CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: office of scholarly communication

  • FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute 2026: A Career Pathway for Research-Support Staff

    The FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) is an annual week-long summer training programme, co-hosted by FORCE11 and the UCLA Library, that teaches researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, and research administrators the practical skills of open scholarly communication. For research-support professionals specifically, FSCI functions less like a one-off conference and more like a structured training pathway: a recognised route to build open-science, data-stewardship, and research-metrics competence that can be cited on a CV or used to justify a promotion case. FSCI 2026 runs 27–31 July 2026.

    The FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute is best defined this way: it is a volunteer-run, multi-day summer school in which attendees select one week-long “morning course” plus a rotation of shorter afternoon electives covering topics such as FAIR data stewardship, persistent identifiers, peer review, and research metrics. It was first launched in 2017 and is modelled on the longer-running Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, British Columbia.

    What is the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute?

    FSCI is the training arm of FORCE11, the community that originated in 2011 around “the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship.” Since 2017, FSCI has been co-organised with the UCLA Library and runs each summer, alternating in recent years between in-person, online, and hybrid formats. Course materials from FSCI 2020 through FSCI 2024 have been archived openly on Zenodo and the Open Science Framework, so the institute leaves a durable, citable training record rather than a one-time event.

    FORCE11’s broader track record matters for credibility: the same community co-developed the FAIR Data Principles and the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, two frameworks that underpin research-data policy at funders and repositories worldwide. FSCI teaches practitioners to apply that same body of work operationally, rather than simply reading about it.

    Who should attend FSCI as a career-development step?

    FSCI is explicitly multi-audience: researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, university research-administration staff, students, and postdocs all attend the same institute, choosing courses at introductory or advanced level. For a research-support professional — someone working in a research office, library scholarly-communication unit, or funder programme team — this cross-sector mix is the point.

    Rather than training in isolation with only colleagues from one institution, attendees benchmark their skills against a global peer group. A 2018 Serials Review analysis of the institute (Rodriguez, 2018, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2018.1555510) described FSCI as training people “not for where we’re at, but for where we’re going” — a framing that positions the institute as anticipatory skills-building rather than remedial catch-up.

    • Research administrators managing open-access compliance or data-management-plan review
    • Library staff moving into or already working in scholarly-communication roles
    • Early-career researchers who want to specialise in research infrastructure rather than bench/field research
    • Funder programme officers who need to understand practitioner-level workflows, not just policy text
    • Publishing and repository staff building peer-review, persistent-identifier, or metrics expertise

    How does the FSCI course structure work?

    Each attendee commits to one week-long morning course, which allows sustained, cohort-based depth on a single subject, and supplements it with shorter afternoon elective courses on adjacent topics. This structure is designed to produce both a depth credential (the morning course) and breadth exposure (the electives), which is unusual among short-format professional development options in the research-support field.

    Topics have included FAIR data management and stewardship, persistent identifiers, peer-review innovation, new forms of publication, research-metrics literacy, and — in recent years — AI governance in scholarly communication. Plenary sessions, “do-a-thons,” and structured networking events run alongside the coursework, which is what distinguishes FSCI from a standard webinar series.

    What does FSCI cost, and are scholarships available?

    FSCI publishes its registration fees and scholarship terms on the official FORCE11 site ahead of each year’s institute, and pricing has varied by year and by in-person/online format. FORCE11 has consistently run a scholarship programme to support attendance from historically underrepresented regions; organisers have reported scholarship recipients from six continents, including documented career-changing participation from institutions in Nigeria and Pakistan. For a research-support professional building a career-development business case, the scholarship route is often the most persuasive argument to an institution reluctant to fund a full-fee place.

    Attribute FSCI (FORCE11) Formal scholarly communication librarian role
    Format One-week intensive summer institute Ongoing salaried position
    Entry route Open registration; no degree prerequisite Typically requires an MLIS or equivalent
    Cost to individual Course fee, offset by scholarships N/A — paid employment
    Output Practical skills, network, open course materials Institutional job title and remit
    Best used as A training pathway feeding into or alongside a role The destination role itself

    How does FSCI differ from a formal scholarly communication librarian role?

    It is worth being precise about the distinction, because the two are often conflated in search results. A scholarly communication librarian is a formal, usually MLIS-qualified, salaried institutional role with responsibilities such as running an institutional repository, advising on copyright and open-access policy, or managing an “office of scholarly communication.” FSCI is not that role — it is a training pathway that can be undertaken by someone already in such a role, by someone aspiring to move into one, or by a research administrator, funder officer, or publisher who never intends to hold that job title at all.

