Engaging Faculty in Scholarly Communication Change: A Learning Community Approach

INTRODUCTION As the landscape of scholarly communication and open access continues to shift, it remains important for academic librarians to continue educating campus stakeholders about these issues, as well as to create faculty advocates on campus. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Three librarians at Miami University created a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) on Scholarly Communication to accomplish this. The FLC, composed of faculty, graduate students, staff, and librarians, met throughout the academic year to read and discuss topics such as open access, journal economics, predatory publishing, alternative metrics (altmetrics), open data, open peer review, etc. NEXT STEPS The members of the FLC provided positive evaluations about the community and the topics about which they learned, leading the co-facilitators to run the FLC for a second year. The library’s Scholarly Communication Committee is creating and implementing a scholarly communication website utilizing the structure and content identified by the 2012-2013 FLC. © 2014 Bazeley et al. This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. PRACTICE jlsc-pub.org | Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication Received: 01/08/2014 Accepted: 04/01/2014 INTRODUCTION Libraries and librarians have been active participants in the open access movement and in the evolving landscape of scholarly communication for as long as these movements have existed. While librarians have embraced these changes, many faculty have been more reluctant to do so, in part because of the inflexibility of the longestablished promotion and tenure systems in place at most universities. All universities are challenged to keep up with changes in scholarly communication, and some actively attempt to educate faculty and other on-campus stakeholders. These attempts have varying degrees of success, because they are often dependent on so many factors—including the methods employed to get faculty interested and involved. Librarians at Miami University have had the opportunity to experiment with several different methods of disseminating scholarly communication information on campus over the last several years. These efforts culminated in the formation of a faculty learning community (FLC) on scholarly communication, conducted during the 2012–2013 academic year. This FLC focused its attention on the process of communication itself: how scholars find information; create knowledge; and communicate among


INTRODUCTION
Libraries and librarians have been active participants in the open access movement and in the evolving landscape of scholarly communication for as long as these movements have existed. While librarians have embraced these changes, many faculty have been more reluctant to do so, in part because of the inflexibility of the longestablished promotion and tenure systems in place at most universities. All universities are challenged to keep up with changes in scholarly communication, and some actively attempt to educate faculty and other on-campus stakeholders. These attempts have varying degrees of success, because they are often dependent on so many factors-including the methods employed to get faculty interested and involved.
Librarians at Miami University have had the opportunity to experiment with several different methods of disseminating scholarly communication information on campus over the last several years. These efforts culminated in the formation of a faculty learning community (FLC) on scholarly communication, conducted during the 2012-2013 academic year. This FLC focused its attention on the process of communication itself: how scholars find information; create knowledge; and communicate among Corbett (2009) more generally acknowledges that librarians should "keep in mind that they have a lot to learn from their faculty, and that education on scholarly communication must be a two-way street. Faculty may resent a scholarly communication program that seems to be "educating" them about a process with which they are intimately familiar" (p. 130). While not naming FLCs directly, Corbett goes on to actually describe part of the collaboration model of the most successful FLCs: "If librarians instead develop a program that emphasizes a collaborative model of education and advocacy, drawing on the unique strengths of both groups, they will probably find that faculty are more receptive" (p. 130). Kirchner (2009) also discusses the importance of librarian engagement with faculty "guided by the principle of open and shared dialogue about the issues with our community and [is] based on relationship-building and partnership with campus stakeholders" (p. 23). Kirchner's goal, however, was for librarian liaisons to be better integrated in their scholarly communication roles; she was not discussing FLCs.
While not an outreach effort, Courtois and Turtle (2008) explore the benefits of using faculty focus groups as a component of a scholarly communication program. In one sense, their description of faculty focus groups sounded similar to some of the objectives of our FLC: "open, in-depth discussion with a small group of individuals purposely selected to explore a predetermined topic of shared interest. This discussion is typically led by a moderator, but the setting is usually informal and encourages interaction among group members" (p. 161). Their descriptions of interactions among their focus group participants also sounded like the group dynamics and outcomes experienced by the members of the Scholarly Communication FLC: "The group setting allows for probing answers, clarifying responses, asking follow-up questions, and testing assumptions. The process of interaction within the group will often stimulate new ideas....Participating in a focus group may be one of the few opportunities faculty have to interact with peers outside their department, and to hear perspectives from fields whose traditions for peer review and scholarly publishing may be quite different from their own" (p. 161). Of course, the objectives of focus groups for research and the objectives of an FLC are significantly different, so the similarities in this article end there.
Finally, as mentioned above, there is a body of library literature devoted to librarian-led FLCs on topics other than scholarly communication or scholarly publishing. Bennett and Gilbert (2009) document how librarians at Eastern Kentucky University created a learning community with graduate students in the Occupational Therapy program (Bennett & Gilbert, 2009). Resnis, Gibson, Hartsell-Gundy, and Misco (2010) wrote a case study about the research conducted by the Information Literacy FLC at Miami University; and Little, Fallon, Dauenhauer, Balzano, and Halquist (2010) reported on their librarian-led FLC that created a research methods library guide (LibGuide) at The College of Brockport.

