium hosted by Division of Chemical Information of American Chemical Society. 

As one of the top STEM-focused universities in the U.S., Colorado School of Mines (Mines) has increased its research investment and scholarly output exponentially over the last couple of decades. With the growing proportion of research funding from federal agencies and shifting research focus to more collaborative, interdisciplinary, and high-impact directions, the university started to recognize the necessity of open access publishing and research data sharing. Mines Library identified scholarly communication as a new strategic direction and one focus is to develop in-depth partnership with researchers on campus to cultivate an open access culture in dissemination of research output. This presentation will introduce our strategies in starting conversations, identifying champions, forming initiatives, and providing support. We will focus on how a discussion on research profiling and networking system (a.k.a. expert system) could lead to a broader discussion on research information ecosystem. When campus develops a better understanding of research information ecosystem, we will introduce how open access and other best practices can help a healthier research information flow in the ecosystem and what individual researcher can contribute through their daily practices, including openly sharing their publications and research data. Examples of interactions between librarians and chemists as well as other scientists will be used to illustrate our strategies.