Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency: Prevalence, Activities, and Concepts of Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Shown Through Job Advertisements

Finlay, C., Tsou, A., & Sugimoto, C. (2015). Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency: Prevalence, Activities, and Concepts of Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Shown Through Job Advertisements. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(1), eP1236. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1236 Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency: Prevalence, Activities, and Concepts of Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Shown Through Job Advertisements


INTRODUCTION
The extent to which libraries are investing money and personnel into components of the scholarly communication ecosystem is something that should be of concern to all stakeholders. Job advertisements provide a useful lens for investigating these issues. These texts implicitly describe the landscape and prioritized activities across time. Such data can be useful for library managers engaged in strategic planning, for educators training the next generation of professionals, for those entering the profession, and for researchers studying scholarly publishing and the history and philosophy of science. This paper reports the results of a study examining ALA JobList postings from 2006 to 2014, with a focus on those positions requiring scholarly communication responsibilities. We sought to understand the extent to which scholarly communication jobs are becoming available, the skills that are required for these jobs, and the degree to which these skills are found in other jobs.
Specifically, we investigated the following research questions: 1. How prevalent are jobs referencing scholarly communication in the job text or title? Has this increased over time? 2. To what extent are scholarly communication activities listed in job advertisements? 3. What types of job titles are associated with scholarly communication activities? 4. What concepts are highly represented in scholarly communication job advertisements?

Scholarly communication job responsibilities in academic libraries
The evolution of the library's role in scholarly communication is most often discussed in the context of library relationships with faculty projects (Vandegrift & Varner, 2013) and with technology and the changing practice of scholarly communication (Shearer, as quoted in Clobridge, 2014). Library administrators have often distributed these responsibilities to existing units, rather than assigning them to a newly-created unit (Kirchner, 2009;Mullins et al., 2012;Thomas, 2013;William, 2009). In smaller institutions, scholarly communication initiatives may be "more likely to be led by a single person, and much less likely to be led by a library unit" (Thomas, 2013, p. 168). Although Burpee and Fernandez (2014) concluded that organizational structure and leadership are essential drivers of scholarly communication initiatives (p. 16), a survey of ARL member libraries found that no single leadership model was predominant, as a mixture of single librarians and committees was responsible for steering initiatives (Radom, Feltner-Reichert, & Stringer-Stanback, 2012, p. 11).

