CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: open access 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 Course materials from FSCI 2020 through FSCI 2024 have been archived openly on Zenodo and the Open Science Framework, so the institute leaves a durable, citable training record rather than a one-time event.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.

  • 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication: 2026

    101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication is a 2015–2016 survey and open dataset, built by Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman of Utrecht University Library, that mapped how more than 20,000 researchers, librarians, publishers and funders were adopting digital tools across six phases of the research workflow. Revisited a decade on, the underlying dataset and taxonomy still frame how institutions read today’s tool landscape — and they show preprints moving from a peripheral publication tactic to a structural stage in the scholarly communication cycle.

    101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication is best understood as both a crowdsourced database of research tools and a workflow taxonomy: it organises tool adoption into six stages — discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment — and remains the most cited empirical baseline for how digital tools reshaped academic practice before the current wave of open-science mandates.

    What is the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication project?

    The project began in spring 2015 when Kramer and Bosman launched a survey asking researchers and research-support staff which tools and services they actually used, rather than which they were told to use. The survey ran from May 2015 to February 2016 and drew responses from over 20,000 participants worldwide, making it one of the largest empirical pictures of research-tool adoption ever assembled.

    Crucially, the project was never a simple popularity poll. Kramer and Bosman built a crowdsourced resource database of research tools alongside the survey, and published the anonymised dataset openly — a practice that itself demonstrated the open-science values the project was measuring. The output most people recognise is the poster mapping roughly 101 tools by year of launch and workflow stage, first presented at Force2015 and reproduced across library guides and blogs ever since.

    What did the six-phase workflow reveal about tool adoption?

    The survey’s most durable contribution is its six-phase model of the research workflow: discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. Each phase captured a different cluster of emerging tools, from literature-alert services in discovery to altmetrics providers in assessment, and the analysis found a median of around 22 different tools in active use per respondent.

    That figure mattered because it quantified a problem institutions were only beginning to name: workflow fragmentation. Researchers were not choosing a single platform; they were stitching together a personal stack, often spanning free, subscription and institutionally licensed tools. The published analysis also flagged a specific risk — that publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature were acquiring tools across multiple phases, raising the prospect of vendor lock-in across an entire research workflow rather than a single product.

    Workflow phase 2015 survey emphasis 2026 landscape signal
    Discovery Alerts, Google Scholar, library databases AI-assisted literature search layered onto existing indexes
    Analysis Excel, SPSS, early notebooks Open notebooks and reproducible-analysis pipelines
    Writing Word processors, early collaborative editors Cloud-native collaborative authoring as default
    Publication Preprints as an emerging, minority practice Preprints as a funder-recognised compliance route
    Outreach Dropbox used more than GitHub for sharing protocols Persistent-identifier-linked outputs (DOIs, ORCID) as default
    Assessment Early altmetrics alongside citation counts Contributor-role taxonomies alongside altmetrics

    Where do preprints sit in the research cycle now?

    In the 2015 dataset, preprint servers appeared in the publication phase as one option among many, used by a minority of respondents concentrated in physics, mathematics and, increasingly, biology. A decade later, scientific preprints have moved from a niche discovery-to-publication bridge to a structural checkpoint that funders and journals actively reference.

    This shift is visible in funder policy rather than survey sentiment alone. cOAlition S’s Plan S rights-retention approach explicitly permits preprint deposit combined with a rights-retention licence as a route to immediate open-access compliance, and journals across the life sciences now routinely accept manuscripts that have already circulated on bioRxiv or medRxiv. The practical effect is that preprints no longer sit only in the “outreach” gap the original survey identified between writing and formal publication — they now function as a recognised, citable stage in their own right within the scholarly communication cycle.

    What the 2015 baseline still gets right is the underlying diagnosis: tool adoption in scholarly communication rarely moves as a single wave. Preprints diffused unevenly by discipline then, and adoption of preprint-linked policies remains uneven by discipline and funder now — the survey’s disaggregated view of workflow stages is why that unevenness is still visible rather than averaged away.

    How has the standards and identifier layer changed since 2015?

    The 2015 survey’s vendor lock-in warning has a direct institutional answer that has matured substantially since the data was collected: the persistent-identifier and standards layer. ORCID identifiers for researchers, DataCite DOIs for datasets, and the Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutional affiliation now interoperate across discovery, publication and assessment tools in a way that was still emergent in 2015.

    Contributor attribution has followed the same trajectory. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014, the same year the 101 Innovations survey was being designed; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, giving the “assessment” phase of the original workflow model a formal, interoperable vocabulary for who-did-what that the survey’s respondents were, at the time, largely improvising without.

    • ORCID: persistent identifiers for individual researchers, reducing name-disambiguation friction across discovery and assessment tools.
    • DataCite: DOI registration for datasets and other non-article outputs, extending citability beyond the journal article.
    • ROR: standardised institutional identifiers, used increasingly by funders and publishers for affiliation matching.
    • ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 (CRediT): a controlled taxonomy of contributor roles, now stewarded by NISO.

    Answer-first questions on the survey and its legacy

    What is the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication survey?

    It is a 2015–2016 survey and open dataset created by Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman of Utrecht University Library, which asked over 20,000 researchers and research-support staff which digital tools they used across six phases of the research workflow, then published the anonymised results openly.

    What are the six phases of the scholarly communication cycle it identified?

    The survey defined the cycle as discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. Each phase groups a distinct set of tools, from literature-alert services and reference managers through to altmetrics and peer-review platforms, giving institutions a structured way to audit workflow tool adoption.

    Why did the survey warn about vendor lock-in?

    The analysis found large commercial publishers acquiring tools spanning multiple workflow phases, meaning a researcher could end up dependent on a single company’s suite from discovery through assessment. That concentration risk is the reason interoperable, standards-based alternatives such as ORCID, DataCite and ROR have gained institutional priority since.

    Are preprints still a minority practice in scholarly communication?

    No. Preprints have shifted from a discipline-specific minority practice in 2015 to a funder-recognised compliance route under policies such as cOAlition S’s rights-retention strategy, with routine preprint-to-journal pipelines now standard in fields including biomedicine and physics.

    What this means for institutions, publishers and developers

    For research administrators and institutional leaders, the practical lesson from re-reading the 101 Innovations dataset in 2026 is that workflow fragmentation has not disappeared — it has been partially re-solved through standards rather than consolidation. Where the 2015 survey found researchers assembling a median of 22 tools with little interoperability, the current landscape increasingly links those tools through shared persistent identifiers and controlled vocabularies rather than through a single vendor suite.

    For publishers and developers building on the scholarly communication cycle, the implication is that preprint infrastructure, contributor-role metadata, and organisational identifiers are no longer optional add-ons; they are the connective tissue the original survey’s respondents were missing. The next iteration of tool-landscape research will need to measure not just which tools researchers pick, but how well those tools speak to each other across the discovery-to-assessment pipeline — a question the original taxonomy was designed to surface, and one that remains unresolved a decade on.