    This distinction matters for career planning. Treating FSCI as a credential-building input — alongside, not instead of, formal qualifications, ORCID-linked professional profiles, and institutional experience — is the more accurate way to use it. Institutions considering whether to fund staff attendance should therefore evaluate FSCI as continuing professional development, comparable to funding attendance at ARMA, NCURA, or EARMA training events, rather than as a substitute for a formal library or research-office qualification.

    Frequently asked questions

    What is FSCI 2026 and when does it take place?

    FSCI 2026 is the annual FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute, running 27–31 July 2026. It follows the institute’s established format of a week-long morning course paired with rotating afternoon electives on open-science and research-communication topics for a global, cross-sector audience.

    How much does FORCE11 FSCI cost to attend?

    Registration fees are set and published by FORCE11 for each year’s institute and vary by format and early registration. FORCE11 runs a dedicated scholarship programme that has supported attendees from underrepresented countries and regions, which materially lowers the effective cost for many participants.

    Who should attend the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute?

    FSCI is designed for researchers, librarians, publishers, funders, and research administrators at any career stage, plus students and postdocs. Courses are offered at introductory and advanced levels, so attendees choose a track matched to their existing scholarly-communication knowledge.

    Are FSCI course materials available after the event?

    Yes. FORCE11 has archived FSCI course materials from 2020 through 2024 openly on Zenodo and the Open Science Framework, meaning the training content remains accessible as a reference resource even for people who did not attend that year’s live sessions.

    What this means for research-support careers

    For institutions, FSCI attendance is a low-cost, high-signal way to build in-house open-science capacity without hiring a new specialist role. For individuals, it is a documented, citable training credential that sits alongside — not in place of — formal qualifications and institutional experience. As open-access mandates, data-management requirements, and AI-governance expectations continue to expand across funders including UKRI and cOAlition S signatories, the practical skills FSCI teaches are becoming a standard expectation of research-support work rather than a specialist add-on.

    Research offices, libraries, and funder teams weighing professional-development budgets in 2026 should treat FSCI as one input in a broader research-support career pathway: a way to keep staff current with FAIR data practice, persistent identifiers, and evolving scholarly-communication standards, while formal qualifications and institutional experience continue to do the work of defining the job itself.

  • Scholarly Communication Librarian: Remit & KPIs

    A scholarly communication librarian is the institutional specialist who manages an organisation’s research-dissemination lifecycle — open access compliance, institutional repository content, author rights and copyright advice, and research-impact metrics — usually from within, or alongside, the university library. For research administrators scoping this function for the first time, the practical questions are rarely about the job title itself but about remit, reporting line, and how success is measured.

    Scholarly communication is defined by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use” — a definition first published in ACRL’s 2003 white paper Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication and still the field’s standard reference point.

    What does a scholarly communication librarian actually do?

    A scholarly communication librarian coordinates four practical work streams: institutional repository management, publishing services, copyright and author-rights advice, and research-impact assessment. The NASIG Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians, adopted in 2017 and revised in 2020, describes the role’s duties as “broad and amorphous” by design — a single post-holder rarely owns every strand, and responsibility is often diffused across a wider library team.

    In day-to-day terms, that means: encouraging and processing repository deposits, checking publisher self-archiving and embargo terms, advising authors on publication agreements and Creative Commons licensing, running open access and OER outreach (often timed around International Open Access Week), and helping researchers interpret citation and altmetrics data for tenure, promotion, or funder reporting.

    What is the remit of an institutional office of scholarly communication?

    An office of scholarly communication is the organisational unit — typically nested inside the university library — that holds institution-wide responsibility for these duties rather than leaving them to individual subject librarians. Its remit generally spans five areas: institutional repository management, publishing services, copyright services, research data management, and assessment/impact metrics, as set out in the joint COAR/OCLC Librarians’ Competencies Profile for Scholarly Communication and Open Access (Calarco et al., 2016).

    Institutions vary in how much of this remit sits in one office versus being distributed. The University of Edinburgh’s Scholarly Communications Team is a working example of a centralised model: it “supports University staff and students before, during and after publication of their research,” managing policy compliance, the institutional repository (ERA), and the research information system (PURE) as a single service point.

    Who does a scholarly communication librarian report to?

    There is no single reporting model across the sector. Four structures recur most often in job postings and organisational charts, and the choice usually reflects whether an institution treats scholarly communication as a collections function, a research-support function, or a technology function.

