Now that you have handed in your term paper outline, what next? First thing that you’ll need to do is to sign up for a date to do your presentation on the class wiki, which, due to class size, should be limited to 8 to 10 minutes. If you are talking about scholarly monographs or emerging trends / formats, please sign up for June 7th as this fits with the topic that day. Otherwise, most presentations will be on June 9th or 14th (maximum 15 on any one day). If you would prefer another class day, that can be accommodated.
Attached are a description of how the term paper is marked and my marking sheet for the presentations. For an example of a paper that is about the right level of work and length, see Morrison, H., & Waller, A. Open access and evolving scholarly communication: An overview of library advocacy and commitment, institutional repositories, and publishing in Canada, 2008. In College & Research Libraries News. American Library Association. pp.486-490, available in E-LIS at http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/12255 For other examples, see the Theory / Research section of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice , from volume 1 to 3:1, when I was the editor of this section.
Resources for term papers
Some peer-reviewed journals that frequently publish articles on the topic of scholarly communication:
- College and Research Libraries
- Journal of Electronic Publishing
- First Monday
- Learned Publishing
Grey literature is often important in this area, for example, scholarly societies, library or publisher associations, and sometimes governments and funders commission reports on scholarly communications, sometimes quite substantial reports. A few places to look:
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
- ACRL, ARL, or CARL pages on scholarly communication
- Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
- Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association
- OASIS
- American Association of University Presses
- Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) http://www.calj-acrs.ca/
- UK – JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), RIN (Research Information Network)
- PEER: Publishing and the Ecology of European Research http://www.peerproject.eu/
- STM: International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (mostly commercial) http://www.stm-assoc.org/
The Open Access Directory features a bibliography of open access. The Open Access Tracking Project is a way of sharing links to news items as they emerge. Both are community-built resources; if you find something that should be here but isn’t, please register (it’s easy) and add it!
Charles Bailey maintains extensive bibliographies at Digital Scholarship.