Background, Definitions, and Context
Miami University. Miami University was established in 1809 and is a public university with a main campus in Oxford, Ohio (approximately 40 miles northwest of Cincinnati) and three smaller regional campuses and learning centers in Hamilton, Ohio; Middletown, Ohio; and West Chester, Ohio. In 2012, the university had a total undergraduate enrollment of approximately 21,000 students and a total graduate enrollment of 3,741 students. The university is residential and focuses primarily on undergraduate liberal education, offering bachelor's degrees in over 100 areas, master's degrees in more than 50 areas, and several doctoral degrees. Faculty positions are primarily tenure-track, but adjunct positions and clinical/lecturer positions have been rising in number in recent years.
The Center for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching, and University Assessment (CELTUA). CELTUA serves a number of purposes at Miami University, including supporting both long-term and short-term FLCs and workshops/seminars. CELTUA also offers grants and awards to support innovative teaching and helps university programs assess their effectiveness. CELTUA organizes and hosts the annual Lilly Conference on College Teaching and publishes several journals on teaching and learning.
FLCs at Miami University. An FLC is "a crossdisciplinary faculty and staff group of six to fifteen members who engage in an active, collaborative, yearlong program with a curriculum about advancing teaching and learning" (Cox, 2004), and Miami University has supported over 125 different FLCs since 1979 ("A History of Miami's FLCs since 1979" 2013). Cox (2011) also provides FLCs' detailed history and function at Miami University. The purpose of an FLC is to provide a structured environment for members to meet and explore the teaching and professional development issues they encounter as faculty, staff, or as graduate students. These communities are sponsored by Miami University's Center for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching, and University Assessment (CELTUA). FLCs focus on 30 components divided into broad categories such as curriculum, administration, participants, activities, scholarship, and rewards. Important facets of FLCs include community building, professional and personal development, and the scholarship of teaching (Cox, 2004). Cohort-based FLCs explore a broad range of teaching topics of interest to the group. Members of the cohort have some commonality, such as early-career or senior faculty. FLCs may also be based around a specific topic, need, or opportunity of interest to a broad range of faculty, staff, and students. FLCs can be thought of as a particular community of practice, penned by Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) as "groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis." During the course of a year, activities might include multiple seminars, retreats, attendance and presentation at a conference of pertinence to the FLC, and original research. Usually an FLC meets every two to three weeks. FLC facilitators plan meeting activities that will advance the topics of interest while also building community between the members of the FLC. FLC facilitators and FLC members also take careful consideration to share results and learning outcomes with the community-atlarge through forums, workshops, and symposia. Finally, members often choose a "focus course" when they commit to participating in the FLC. The focus course is one in which members have agency to adjust and revise teaching practices and policy in response to what they have learned during the course of the FLC. Thus, member engagement with an FLC continues even after the yearlong span of activities is complete (Cox, 2011).
Prior to the FLC for Scholarly Communication, which is the focus of this article, a librarian-facilitated FLC on Information Literacy existed from 2004 until 2012, helping more than 110 faculty, librarians, and staff members work together to enhance information literacy on campus.
Each year a new group identified student struggles with information literacy, discussed them with students, and together devised methods to address those struggles.
By 2010, this Information Literacy FLC had become one of the longest running topic-based faculty learning communities. In 2012, the librarian-facilitator decided to retire the Information Literacy FLC after eight successful years. He agreed to assist in the creation of the Scholarly Communication FLC, taking responsibility during its first year for administrative duties and liaising with CELTUA. This freed the other two facilitators to focus on content and projects, both of which are crucial to the success of a first-year FLC.

