Using Outreach Weeks to Examine Labor, Assessment, and Value in Open Advocacy

INTRODUCTION Like the scholarly communication system it aims to transform, open advocacy work is broad in scope and reflects many influences, practices, and players. Despite having a rewarding mission, scholarly communication librarians frequently juggle multiple roles, may experience isolation and career stagnation, and produce outputs that are not readily understood. METHODS These challenges inspired the creation of the Open Action Kit, a suite of tools to help practitioners plan, execute, and assess open advocacy weeks, particularly Open Access Week. This resource sought to make explicit parallels between the activities and scope of open advocacy work and leadership skills that could aid in career progression. RESULTS The project’s aims and structure matured to focus on a broader, critical appraisal of the nature of scholarly communication work. Its encouragement of dialogue between its members and audience more thoroughly recognized and addressed the tensions between open advocacy work and professional success. DISCUSSION Open advocates expressed many frustrations with their work: they often felt isolated or burnt out, hindered by structures or expectations from their organization. While relational work is fundamental to the cultural change inherent in scholarly communication work, the overly simplistic, quantitative measures typical of library assessment do not accurately capture its nuance or complexity. CONCLUSION Centering the relational components of open advocacy work is necessary for it to be successful, sustainable, and appropriately valued. While the Open Action Kit has not been updated since 2017, it serves as a useful model for translating and centering relational work through distributed leadership, advocacy, and skill development.


INTRODUCTION
In March 2017 at the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) conference, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) organized a meeting of librarians involved in open access advocacy, some of whom were particularly active in SPARC's OpenCon Early Career Librarian community. During the meeting, the group discussed the nature of scholarly communication, open advocacy roles and activities, and how to best support this work and its community members, especially in regards to positioning them for future leadership roles. While this discussion did not have an explicit outcome, it ultimately led to the creation of the Open Action Kit. The kit was meant to provide support for translating scholarly communication work to leadership skills that could aid in future career progression by supporting open advocates in planning, executing, and assessing their Open Access Week 2017 activities and framing this work through a leadership lens. This goal, however, evolved as our work and planning drew attention to the patterns of disconnection between open advocacy work, strategic progress, and career advancement. As a result, the project pivoted to a more explicit examination of labor, value and assessment in scholarly communication. By keeping the practitioner perspectives of those doing scholarly communication work as a priority, the Open Action Kit and the process of its creation emphasized and supported the relational nature of advocacy work, positive coping, and the professional development needs of open advocates.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Scholarly communication work has become increasingly representative of the breadth of practices, communities, policies, and technologies that encompass and are impacted by the creation, dissemination and preservation of scholarly knowledge and activities. Academic libraries and librarians are leading efforts related to campus based publishing, copyright and licensing, open educational resources, research data management, digital scholarship, and policy compliance (NASIG, 2017;Thomas, 2013;Xia & Li, 2015). The scope of this work often makes it both highly distributed and collaborative, and these traits are commonly reflected within academic institutions. The results of a 2012 ARL survey on the organization of scholarly communications work illustrates a diversity of leadership and support structures, often reflecting the contributions of more than one individual. Thomas (2013) looked at the structure of scholarly communication services in non-ARL libraries and found that while leadership in this area was most often the responsibility of one person, the scope of activities and services provided was similar to ARL libraries. Furthermore, library liaison roles are evolving to explicitly include expertise, outreach, and teaching activities related to scholarly communication practices and issues (Jaguszewski & Williams, 2013;Malenfant, 2010). Regardless of the institution type, job positions that require leading or contributing to scholarly communication services often only have this as a partial focus (Thomas, 2013;Xia & Li, 2015), with additional responsibilities or areas of focus.
Given how wide ranging the duties associated with scholarly communications work can be, the various structures it exists within, and the myriad of stakeholders that are involved, it has become increasingly necessary for open advocates to be able to prioritize projects, collaborate with others, and translate the success of initiatives and services in a way that will resonate with others in their organization. As such, the work itself requires relationship building, outreach, and advocacy activities. The NASIG (2017) Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians describes the importance of deeply engaging with internal and external audiences, noting the "fundamentally collaborative" nature of scholarly communications work (para. 8). In addition to several communication-focused qualities, the NASIG (2017) competencies also prioritize personal strengths such as ambition and a "comfort with change and ambiguity" (para. 22). These themes are echoed in Xia and Li's (2015) analysis of scholarly communication focused position descriptions, as they found that the newest job announcements prioritized collaborative efforts with faculty and researchers, interpersonal skills, and the ability to work with internal partners to realize new initiatives. Collaboration has not only become fundamental to work in this area, it is expected for success. This expectation is reified by institutions through formal job descriptions and annual reviews, as well as the composition and structure of scholarly communications units, where one employee is often tasked to deliver multiple, growing services.
