2018 Charleston Library Conference

"Community and scholarly communication are intertwined by design. Researcher careers, research institutions, and global collaborations progress based on the communication of ideas. Cultivating change in this space involves navigating the cultural norms of inter- and intra-disciplinary groups, funders, publishers, and infrastructure. Mobilizing communities capable of supporting this work is a daunting task. Determining who your community is, how to create a sense of belonging among them, and the ways that they will work together are interrelated challenges that all community initiatives in scholarly communication must face.

This Lively Discussion will feature five individuals with experience working on a range of projects that have taken unique approaches to working with their communities. From coordinating a network of data science instructors to advocating for improved technical infrastructure in scholarly communication, each participant has faced different challenges and surfaced new opportunities. On their journey through the community experiences of The Carpentries, Metadata2020, C4DISC, ORCID, CHORUS, the Open Scholarship Initiative, and more, the Lively discussion attendees will see similarities and connections among the projects emerge, and will be encouraged to share their own experiences, success stories, and challenges. Collectively, the participants in the session will begin to map the many ways that community approaches in scholarly communication are similar and can build upon one another, as well as how and why paths may diverge.

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Chris Erdmann is the Library Carpentry Community and Development Director, and he works with the community of nearly 2,000 Carpentries instructors that are dedicated to the proliferation of data science skills among researchers. He coordinates workshops globally, and develops the community infrastructure that will facilitate growth.

Alice Meadows is the Director of Community Engagement and Support at ORCID. Alice develops and implements the ORCID communications plan and leads the support services team. Her primary role is to broaden awareness of the organization and its services and programs, and to support adoption by key stakeholders and audiences. She also works with a number of community initiatives in scholarly communication, including Metadata 2020, the recently established C4DISC (Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications), and a soon-to-be-launched, cross-community campaign for wider adoption and use of persistent identifiers.

T. Scott Plutchak, now retired from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, leads the “Defining the Terms we use about Metadata” project of the Metadata2020 initiative. He is also founding member of the Chicago Collaborative, a group dedicated to finding common ground among the librarian, publisher and editorial communities, and the Chair of the steering committee for the Open Scholarship Initiative, a UNESCO-sponsored global convention featuring all stakeholders in scholarly communication.

Howard Ratner, Executive Director of CHORUS, a community-led organization that leverages existing infrastructure to enable sustainable, cost-effective, and transparent open access to content reporting on funded research. Howard also helped launch Crossref, ORCID, and CLOCKSS, all community-led scholarly publishing organizations that are now well established.

(Moderator) Lou Woodley serves as the Director of Community Engagement for Trellis, an online community platform developed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also the Program Director for the AAAS Community Engagement Fellows Program, which launched in January 2017. The aim of the program is to train and support scientific community managers"