Thursday, January 6, 2011

Florida State University: Open Access Statewide Conference CoLAB 2010




The goal of this statewide conference was to present the most current information regarding copyright law and ways to inspire academics to publish in open access journals.

The problem was attendees largely didn't know each other's work in the field of open access. CoLAB speed meeting processes facilitated by Bess de Farber, created a knowledgeable framework about available assets in this topic area, from which collaborations and shared support could grow.

For the second part of CoLAB Planning ® the group divided into 8 “idea” tables, ensuring a diversity of institutional representatives at each table. First, participants exchanged information about their own institution’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as they relate to Open Access issues. Within a 10 minute timeframe, participants at each table brainstormed as many possible ideas for moving Open Access forward on their campuses and state-wide. As they brainstormed, librarians recorded their ideas on post-it notes. The results in this preliminary report come from the post-its created during the Idea Tables process.

Major themes to emerge:
This preliminary report categorizes the 204 suggestions given by workshop attendees into 12 major themes. The structure of this report lists the theme, a definition of that theme, and all the suggestions relevant to that theme. 84 suggestions fit into multiple themes and therefore are listed multiple times.
Because this was a brainstorming activity, no ideas have been excluded from this preliminary report.

# of suggestions Theme
77 Engage in faculty outreach
40 Market/ Develop PR for Open Access
34 Strategic planning for Open Access initiatives at the campus and state level
33 Improve Institutional Repositories & digital collections
33 Continue librarian education/ promote librarian awareness
32 Develop workshops on scholarly communication; integrate scholarly communication into existing instruction efforts
15 Get support from/ work with administration (both librarian and campus)
11 Engage in student outreach
9 Librarians should publish in Open Access journals
7 Conduct environmental scans or assessments
6 Develop Open Access Journals hosted by/ managed by libraries
6 Create strategies for working with/ responding to publishers/vendors

TABLE 1: Suggestion Themes
As a follow up to the CoLab Planning ®, all participants will be sent the list of suggestions generated at the event. A webpage will be developed for participants to comment on suggestions, share new suggestions, and continue the conversation thus extending the workshop experience.

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