Due to its emphasis on relationship building, it can take significant time to measure success and realize outcomes for scholarly communications work. Farrell and Mastel (2016) note the challenges around assessing academic library activities more generally, pointing out that "numbers alone cannot measure outreach programming" (n.p.). Likewise, the assessment mechanisms for scholarly communication services are not well-developed (Thomas, 2013) with commonly used measures (such as institutional repository deposits or event attendance) failing to adequately demonstrate the successes of partnership building or collaborations that library staff undertake. Scholarly communication services and outreach are challenging to assess, as the overarching goal of such work is to facilitate cultural or behavioral change, both of which tend to be slow and incremental (Martin, 2001).
While this landscape is rich with opportunities to contribute to a more open, impactful scholarly communication system, it can be isolating, frustrating, and professionally confusing to the professionals who operate within it. Ford (2009) argues that outreach and community-centered work-both of which characterize the primary responsibilities of the scholarly communication librarian-often sit outside what are perceived as core library and librarian activities. Moreover, as Dawson (2018) described, raising awareness of and engaging scholars about more open methods of research communication is a "perpetual challenge" (p. 1). Unlike other areas of librarianship, for which there are national and international standards of practice and excellence, scholarly communication outreach and open advocacy is highly contextual, with challenges and opportunities differing greatly by institution, discipline, career stage, and other variables (Dawson, 2018;Foasberg, 2015). It is also worth noting that the supervision of librarians or other staff members-experience that is often required for administrative or managerial positions-is not a common component of many scholarly communication positions (Thomas, 2013;Xia & Li, 2015). Those in positions with additional managerial or departmental liaison responsibilities may also find difficulty balancing the scope of their work or assigning procedural work for highly specialized areas. The rapid changes that tend to characterize this work, when coupled with ambiguous expectations and scope creep around job responsibilities, tend to make it difficult for those in scholarly communication roles to position themselves for advancement within existing career trajectory structures. Moreover, open advocacy work often sees librarians develop and adopt more radical politics that can come into conflict with the more traditional, palatable politics necessary for success in university administration.
Adding another layer of complexity onto labor in scholarly communications work is a deep, pervasive belief in the common good and the dedication to actions that help realize this. Although the belief that we are working in service of the greater good has been a core tenet of librarianship for decades-having been articulated through various iterations of our professional Code of Ethics (American Library Association, 2008)-this notion has been reaffirmed and reinscribed more recently by Ettarh (2018) through the idea of "vocational awe." Ettarh (2018) asserts that vocational awe-characterized by a martyrlevel devotion to one's work and the romanticization of libraries-can eventually lead to burnout, job scope creep, and poor compensation. Since open advocates are hoping to usher in substantive, meaningful change in the research, education, and data ecosystems, it is safe to say they experience and perpetuate a great deal of vocational awe. This awebased devotion, when coupled with a lack of shared understanding around success, can hinder critical discourse, especially in the field of librarianship, which tends to discourage such discussions (Ettarh, 2018). Moreover, the complex nature of scholarly communication work, including its rapidly changing developments, high degree of contextuality, paucity of meaningful assessment mechanisms, and distribution of labor, often poses a substantial challenge to professionals working in these roles. How can one effectively establish measurable and meaningful expectations, implement strategic initiatives, and communicate their professional contributions in concrete terms, when so much of the work is ill-defined or misunderstood?
These myriad and multifaceted challenges provided the impetus for the development of the Open Action Kit, a resource that supports open advocates by empowering them to articulate a vision of their work and make strategic decisions. Our hope was that by using this resource, librarians working in scholarly communications would be able to develop a common understanding of their work so that it could be assessed and valued accordingly. To do so, we aligned common practices for Open Access Week with project management and reporting resources in order to support scholarly communication librarians in planning, executing, assessing, and communicating the value of Open Access Week initiatives.
It is important to reinforce here (as we have above) that open advocacy is complex, everchanging work. Thus, it is unsurprising that as we navigated this project, the direction of the project itself evolved. There was a noticeable shift away from focusing on future career or leadership opportunities to focus on other areas of professional development such as strategic planning, mitigating burnout, and supporting the larger community of scholarly communications advocates. Realizing that not all open advocates aspire to career progression through administrative or management capacities, we felt that this shift in focus would make the kit more widely applicable. Yet, throughout the project the goal of fostering opportunities for advocates to effectively communicate the value and outputs of scholarly communication work in ways that administrators speak and understand remained salient.