Scholarly communication at Miami University. Miami
University has a large and active body of faculty members who perform research and publish regularly, but the university community has been slow to recognize the changes occurring in the scholarly communication landscape. The former University Librarian and Dean of Libraries formed a Scholarly Communication Working Group (now the Scholarly Communication Committee) in 2008, composed of five librarians. This group was charged with increasing the number of deposits in the university's institutional repository, the Scholarly Commons. A parallel charge was to educate librarians, faculty, and the university community at large on current issues in scholarly communication. To this end, members of the working group initially prepared presentations on open access, scholarly communication, and journal costs to present to individual departments on campus. While faculty were clearly interested in these issues, these presentations often had the unfortunate effect of generating hostility about subscription costs and open access rather than starting a dialogue among concerned parties. An open access resolution was drafted and presented to the Council of Academic Deans (COAD) in December 2009, but it was not widely accepted and was not implemented. Additionally, the Scholarly Communication Working Group created a LibGuide about open access and copyright, but it was not widely utilized by faculty, students, or librarians.
In 2011, changes in the working group's organization led to several successful efforts including copyright seminars for faculty, increased faculty participation in the institutional repository, and the establishment of a stronger scholarly communication presence on campus through social media and the celebration of Open Access Week.
A key event occurred in 2011, when ACRL's Scholarly Communication Committee (now ACRL Research and Scholarly Environment Committee) selected Ohio as one of the 2011 locations for its Scholarly Communication Roadshow. Members of the working group (along with several additional subject librarians) attended the ACRL Roadshow "Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics," held in Newark, Ohio on June 7, 2011. This workshop both educated and inspired the librarians who attended, leading to increased confidence and a new approach to educating the scholarly community at Miami University. Rather than introducing an open access policy from the top down (faculty first), the group decided to start smaller by creating an open access policy for Miami University librarians, which was adopted in May 2012. In this way, librarians are positioned to lead by example, which has proven to be effective as they work to establish an open access resolution among faculty.
While these successes helped to overcome some faculty skepticism, the group struggled with a way to educate researchers on campus in a focused and deliberate manner. At the end of 2011, the group discussed the idea of using an FLC to educate a finite group of university community members on issues in scholarly communication. The FLC was an appealing idea for several reasons: the university community has a high participation rate in FLCs, because they are important additions to tenure-seeking faculty résumés, and because FLCs offer each participating member a professional development stipend. While some FLCs are restricted to faculty-only membership, the Scholarly Communication Working Group felt it would be more beneficial to open the Scholarly Communication FLC membership to full and part-time faculty, as well as administrative staff, librarians, and graduate students. Because scholarly communication issues affect so many portions of the research lifecycle, we wanted to allow an opportunity for all relevant stakeholders to apply.
With support from the library administration, three librarians (the authors) volunteered as potential cofacilitators for the FLC, and moved forward in preparing a description and proposal for an FLC on scholarly communication for the 2012/2013 school year.

Planning, Proposal, and Applications
Scholarly Communication FLC proposal. CELTUA placed a call for FLC proposals from the Miami University community in January 2012, and the three co-facilitators began the proposal process. The proposal required several elements including eligibility, member selection criteria, a purpose and description, intended activities, and a budget for the year. The original description and proposed activities of the FLC on Scholarly Communication for 2012/2013 can be found in their entirety in Appendix A.
Proposal timeline. To assist others in facilitating an FLC or similar group, the authors created a proposal and acceptance timeline, which began with the preparation of a proposal for the FLC in January and culminated in applicant decisions and invitations in May of the same year. Appendix B contains additional details about this FLC's timeline.

Member selection process.
Applicants were asked to answer the following questions on their applications to the FLC: The scholarly communication FLC co-facilitators received 16 applications from faculty (both full and part time, as well as faculty from both the main and regional campuses), administrative staff (primarily from Information Technology), and graduate students. Of the 16 applicants, the co-facilitators chose 12 members based on their answers to the application questions, their research interests, their university status (faculty, administrative staff, grad student), and their rank (assistant, associate, full professor where applicable). The co-facilitators looked for applicants who demonstrated genuine interest in the objectives of the FLC in relation to their role in the university community. Thoughtful answers to the questions on the application were ranked highly, as it was felt that this would lead to the most committed FLC members. It was also important to have an equable distribution across subject areas, since scholarly communication issues are significantly different for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) researchers than they are for humanities scholars. There was also an interest in having a mix of members from the university community-the hope was to have faculty, staff, and graduate student perspectives in the final membership. To that end, the 12 (non-librarian) members in the FLC included eight tenured or tenure-track faculty, two administrative staff (both from Information Technology), and two graduate students.
Research disciplines among the faculty and graduate students included psychology, English, women's gender and sexuality studies, history, music, art/architecture, sociology, ecology, and zoology.