Scholarly communication education for librarians
While academic libraries are busily assigning scholarly communication duties to existing units or job descriptions, or creating entirely new scholarly communication librarian positions, library schools seem not to be undertaking analogous curricular changes. Bonn remarks that it is "clear that we are at a moment in the library profession that calls for expansion of education and training…that can and should be undertaken by library and information schools and through professional development" (Bonn, 2014, p. 135). Given the rising number of jobs requiring knowledge of scholarly communication and the ability to implement scholarly communication initiatives, it is striking that scholarly communication has not been widely integrated as a core component of library school curricula: 73% of ALA-accredited library schools offer some type of legal education, but the majority provide one or zero scholarly communication classes (Cross & Edwards, 2011). In addition, 83% of institutional repository (IR) staff and librarians have not received any type of formal, repository-specific training (Simmons & Richardson, 2012). A survey of IRs by Dubinsky (2014) found the majority of repositories continue to utilize a mediated submission system, in which an IR staff member either helps facilitate or undertakes the entire submission process, suggesting populating repositories is likely to remain labor-intensive for IR staff and librarians tasked with IR responsibilities. If further studies confirm the increasing emphasis on scholarly communication in academic library hiring, look for library schools to begin responding to the demands of the job market by instituting more scholarly communication courses in MLS programs. Fortunately, UNESCO has recently released online their Open Access Curricula for Researchers and Library Schools. Consisting of two components-a Institutional repositories (IRs) have become another cornerstone of library scholarly communication initiatives (Burpee & Fernandez, 2014;Carpenter, 2011;Radom et al., 2012;Staley, et al., 2010;Thomas, 2013). IRs provide "a natural entree for conversations about scholarly communication issues" (ARL, 2010, p. 289), and given tight budgets, many academic libraries (regardless of institution size) are attracted to open-source IR systems to cost-effectively engage in scholarly communication initiatives (Hashim & Jan, 2011). However, the growth of IRs has met with some recurrent obstacles. For example, publisher policies on self-archiving, permitted versions for archiving, and license agreements have created "information gaps" amongst IR adopters (Hanlon & Ramirez, 2011, p. 688). In addition, technological concerns (such as keeping IR items consistently and permanently usable even when faced with technological advancements in access technology) are a perennial issue for IR adopters (Duranti, 2010). Finally, faculty contributions can be lacking despite a library's promotion of its IR. As Foster and Gibbons noted in 2005, "the phrase 'if you build it, they will come' does not yet apply to IRs," (Foster and Gibbons). Engagement may vary by discipline, as chemistry and sociology faculty have been found to be more enthusiastic about self-archiving than those in physics and economics (Xia, 2009). General barriers to faculty involvement also exist. For example, Casey (2011) found untenured faculty to be wary of plagiarism issues related to depositing work into an IR, while other faculty have expressed uncertainty regarding copyright agreements with publishers (Davis & Connolly 2007).
Yet another critical component of contemporary scholarly communication is the OA movement. While on the surface academic libraries embracing OA can be seen as motivated by self-interest (tied to shrinking or flat budgets in the face of still-increasing journal subscription costs), libraries are just as likely motivated by the commonality of OA ideology and the historical mission of libraries; i.e., to democratize information and provide broad public access to resources (Collister & Diliyannides, 2014;Magniafico & Smith, 2012;Ogburn, 2012). A growing number of ARL institutions and libraries are adopting self-archiving policies or resolutions in support of OA (Radom et al., 2012), and over half of non-ARL libraries advise authors on publishing their work in OA journals and offer educational programming (Thomas, 2013). Library directors and deans envision a continued increase in OA engagement and advocacy (Carpenter et al., 2011), and OA should continue to grow into a central role in the mission and activities of academic libraries (Clobridge, 2014;Mullins et. al, 2011). The recent federal mandate for public access to federally funded research, instituted by the Obama Administration in 2013, will futher increase the amount of available OA publications. As Cross (2014) points out, this provides yet another opportunity for academic librarians to advocate and educate about OA.
Finally, many libraries have become publishers themselves; a study by Radom et al. (2012) found that a majority of responding libraries were working to develop new publishing models, while an almost equal number were already publishing journals. It was also found that non-ARL institutions supported publishing, albeit at a lower rate than ARL institutions (Thomas, 2013). There is widespread interest in library publishing, and most libraries with existing publishing programs have reported plans to expand within a year (Mullins et al., 2012). Library publishing programs tend to be small, publishing up to six journals, and 90% are intended to "contribute to a change in the scholarly publishing system, supplemented by a variety of other mission-related motivations" (Mullins et al., 2012, p. 6). The growth of library publishing as a viable paradigm is inevitable and necessary for libraries, which "simply do not have the option to ignore new models of publishing if they wish to continue to pursue their basic, long-standing mission in this new environment" (Mangiafico & Smith, 2014, p. 223). Technology has helped to enable these developments, given that "it is cheaper and easier than ever to acquire the infrastructure necessary to publish an online scholarly journal, and of course we know that the all-important labor (editors and reviewers) has always been free" (Gilman & Ramirez, 2011, para. 5). Cross, 2011;Gold & Gortti, 2013;Xia & Wang, 2014). Such studies are valuable in understanding the evolution of a profession, employers' expectations, and how well a profession interacts with the surrounding ecosystem that demands its services and supplies new members (Choi & Rasmussen, 2009). Incongruities identified, such as job responsibilities listed in advertisements but not commonly offered in standard education and training, can lead to opportunities for improvement. This is particularly true given the dynamic nature of the information professions, as evidenced by the sudden expansion of librarian job responsibilities in recent decades (Wang, Tang, & Knight, 2010;Detmering & Sproles, 2012).

Content analysis of job advertisements is an established research design in library and information science literature (recent examples include
At least two recent studies have noted the emergence of scholarly communication responsibilities in job advertisements. Cooper and Crum (2013) found that after 2007, job ads for health science librarian positions started to contain the phrase "scholarly communication librarian." They noted that responsibilities included institutional repository work, new publishing models, open access, copyright and authors' rights, and compliance with National Institute of Health (NIH) public access mandates (p. 274). Kim, Warga, and Moen (2013) looked at 173 job advertisements related to digital curation between October 2011 and April 2012 and concluded that the field "currently intersects with a variety of problems and domains from cultural heritage collections to eScience and data science" (p. 67). Detmering and Sproles (2012) determined scholarly communication to be a duty in 7.3% of the listings they studied and noted that "while not pervasive, scholarly communication emerged as another significant trend, particularly in science subject specialist positions. This duty requires collection development and management skills...data sharing projects, open access initiatives, digital repositories" (p. 552). In a 2011 survey of scholarly communication job responsibilities, Cross found that jobs were "overwhelmingly likely" to require strength in legal issues, new forms of scholarship and digital issues (p. 36).
Despite the breadth of these previous studies, all have ultimately surveyed a limited number of libraries and were limited by response rate or focus. By comparison, the current study presents the first comprehensive analysis of scholarly communication job responsibilities across the largest population of library and job types yet examined, taking the broadest, most detailed look yet at scholarly communication and the skill sets desired by academic libraries hoping to fill vacancies.