THE CASE OF OPEN ACCESS WEEK AND THE ORIGINS OF THE OPEN ACTION KIT
Participating in International Open Access Week is a common activity for many scholarly communication librarians, involving many professional competencies, including event planning, policy advocacy, marketing, and instruction. It is generally aligned with a particular time frame (usually the last full week of October) and a theme. Responsibilities around advocacy and educational programming-of which Open Access Week is the most well-established example-are often formalized in scholarly communication focused job descriptions (Finlay, Tsou, & Sugimoto, 2015) and administrative expectations for job performance (Carpenter et al., 2011). For this reason, it tends to be a period of heightened activity that often includes long-term planning and extensive coordination. Many advocates go with tried and true initiatives such as workshops, informative displays, and social media campaigns. However, despite the prevalence of Open Access Week as a planned activity and its time and labor intensive nature, it is difficult to find discussions in the scholarly literature about what a successful Open Access Week looks like.
Precisely because Open Access Week is such an established activity and because it poses challenges to open advocates in terms of logistics and assessment, the Open Action Kit team decided it would be an ideal use case for whether a resource like this would be helpful. The The group began meeting remotely on a regular basis in April 2017 to brainstorm and ideate the most practical ways to support the work of open advocates during Open Access Week. That year's theme was "Open in Order to," which was intended to inspire communities to explore and celebrate the benefits that open scholarship makes possible. Our objective in creating the kit was to enable advocates to approach Open Access Week as a longerterm project and apply a strategic process to their planning that reflected the context of their institution, as well as their experience and capacity. While we were primarily focused on librarians, we took into consideration members of the research community who were not librarians and those who were not at research-focused institutions. The team decided to create and release monthly "packages" of tools and resources to facilitate the planning, execution, and assessment stages of organizing Open Access Week initiatives. The overall schedule of resources is detailed in Table 1.
Although there were some resources shared in August 2017, the first package of content was published in September and was focused on helping librarians and other community members identify an action for Open Access Week and plan for its eventual execution. Several resources and feedback mechanisms were provided to enable this, including a quiz that matched respondents to a particular open advocate persona 1 , suggested activities, and resources. These personas were based on an advocate's experience with Open Access Week, the intended audience for their programming, their professional strengths, and what resources were available to them. We also published a number of checklists that outlined common tasks associated with event awareness, virtual activity, and activism type projects. The September package also contained an environmental mapping worksheet, which was designed to help advocates connect their activities with the goals of their organization, identify potential partners, and utilize existing resources (e.g. posters, speaker lists, teaching materials, etc.) that they could access, reuse, and modify as necessary.
Resources provided in October 2017 included materials and advice for working through last-minute details, increasing the impact of outreach work, and coping with project and professional stress. It should be noted that the latter was in fact a theme addressed throughout the dissemination of the Open Action Kit's materials and promotion. We consciously and consistently used messaging that acknowledged that being an open advocate can be stressful and tiring work, especially during times of heightened activity such as Open Access Week. As noted above, discussions in the scholarly literature about what a successful Open Access Week looks like are rare. As such, the final content package in November 2017 included resources that would encourage advocates to reflect on their efforts in order to identify what went well and what could be improved, taking care to include resources related to communicating the impact of Open Access Week initiatives. Later that month, we developed and delivered a webinar on developing a professional competency narrative, especially for the purposes of updating a curriculum vitae or preparing for a job interview. While the expertise and experiences of the Open Action Kit team members were complex and varied, we recognized that they did not represent the totality of insights and experiences. Thus, we undertook efforts to gather valuable feedback from the open community that ultimately informed the content of the kit. We crowdsourced and incorporated best practices to promote existing resources and account for differences in institution type, job scope, and other variables by engaging in conversations on Twitter and listservs, both in the lead up and the weeks after we disseminated a package. We surveyed open advocates in the field on their experiences with relevant outreach weeks, requesting feedback on the personas we created, and encouraging them to share their assessment processes or perspectives. We regularly used Twitter, creating the #OpenPros hashtag to host two Twitter chats to facilitate professional development, networking, and discussions for open advocates. The first Twitter chat took place in September in preparation for Open Access Week 2017, with the second taking place in November to debrief and discuss how to report out and translate the impact of Open Access Week activities. Finally, at the end of the project, several members of the team wrote reflections about their expectations, challenges and successes contributing to the kit.