FLC Logistics
Structure and organization. One of the first tasks the co-facilitators faced was to create a year-long structure for the FLC's activities and other events. Creating a schedule of meetings throughout the fall and spring semesters for 15 university members when everyone was available simultaneously was a challenge. In the end, we were generally successful in accommodating everyone's schedules by meeting for 1.5 hours approximately every third week. Morning times were the most accommodating and also allowed us to offer substantial food and beverage options like coffee and bagels. During fall semester, we provided lunch which was a greatly appreciated when meetings occurred during the noon hour. The group was able to use the library's meeting spaces, which was beneficial due to the library's central location on campus.
Meeting space was also flexible from meeting to meeting in order to accommodate the different activities we had planned for each session.
In order to track all of the events, dates, readings, and member information for the FLC, the co-facilitators created a workspace in niihka (the university's branding of the learning management system Sakai). Using learning management software allowed us to create a hierarchical and chronological set of folders to contain all of the links and readings we assigned to the group. It also gave us a central place to manage group e-mailing, group forums for assignments and questions, and announcements. Because most faculty and graduate students already utilize niihka for their own courses, their level of familiarity with the tool meant that the group didn't have to spend time learning how to use it.
The general format for FLC meetings usually revolved around pre-assigning readings or short written assignments, followed by discussion or activities at the meeting time itself. To prevent boredom, we interspersed these types of sessions with a variety of other formats. In addition to discussions, we sometimes spent meeting time reviewing online resources, watching videos or web seminars, presenting a panel of outside speakers for moderated discussion (about open data), card sorting activities, multi-voting, and written reflections. Homework assignments were generally short readings and/or online resources to be reviewed, all related to a common topic to be discussed at the next session. Each session was assigned a general scholarly communication topic, starting with the definitions of scholarly communication and open access. The co-facilitators worried going into the first meeting that the planned topics were too basic, but quickly discovered that most of the members of the group were starting from square one and appreciated our thoroughness.
The meeting themes for 2012-2013 were as follows: • What is scholarly communication?
• Co-facilitator meetings. The necessity of co-facilitator meetings prior to each FLC session became clear shortly into the first semester. These preparatory meetings gave the co-facilitators the opportunity to assess the previous session of the FLC, consider member feedback, and plan the next session. The co-facilitators fell into the moderator role during most of the FLC discussions, and preparation ahead of time in regard to the next meeting's themes was essential for that moderator role to be successful.

Special events.
Prior to the formation of the FLC, the Libraries celebrated Open Access Week in 2011 with a targeted, strategic marketing campaign, which included open access activities and displays. It was decided to celebrate again in 2012 in a similar manner. In order to involve the FLC in Open Access Week celebrations, packets of promotional materials (including Open Access Week promotional cards and buttons) were sent to each FLC member before the week started. Additionally, a presentation by William Gunn (Head of Academic Outreach at Mendeley) was scheduled for mid-week in place of the usual FLC meeting, in the hope that this would allow FLC members to attend.

Deviating From the FLC's Original Goals
Before the FLC began meeting in the fall semester, the co-facilitators had originally planned the group's activities as follows: • Several weeks after the FLC began meeting, the cofacilitators realized that accomplishing all of these goals in a single academic year would be unrealistic. In addition to the above, CELTUA expected the FLC to produce a deliverable at the end of their time together-a white paper, a project, or some other tangible result of the work done over the course of the year. The FLC decided as a group that the final project would be to develop the structure and content for a dynamic website on scholarly communication issues, tailored specifically to faculty and graduate students at Miami University. This decision was accomplished through a series of multivoting exercises, discussions, and card-sorting activities.

JL SC
Due to time constraints during the school year, the cofacilitators decided that the creation and implementation of the website would occur after the conclusion of the FLC. Members of the library's Scholarly Communication Committee (formerly Scholarly Communication Working Group) would be responsible for the website's implementation and upkeep.
Of the initial FLC goals, the seminar style meetings were the most successfully accomplished activity, followed by the presentation by William Gunn during Open Access Week. While some FLC members did attend the Lilly Conference, the group's learning curve was initially steep, so members did not have enough time to prepare any presentations for the conference that year. The SPARC Open Access Meeting attendance was postponed to 2014, as this conference is held every other year. The CELTUA workshop/seminar goal was postponed to the fall 2013 semester, at which time several FLC membersnow confident in their knowledge of the issues-and two of the co-facilitators offered a panel presentation during Open Access Week.