Data
A listing of job advertisements and associated metadata was provided by the American Library Association job list (ALA JobLIST), covering jobs posted between August, 1, 2006 and June 6, 2014. Two documents were included: a list of all jobs with associated metadata (i.e., advertisement start/end data, job title, institution, city, state, years of experience, minimum degree, organization type) and a separate .pdf containing the texts of the job advertisements. All of the job descriptions were matched and merged with their respective announcements using a PHP script and duplicates were removed. The final list contained 13,869 job advertisements, the majority of which were postings from academic/research institutions.

Sampling
We drew a purposive sample from the list of all jobs, selecting only those advertisements that contained the phrase "scholarly communication*" in the text or title. This generated a list of 598 total job advertisements. Nearly all of these were classed as "academic/research" organizations (Table 1). However, classification errors became apparent upon closer examination: all 11 advertisements mentioning scholarly communication and classed under School Library/Media Center (K-12) were incorrectly classified and were in fact for positions at academic research institutions. This finding supported our decision to include all organization types in the subsequent analyses.

Coding and analysis
The 598 job advertisements were manually examined, and a list of categories was inductively developed. These included six categories: 1. Core: Jobs for which scholarly communication activities are central to the position (including management positions where scholarly communication is dominant). For example: "The Scholarly Communications Librarian will manage the Princeton communication was coded. Other advertisements were a republished version of the same job, sometimes with slightly different language. There were 65 job advertisements (less than 1% of all job advertisements) among the set that had exactly the same text and title, but different metadata (e.g., different ad start and end dates). We treated these as unique units, since it could be possible that the university used a standard template for all jobs and the jobs were, in fact, two unique jobs. Finally, job advertisements differ in length and language style. We used only the text and title of the job advertisement as the unit of analysis and did not investigate additional information for the job. Furthermore, we took the job advertisement literally, although there are likely jobs that include scholarly communication activities but do not make it explicit. Therefore, it is likely that our coding erred towards false negatives: it's likely that there are more jobs advertisements for scholarly communication that are not in our sample than those that are not about scholarly communication, but were coded as such.

Prevalence
The percentage of jobs over time including the term "scholarly communication*" in the text or title is shown in Figure 1 (following page; only partial data were available for 2006 and 2014, hence the lower number of total job advertisements). Jobs mentioning scholarly communication have increased each year since 2009, with the greatest increase in 2014. This suggests a growing interest in this area, with more than 7% of all job advertisements in 2014 including a reference to the phrase "scholarly communication*." This percentage increases when examining only those jobs classified as academic/research by ALA JobLIST: more than 11% (n=63) of these 553 jobs contained a reference to scholarly communication.

Levels of engagement
Nearly 40% (n=232) of the job advertisements with "scholarly communication*" in the text or title listed activities or skills directly related to scholarly communication librarianship (i.e., were coded as either Core (1) or Inclusion (2)). Of these jobs with "scholarly communication*" in the title or text, 13% (n=80) were for Core (1) (5)). Another 7.9% (n=47) asked that the candidate maintain awareness of issues related to scholarly communication once they are in the position (Active Awareness (4)). Slightly fewer, 7.7% (n=46), did not directly engage in scholarly communication activities, but were in positions to manage, supervise, or otherwise oversee these initiatives. Common positions were directors of units (e.g., collection development), under which the scholarly communication unit was a single part.
More than 10% of the jobs with "scholarly communication*" in the text or title (n=62) did not ask for applicants to conduct activities, oversee activities, or have knowledge of issues related to scholarly communication. These were primarily job advertisements in which applicant would report to someone with a title including the term scholarly communication or described institutional commitment to scholarly communication.  Terms such as copyright, research, repositor*, scholar* (without communication), and publishing were also present in the titles, but to a lesser degree.