In terms of logistics, we used several tools to manage, publish, and update the Open Action Kit. Slack was our primary tool for internal communication, with Google Docs being used for documentation, collaborative writing, and to collect ideas or feedback from community members. A GitHub repository and a GitHub pages website were used to publish the content, manage some project tasks, and contain internal project documentation (including team meeting notes and issues, which we wanted to make publicly available). We used a promotion schedule to raise awareness about the monthly resource releases, #OpenPros Twitter chats, webinars and other news. All content was released under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.
It is important to note that the Open Action Kit was only distributed in 2017. There were plans to transition the kit to a new team of advocates in 2018 with recommendations and guidance from the original team; however, this transition did not happen due to changes in the Open Access Week theme, original team member priorities, and SPARC (the organizers of International Open Access Week) reprioritizing initiatives within the organization. The Open Access Week themes for 2018 and 2019 were centered on diversity and inclusion, which would have required a substantial reframing of the 2017 Open Action Kit to best suit that context, ideally with a geographically and culturally diverse team. On a more local level, significant institutional priorities such as repository migrations (Digital Commons had been acquired by Elsevier during this time) and shifting professional responsibilities required the more immediate attention of several Open Action Kit team members. On a more meta-level, this also points to one of the more challenging aspects of a distributed leadership model: without having at least one person remaining for continuity and consistency, projects can lose direction and engagement. All told, there were many factors that contributed to making a hand off of the project more difficult.

LESSONS LEARNED
The most prominent theme that arose in the surveys, Twitter discussions, and Open Action Kit team member reflections corresponded with challenges expressed in the literature and our initial rationale for creating the kit. "Overtaxed people and sense that we aren't doing enough." "Colleagues are happy to speak to the importance of the event and to retweet, but not to do much more." "Hard to find time and support." "Labor intensive with one person doing most of the work." That being said, it is important to note that not all of the conversations fostered a sense of doom and gloom. Advocates spoke about the value and positivity that came from partnerships, new connections, and increased engagement with library services, however modest. Respondents experienced more success when open topics were embedded in discussions and issues fostered by external partners (such as the Office of Research or Graduate Studies, or units that focused on knowledge mobilization or community-based scholarship), with this "meet them where they are" approach resulting in more consultations and engagement with scholarly communication services. However, not a single advocate indicated that event attendance was a positive outcome of outreach weeks, leading us to believe that the labor required to conduct traditional activities such as workshops may not be the most effective course of action. There are other approaches to outreach that would yield more opportunities for relationship building.
Several advocates identified the importance of networks external to their institutions, noting that such connections assisted with inspiration, efficiency, and effectiveness for their personal practice. This was also a common sentiment among the Open Action Kit's team members in their project reflections. The quotes from participants in the #openpros Twitter chat below illustrates how instrumental professional networks can be in supporting and motivating open advocates: "I jokingly called the #openpros and #opencon networks my 'inspiration engine' once in a meeting, but it's so true! Because you all seriously help me come up with ideas for programming, events, initiatives, and ways of talking to people. Important to cultivate!" "It was really exciting getting to partner with other folks in this area, especially since these sort of positions may be isolated and not have frequent collaborations." Many questioned whether the work done in service of Open Access Week and other related weeks was inherently valuable. Some felt reform was needed in order for outreach weeks and open advocacy work to be more effective, both in terms of the magnitude of planning and the types of events organized. This is not to say that advocates should forgo Open Access Week or that outreach initiatives do not have a purpose or impact, but more that advocates may be committing without purpose or measuring impact with ineffective or misaligned methods. Other considerations such as focus groups, follow-up surveys, and documenting observations during events can demonstrate qualitative aspects, an important consideration since headcounts do not measure engagement (Farrell & Mastel, 2016). One element of success for the scholarly communications librarian is the partnerships they are able to make. However, when so many of the metrics of the library's success are internal or transactionally focused, this hinders how these advocates are able to talk about the impact of their work. Advocates shared a diversity of perspectives about what success looks like to them and ways in which they have reoriented their approach to advocacy weeks: "I think this work can be valuable, but I no longer assume that it will be." "In general, we have made the various weeks a nice way to frame and organize the work we do, but have not done substantial programming or outreach based on the week itself (i.e. we're not generally creating stuff just to say we did something). This has significantly reduced our stress level around the various weeks and made the things we do offer much more sustainable." "It would be better for the institutions/organizations that 'run' these weeks to offer clear paths to contribute to a larger effort (and edit-a-thon, a survey, etc.), rather than just announcing a week and expecting people to drop everything and focus on one topic." It was difficult for most advocates to articulate the impact of their advocacy work in general.