Learning From Assessment and Evaluation-FLC Member Feedback
FLC members provided anecdotal feedback to cofacilitators throughout the 2012-2013 school year and submitted written reflections on their experience to the co-facilitators at the last meeting of the group. CELTUA formally collected feedback through a written evaluation conducted after the final FLC meeting in May 2013. Written evaluation questions can be found in Appendix C.
Overall, member responses were enthusiastic and positive. There were several topics that the majority of members identified as crucial: • Learning what open access and scholarly communication mean and what they encompass. The video created by Jorge Cham of PhD Comics called "Open Access Explained!" (Open Access Explained!, 2012) was very influential in our initial discussions, and members talked about it throughout the rest of the year; • Learning about copyright and author's rights for journal articles and how to negotiate/amend those rights with publishers; • Learning about predatory publishing practices, how to identify them, and how to respond to them; • Learning about the publication cycle outside of the writing, submission, and editorial processes; • Learning about the "serials crisis" and the institutional costs of commercial and scholarly publications; and • Learning about the impact of open access materials for researchers in developing countries.
• Several aspects of the FLC group experience were specifically identified as notable: • Interacting with faculty from across the disciplines and learning how scholarly communication issues differ among subject areas; • Discussions created a significant rise in member confidence in discussing scholarly communication issues with colleagues and students; and • FLC co-facilitators were organized and used the suggestions of the group members to shape the direction of the group. Topics and associated readings were relevant, thoughtfully selected, and discussed in a moderated manner.
There were also several things that members wished the FLC had done better, including: • Better integration of "outside experts" into panels or presentations on scholarly communication issues; • More emphasis throughout both semesters on the final project (as opposed to emphasizing the project in the second semester); and • Having a true deliverable at the end of the FLC, rather than just the content and structure for that deliverable.

Other Lessons Learned
The co-facilitators learned a great deal both from the community's feedback and from the experience as a whole. What was most interesting (and most surprising) was the realization that what the co-facilitators considered the most interesting topics and readings did not always coincide with what the group members found most interesting. The video created by PhD Comics on open access was released during Open Access Week 2012, and the group viewed it shortly after it became available online. The FLC members were very impressed with the video, and it generated one of the liveliest discussions the group had all year. The co-facilitators knew the video would be beneficial, yet they underestimated the impact it would have on FLC members.
A similar reaction occurred during the meeting where journal subscription models and costs were discussed. Cofacilitators assumed that faculty had a good, general idea of how journal publishing worked, but that assumption was generally false. FLC members were surprised to learn how much money the university was investing in all parts of the journal publishing process. Librarians take this knowledge for granted. The biggest outstanding item remaining from the 2012-2013 FLC is the development of the group's final project-an online resource (website) with the purpose of educating and updating Miami University's faculty, staff, librarians, students, and administrators about scholarly communication and open access issues. Members of the FLC identified this project as their top priority after rounds of multi-voting, and they identified the topics and information such a website should contain. Additionally, they participated in a card sorting exercise to identify how the website's information should be arranged. However, FLC members are not responsible for the website's actual construction. The library's Scholarly Communication Committee will accomplish that task during the spring and summer of 2014.
Finally, the co-facilitators will soon be deciding on if they will be proposing a similar FLC for the 2014-2015 academic year. There are a limited number of FLCs per academic year, and the Scholarly Communication FLC will have successfully run for two years. It may be time to retire it, to update it significantly, or to propose a new FLC topic entirely.

CONCLUSION
Overall, the Scholarly Communication FLC was extremely well received by participating faculty members, transforming most of them into active advocates for a system of more open scholarship. As one member indicated at the end of the community, "In amazing, significant ways has my thinking been changed. I have realized our institutional practices work against our collective faculty goals of building upon the shoulders of those who have come before us." Additionally, the cofacilitators have seen changes made by participating FLC members as a direct result of what those members learned in the FLC. One faculty participant submitted an article to an open access journal where he otherwise would not have; another faculty participant invited librarians to speak to her graduate level class about open access issues. Reading positive evaluations and hearing enthusiastic and supportive feedback is always gratifying, but it is even better to observe changes in participants' actions and behavior. These outcomes also provide evidence that FLCs can successfully be used as part of a multi-pronged effort to improve faculty and student knowledge of the open access movement and the evolving landscape of scholarly communication. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.org