Key concepts
Seventy words and phrases related to scholarly communication were inductively derived and coded in list of the 598 job advertisements. Those words appearing in more than 10% of scholarly communication job advertisements are listed in  For ads coded 1-5, several trends were evident in regard to the use of certain key terms in the scholarly communication job ads over time. Some fluctuated markedly (e.g., "scholarship" and "publishing"), while others exhibited a relatively steady increase or decrease over time. For example, "electronic resource" was one of those that seemed to fall out of favor as time went by, decreasing from 26.7 % in 2007 to 13% in 2013. By contrast, "data management" grew significantly more popular with time, from 5.8 % in 2007 to 15.2 % in 2013. The terms "data management," "data curation," "authors' rights" (and variants), and "compliance/federal mandate/NIH public" terms were rarely used during the first half of the time frame, only coming into something approximating prominence since 2011. Conversely, "legislation/legislative," although never amongst the most popular terms, disappeared almost completely after 2009. "Scholarship," "instruction," and "outreach" all experienced large increases in use. "Scholarship" increased from 15.1% in 2007 to 28.3% in 2013. Instruction, present in 46.5% of ads in 2007 saw its use increase to 67.4% in 2013, indicating increasing engagement of scholarly communication programs and instruction librarians. "Outreach" nearly doubled, from 18.6% to 36.9% while "awareness" and "metadata" experienced an overall decrease in use over the same period of time. Interestingly, "social media" peaked with its first introduction into the scholarly communication job ads in 2011 with six percent; in the three years since its use has declined to just 1.8 percent.

Prevalence
Our first research question sought to identify the prevalence of scholarly communication in job advertisements. Our analysis found that 4.3% of the 13,869 job advertisements over the last nine years contained at least one reference to the phrase "scholarly communication*." The proportion of jobs mentioning scholarly communication has increased steadily since 2009, with the greatest increase between 2013 and 2014. The drop in 2009 is likely explained by the recession: there were half as many jobs posted in 2009 as in 2008, and it is likely that the jobs that were available this year were focused on replacing current positions rather than creating new ones. It is important to note that the percentage dip from 2008-2009 recovered immediately and the percentage has increased ever since. It is not unreasonable to postulate that the current figure (7.1%) would be even higher if not for that anomaly. Both the current figure and the percentage of jobs coded as scholarly communication positions in 2010 (3.7%) are lower than the 7.3% identified by Detmering and Sproles (2012), which looked at entry level library job advertisements posted in 2010. We could expect that, given our trend data, the current number will continue to grow, particularly in the context of academic libraries (for which 11% of 2014 jobs contained a reference to scholarly communication).

Engagement
The extent of scholarly communication activities in job advertisements was the focus of the second research question. We investigated this through a classification of jobs containing communication," "promote relevant scholarly communication issues," "contribute to advocacy efforts," and "provide education and advocacy around new models of scholarly communication"). Most did not describe what these "scholarly communication issues" were, although one list provided copyright, authors' rights, open access, and digital repositories as examples of relevant topics. This finding-that subject librarians are being tasked with scholarly communication advocacy-seems to support the existence of the environment identified by Kirchner (2009), who found that scholarly communication duties were being assigned to existing units, rather than to newly created ones.
"Digital" was a common word used in the job titles: for example, Digital Initiatives Libraries, Head of Digital Scholarship, and Digital Access Libraries. However, nearly all of them should perhaps be more appropriately called "Digital Repository Coordinator," as management of the institutional repository was dominant across the identified job advertisements, as was the implementation or management of other library publishing initiatives (though publishing only appeared in 6 titles). There were a few job ads that were more focused on Digital Humanities or Digital Libraries, but these were almost exclusively institutional repository jobs under a refurbished label. Note that only 9 jobs had the term repositor* anywhere in the title, and of these, five also contained the term digital. This suggests that librarians have responded to the argument that digital libraries should play a greater role in scholarly communication, perhaps due in part to their potential for interacting with and facilitating the "social life" of documents (Borgman, 2000, p. 414).
Work with institutional repositories was also present in jobs with "collection" in the title, though many collection jobs were more administrative in nature. This may show a trend towards incorporating the term "scholarly communication" into positions that were traditionally focused on collection management (e.g., "Assistant Dean for Collection Management and Scholarly Communication") or including scholarly communication duties in positions that did not previously include them (e.g., "Collection Development Librarian"). The data suggests that collection management and scholarly communication are becoming more closely linked in library scholarly communication programs. As libraries continue to launch such programs, and as the trend of adding scholarly communication responsibilities to existing job responsibilities is likely to continue barring increases in library budgets to accommodate new hires, it is perhaps inevitable that certain areas will develop to become more closely tied than others. Researchers should continue to look at collection development librarians to determine if scholarly communication initiative integration will be a continued trend.
Nearly 10% of the jobs did not contain any of these key words: some of these were generic titles (e.g., Librarian/Assistant Professor), but many other were explicitly titled (e.g., Metadata Librarian, Outreach Librarian, Electronic Resources/Serials Librarian). This suggests that many different positions in the library are likely to include scholarly communication components. However, this may also demonstrate a problem in lack of clear definitions and boundaries for scholarly communication librarians. Given this, we concur with Simmons and Richardson's (2012) call for appropriate and formalized job descriptions. While their study specifically looked at institutional repositories, their five suggestions for improvement are applicable to all of scholarly communication librarianship: appropriate job descriptions, new educational opportunities, guidance for internal training, development of academic curriculum, and coordination of existing training opportunities (Simmons & Richardson, 2012).

