Below I offer my suggestions for librarians looking to stay current in the field of scholarly communication (“scholcomm”). This list is primary aimed at people new to the field, but I hope it will also be useful to those who have been around for a while and may discover a mailing list, conference, or other resource they were unaware of. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

The major organizations

• SPARC — This small organization, supported by its member institutions and focused on open access, open data, and open education, was originally formed by the Association of Research Libraries but is now a standalone organization based in Washington, D.C. SPARC is advocacy organization, sponsoring the Right to Research Coalition and the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI).
• ACRL has a section of their website dedicated to scholarly communication pulling together ACRL initiatives on this topic. There’s also a Research and Scholarly Environment Committee (ReSEC) of members.
• FORCE11 is a coalition with origins in the life sciences including many practicing researchers, not just librarians and publishers
• The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
• Research Data Alliance
• Authors Alliance – The Authors Alliance was created as a counterpoint to the Authors Guild that is designed to better reflect the needs of scholars, not bestselling authors.  The resources section of the website includess some original guides that are available for free download or for purchase in print.
• National Information Standards Organization (NISO) – brings together libraries and publishers to set best practices and create and maintain standards
• Library Publishing Coalition – A membership organization of academic libraries providing publishing services. They have an excellent professional development guide. The LPC publishes an annual Library Publishing Directory that includes non-member libraries, and they host an annual conference called the Library Publishing Forum, open to non-members. If your institution is a member and you want to join the members-only email list, contact the LPC.
• The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) engages in scholarly-communication–related issues, including through the Digital Library Federation (DLF).
• The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) uses social tagging to inventory developments related to open access. You can follow the firehose of information through various kinds of feeds, including on Twitter.

Websites

• Scholarly Communication Toolkit from ACRL ReSEC
• Open Access Directory – You can register to get an account to contribute to this directory.
• Digital Scholarship
• A Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure
• Library publishing resources from the Council of Australian University Librarians
• dh+lib – This site, created by the ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group, is “where the digital humanities and librarianship meet”. Most of the site is a blog; a digest of posts is sent to the interest group’s email list.
• Innovations in Scholarly Communication – a directory of tools that can be browsed by facet and explored through various visualizations

Email lists

• scholcomm – This list is hosted by ACRL and nominally run by the Research and Scholarly Environment Committee (ReSEC). Membership is broad, and discussions are at times heated. Copyright is a major topic of discussion. The old list archives are still available online though not currently indexed by search engines.
• SPARC hosts a few lists that are very difficult to find on their website:
  • SPARC OA Forum (sparc-oaforum)
  • SPARC Libraries & OER Forum (sparc-liboer)
• IR Managers Forum – for managers of institutional repositories
• There are two low-volume email lists called “libpub” about library publishing:
  • Libpub – hosted on Google Groups
  • LibPub – hosted by IFLA
• FORCE11 has had a number of different email lists over the years, tied to their various conferences, but the new one, meant to be indefinite, is the FORCE11 Forum (f11discussion).
• CNI-ANNOUNCE – This moderated list is sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information. Many postings come with commentary or context by CNI staff members. Alternatively, you can subscribe to a feed of the same postings.
• all DLF lists are publicly joinable (even if you’re not at a DLF-member institution): see the DLF “stay connected” page.
• UNIVERSITYPRESS – This list, sponsored by JISC, is for those interested in the new university presses arising in the UK and beyond (generally publishing only in open access). As mentioned in the first message, it’s meant for sharing news and asking questions.

Blogs

• info-structure – A monthly newsletter “of ideas, inspirations, and interests across open, public, and collaborative research”
• The Scholarly Kitchen — A multi-author blog on issues related to scholarly publishing, hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing. A number of authors are seen as leaning towards the views of commercial publishing, though there is always vigorous discussion in comments.
• Open and Shut – This blog, hosted by Richard Poynder, an independent journalist focusing on open access, includes a series called “the OA interviews” in which he interviews leading figures with something to say about open access.
• Impact of Social Sciences – a number of posts relate to scholarly communication and are applicable to other fields
• Delta Think, a consulting firm specializing in scholarly publishing, puts out a monthly newsletter called “News & Views” with their latest analysis of open access publishing. You can sign up online.