They also found it difficult to address gaps between the subjectivity of what an advocate might personally consider success and what their institution considers success. There was a reported tension between the demand for quantitative data and the importance of qualitative stories of impact. For example, advocates indicated that relationships and partnerships were essential to the success of their work, but found it difficult to demonstrate the extent of the value of relationship building in their formal evaluations and assessments. Some expressed the need to move from justifying completed actions to strategically planning for the future and considering multiple access points to scholarly communication topics.
"Even tracking the impact of the articles we help publish is difficult & defining your personal role in this ecosystem." "An interesting feature of consortial models, like OLH, is that we have libraries thinking in both modes: some want to know whether their authors are publishing with us, others want to know about readership at their institution #openpros." The quotes above reinforce some of the difficulties of assessing scholarly communications work, which can be further exacerbated when working within consortial or multi-campus systems that often have different goals, politics, or priorities. It is imperative that organizations and administrators begin to shift their focus away from overly simplistic quantitative metrics (such as workshop attendance or repository deposits) and begin to consider what type of measures give visibility and nuance to the incremental cultural change that characterizes open advocacy work. Until the time when such a shift is ushered in, this work will continue to be plagued by positions that are inadequately resourced, improperly scoped, and often misunderstood.

CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS
Throughout the lifecycle of this project, we were able to engage in rich, nuanced conversations both as members of the Open Action Kit team and as members of the larger scholarly communications community. As a result, each of us developed unique insight into what success can look like for open advocates and what barriers exist in terms of getting there.
We found that understandings about the wider impact of Open Access Week activities are generally short-term. Often, conceptions of success were based on collection sizes in reposi-tories or attendance for events (Vandegrift, Bolick, & Rose, 2013;Wirth, 2011), reinforcing the tendency of libraries to continue to conceive of value in a strictly quantitative manner.
However, as open advocacy focuses on transforming the publishing ecosystem, the most appropriate method to measure success is qualitative: through the realization of behavioral or attitudinal change. This poses a serious challenge to scholarly communications librarians hoping to communicate the needs, value, or type of this work to administrators, as there may not be enough data or terminology to articulate it. Shifts in behavior and attitudes take time, a luxury that contractually or precariously employed open advocates may not have. In the absence of more detailed information, "anecdata" can be useful, but administrators may not be willing or able to extrapolate outward from it.
This essentially results in a perpetual cycle, with librarians continuing to develop and plan heightened levels of activities around Open Access Week, while there tends to be a lack of strategic discussion, clear purpose, or "return on investment" for this extensive amount of work throughout the year. Open advocacy work continues to appear as the tip of an iceberg, with the greater, complex depths remaining invisible. These circumstances can personally and professionally hinder the individual advocate, as well as their larger organization's efforts to successfully advance openness.
For the members of the Open Action Kit team, getting involved in the process of rethinking how this type of open advocacy could look helped us all become more reflective and strategic in our own daily work. Moreover, knowing that others were taking stock of the utility of Open Access Week and thinking about stepping back accordingly was a game-changer for our own professional practice. In the years following the completion of the Open Action Kit in late 2017, each team member tended to be more reflective in their approach to planning Open Access Weeks: some chose to organize a less labor-intensive series of activities or shared labor with campus partners, with others opting to forgo Open Access Week completely. It is clear that the honesty cultivated through the Open Action Kit and similar efforts was both necessary and transformative, both in terms of building up consortial or collaborative open infrastructure but also for getting folks more connected to problem-solve structural issues such as burnout, unclear expectations, and isolation.
It is imperative that there be more consideration of and emphasis on open advocacy as relational work. Administrative and managerial conceptions of the success and value of this work, both during and outside of Open Access Week, must take into account that building relationships, changing behavior, and shifting narratives take a substantial amount of both time and energy. While robust communities of practice (such as listservs, Slack channels, and regional conferences) exist for those engaging in this type of work, more professional development is needed to counteract rampant burnout and develop useful skills in leadership, strategic planning, and project management. Further professional development should also acknowledge the systemic inequities and bias within the profession of scholarly communication and the institutions in which we work. These factors fuel both burnout and the perpetuation of a system of white, male, and Anglophone dominated approach to leadership and scholarly communication. Meaningfully addressing these would alleviate some of the current issues plaguing open advocacy.
Should it get taken up and built upon by other advocates in the future, the Open Action Kit presents a possible way forward for doing open, collaborative advocacy work in a sustainable, scalable way, regardless of the specific event or campaign at hand. By implementing a distributed leadership approach with a centralized planning structure, open advocates can share best practices, expertise, and skill sets to not only help others, but to streamline the organization of their own local activities. Ultimately, this model centers the relational nature of advocacy work both in regards to supporting the professional development of its participants and evaluating its success.