This month’s blog post was contributed by Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian at University of Iowa.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge, edited by Maria Bonn, Josh Bolick, and Will Cross, is an openly licensed textbook, as well as practical lessons in open data, open access, and open education; it also includes short case studies from those working in the field. Readers hear from nearly 80 scholarly communications practitioners, offering a range of perspectives on everything from coordinating an OER program to supporting reproducible research through the curation of open data.

The book addresses several well-known curricular gaps scholarly communication training—namely, in the areas of copyright, open data, open education, and scholarly publishing. Scholarly Communication Librarianship provides both the contextual information, and the practical skills and resources necessary for a deep, multi-faceted understanding of schol comm and all it entails.

As an open textbook, Scholarly Communication Librarianship follows OER best practices in that it is written to be reused. The content is modular and easily adaptable for other audiences and contexts. It makes good use of previously published articles, book excerpts, conversations, charts, and interviews, pulling in relevant content from a variety of open sources. In addition, it is published under a CC-BY Creative Commons license for maximum reusability. The book provides an excellent example for other OER authors on how new and existing content can be interwoven to create an effective curricular resource.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship is divided into three parts. Part I describes the interplay between formal and informal scholarly communications systems and outlines the contexts—social, economic, technological, and legal—that shape schol comm. Part II, “Scholarly Communication and Open Culture,” explores the concept of open in greater depth, not just as it pertains to open access journal publishing and OER, but also open data, open pedagogy, and open science. Part III of Scholarly Communication Librarianship shifts from theory and concept to practical example. It again features voices from the field, this time in the form of short pieces divided into the categories of “perspectives,” “intersections,” and “case studies.” Here, readers will again find a great deal of variety, both in terms of authorial voice, but also job and experience type.

Those who find themselves in a similar role or situation to the ones described in this section could use this part of the book as a reference source.