    Reporting model Typical manager Institutional emphasis
    Collections-integrated Associate University Librarian for Collections & Scholarly Communication Ties open access and repository work to acquisitions and collection strategy
    Research-services-integrated Associate University Librarian for Research Services / Academic Success Positions the role alongside research support, data management, grants
    Digital-scholarship unit Head of Digital Scholarship Groups scholarly communication with data curation and digital publishing
    Distributed/diffuse No single line manager; shared across subject librarians Spreads responsibility rather than centralising it in one post

    For research administrators building a business case, the reporting line matters because it determines which budget line funds the post, which committee sets its priorities, and whether the role has authority to negotiate publisher agreements directly or must route decisions through acquisitions or general counsel.

    What competencies and skills does the role require?

    NASIG’s framework groups core competencies into four cross-cutting themes — background knowledge, technical skills, outreach and instruction, and team building — layered under whichever of the five areas of emphasis a given post prioritises. Practical requirements include:

    • Working knowledge of copyright law, fair use/fair dealing, and publisher self-archiving policies
    • Familiarity with repository platforms (e.g. DSpace, Digital Commons, Fedora) and identifier systems such as CrossRef and DataCite DOIs and ORCID
    • Ability to interpret bibliometrics and altmetrics without overstating what a single indicator (such as the Journal Impact Factor) can support
    • Project management skills to run cross-departmental initiatives with subject librarians, university counsel, and IT
    • Comfort advising on funder open access mandates and institutional policy drafting

    Author-identifier and contribution-tracking literacy increasingly falls within this remit too. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and scholarly communication librarians are frequently the staff who explain CRediT tagging to authors submitting to journals that require it.

    What KPIs do institutions use to measure the role?

    Because the remit spans compliance, service, and advocacy work, institutions typically track a mixed basket of KPIs rather than a single output metric:

    • Compliance KPIs: proportion of eligible outputs deposited in the repository within funder-mandated windows (for UK institutions, this maps to REF open access requirements and UKRI’s policy, in force for journal articles and conference proceedings since 1 April 2022 and extended to monographs, book chapters and edited collections from 1 January 2024)
    • Service KPIs: turnaround time on copyright and publishing-agreement queries; number of consultations delivered
    • Adoption KPIs: repository deposit volume and growth; OER adoption rate and associated student cost savings
    • Outreach KPIs: workshop and training attendance; policy and guidance page usage
    • Impact-reporting KPIs: volume of impact-metrics consultations supporting tenure, promotion, or funder reporting cycles

    Compliance and adoption KPIs are the ones most directly reportable to institutional leadership and funders, since they map to external mandates rather than internal service-level judgement calls.

    Answer-first Q&A

    What does a scholarly communication librarian do?

    A scholarly communication librarian manages an institution’s research dissemination lifecycle: encouraging and processing institutional repository deposits, advising authors on copyright and publisher agreements, supporting open access compliance, and helping researchers interpret citation and altmetrics data for promotion or funder reporting purposes.

    Who does a scholarly communication librarian report to?

    Reporting lines vary by institution. Most commonly the role sits under an Associate University Librarian for Collections, Research Services, or Digital Scholarship, though some institutions run a distributed model where duties are shared across subject librarians rather than assigned to one dedicated post.

    Not exactly. Copyright services are one of five recognised areas of emphasis within scholarly communication work, alongside repository management, publishing services, data management, and impact assessment — a copyright librarian is typically a specialist within, not synonymous with, the broader role.

    What skills does a scholarly communication librarian need?

    Core requirements include copyright and licensing knowledge, familiarity with repository platforms and identifier systems (DOIs, ORCID), bibliometrics literacy, project management ability, and comfort translating funder open access mandates into institutional policy and researcher-facing guidance.

    Implications for research administrators building the team

    Institutions standing up this function from scratch should decide the reporting line before writing the job description, since the five areas of emphasis rarely fit into one full-time post. A common pattern is to hire a generalist scholarly communication librarian first, then add copyright or data-management specialists as the repository, compliance, and outreach workload grows. Aligning KPIs to funder mandates — UKRI open access policy, REF-linked deposit windows — gives the post measurable, leadership-visible outcomes from year one rather than only qualitative service-desk activity.

    As funder identifier requirements expand and CRediT-style contribution tagging becomes more common in submission systems, institutions that fold author-identifier and contribution-metadata literacy into this role early will spend less time retrofitting compliance processes later. Research administrators building or reviewing this function should treat it as a standing institutional capability, not a project team, and revisit its remit and KPIs whenever a major funder policy changes.