Recurring conferences, symposia, and other meetings

• OpenCon (see website for OpenCon 2018) was long held annually, with parts livestreamed to allow remote participation. The OpenCon community also sponsors community calls on various topics, including some especially for early-career librarians.
• NISO holds various educational programs in the form of webinars and virtual conferences (long webinars). Those at NISO member institutions, plus members of the Library Standards Alliance, can attend for free (webinars) or at reduced rates when purchased by the institutions (virtual conferences).
• CERN hosts a Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication in odd-numbered years (see the website for OAI9, held in 2015).
• PKP International Scholarly Publishing Conferences – has been held in odd-numbered years
• FORCE11 sponsors an annual conference and an annual Scholarly Communication Institute.
• RDA sponsors an annual plenary meeting plus other occasional events.
• The Library Publishing Coalition organizes an annual Library Publishing Forum that is open to attendees from institutions that are not members of the LPC.
• The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) organizes a recurring event called University Press Redux.
• Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing – This annual conference, held in Tromsø, Norway, covers scholarly publishing and communication.
• Scholarly Communication Institute (sometimes called “TriangleSCI”) – annual event hosted in North Carolina and funded by the Mellon Foundation. Teams apply to attend to work on a project; travel expenses are paid for those teams accepted.
• The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) organizes various events: membership meetings twice a year (open to two participants from each membership institution, plus presenters) and other periodic events.
• University of North Texas annual Open Access Symposium – takes place each May at one of UNT’s campuses in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
• The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) holds an annual conference.
• The Southern Miss Institutional Repository Conference is an annual event held in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
• The University of Colorado Colorado Springs hosts the annual Kraemer Copyright Conference, and Miami University Libraries hosts an annual copyright conference.
• Electronic Resources and Libraries (ER&L) is an annual conference, held since 2010 each April in Austin, Texas. It has a track on scholarly communication & library publishing.

Also see the DLF-sponsored events calendar, the events section of the Open Access Directory, the Open Access Community Events listing from OASPA, and the monthly NISO Newsline for listings of events.

Twitter

• Keep an eye on hashtags like #scholcomm, #openaccess, #oa, and #libpub.
• Open Access HSS (@OpenAccessHSS) – specifically on the humanities and social sciences
• SLA Acad Schol Comm (@SLAAcadSCS) – This account is run by the Scholarly Communication Section of the Academic Division of the Special Libraries Association

Journals

• Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication
• Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship – a brand new publication with a promising editorial staff and board
• Insights – the journal of UKSG
• Journal of Scholarly Publishing
• Learned Publishing
• The Journal of Electronic Publishing publishes on a wide range of topics, much of it related to scholarly publishing
• Scholarly and Research Communication

See also Publishing options for research in Scholarly Communication.

A bit farther afield thematically

Email lists

• The LIBLICENSE project has a list called LIBLICENSE-L that, while originally focused on licensing of access to content, now addresses “the creation, publication, distribution, and economics of scholarly electronic information.”

Recurring conferences

• Researcher to Reader Conference
• The annual Charleston Conference nominally focuses on library acquisitions but more generally deals with the relationships between libraries and publishers
• There’s an annual conference called Open Repositories (see the website for Open Repositories 2017)
• The Society for Scholarly Publishing organizes various events including an annual meeting, for which SSP offers a special registration rate for librarians.
• The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) organizes various events and hosts a calendar of industry events.
• The Association of American University Presses organizes an annual meeting. AAUP offers a special registration rate for librarians.
• International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB) – There’s little industry representation at this conference, which generally draws participants from outside North America and encompasses publishing in a broad sense.
• NASIG and UKSG began as conferences of serials catalogers, but their scope has expanded to include electronic resources more generally, including aspects of scholarly communication. They organize annual conferences and sponsor journals.
• National Federation of Advanced Information Services
• The University of San Diego hosts an annual Digital Initiatives Symposium.
• Digital Library Federation Forum – The DLF Forum is an event held each fall. In recent years, there has been considerable to attention to support for digital scholarship, publishing, pedagogy, and more in libraries. Meetings are open to those not at DLF member institutions.

This work by Kevin Hawkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International