Concepts
Our final research question sought to explore the concepts that define scholarly communication positions. The most frequently used terms provide an indication of those concepts that define the practice of scholarly communication: instruction; digital products; outreach and liaison work; publishing; repositories; copyright, policy, and licensing; preservation; metadata, standards, and data management; and open access were all dominant in these job ads. While several studies have looked at scholarly communication responsibilities of different types of librarians, such as liaisons (Kirchner, 2009;Wright, 2013) and technical services (Connell & Cetwinski, 2010), we sought to identify what differentiates scholarly communication librarians from other professional positions in the field. To separate these trends from trends in librarianship overall (e.g., an increased emphasis on instruction), we looked at those terms that appeared proportionally more often in our sampled list of scholarly communication positions than in the entire list of job advertisements. The ranked list of terms provides a clear indication of the items that differentiate scholarly communication positions. In such a list, digital, publishing, and liaison work appear as the most differentiating.
However, it should be noted that a large proportion of the jobs were for subject librarians and those who are tasked with more passive activities related to scholarly communication (e.g., Awareness and Knowledge). Terms like "liaison" might be expected, even though it is not truly indicative of the key tasks with which scholarly communication librarians are concerned. Therefore, a subsequent analysis sought to identify those most likely to occur in Core or Inclusion positions. This analysis revealed that Core and Inclusion positions are most likely to be concerned with repositories, open access, copyright, intellectual property, and scholarly publishing tasks. Conversely, positions for which scholarly communication is only a peripheral task are more focused on consortia agreements, instruction, policy, and serials acquisition and licensing.
Finally, there has been an increased emphasis on instruction, outreach, data curation, authors' rights, and federal compliance in the last few years. The emphasis on electronic resources, legislation, and metadata has also decreased.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE RESEARCH
The era of intense engagement by academic libraries with scholarly communication issues is well upon us, occurring at all levels of academic librarianship. In many ways, this research makes manifest what has been largely anecdotal and confirms what has been suggested by recent studies. For example, Thomas (2013) found a "consistent pattern of non-ARL schools providing the same kinds of SC services, just at lower rates of adoption-suggesting an opportunity for programmatic growth" (p. 169). Similarly, library directors predict that libraries will continue to reinvent their roles to incorporate scholarly communication as they increasingly assume a role in publishing and face the need to remain relevant (Carpenter et al., 2011). This prediction is shared by the Association of Research Libraries, which predicts greater engagement by libraries in scholarly communication, including partnerships with commercial publishers (ARL, 2014). We may predict, given our data, that scholarly communication will soon be considered a core component of academic librarianship, alongside the traditional pillars of the trade (references and instruction, collection development, cataloging).
Given the newness of scholarly communication projects and services in academic librarianship, a discrepancy between the reality of job responsibilities and educational focus in library schools is to be expected. However, this is an issue that must be addressed. To continue to neglect scholarly communication at the library school level will only do a disservice to those students currently training to becoming librarians and those libraries seeking to fill vacancies with individuals familiar with those specific skillsets. Over the next decade, we can reasonably expect that scholarly communication programs will continue to proliferate as libraries devote resources toward launching and maintaining scholarly communication initiatives.