Author contracts in scholarly publishing serve to outline the rights and permissions for each party in the use and redistribution of a work throughout the life of its copyright term. Although rights and licensing expectations for open access publishing--the "open access ethos"--have been detailed in the Budapest Declaration, Plan S…

Library publishers have an important role in building an equitable and open scholarly publishing ecosystem. As library publishers' services mature, it is critical to understand how noncommercial journals operate and organize their daily activities to ensure the journals' success, longevity, and sustainability. To inform these efforts, the authors…

Past studies have found that university students' well-being is relatively low, and that first-year students are specifically vulnerable. This issue has drawn particular attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines the effect of COVID-19 on the well-being, academic confidence, feeling of informedness, and self-efficacy of first-year…

This paper studies how parents' school choices are affected by information about school and peer quality and how social interactions mediate changes in demand. I design an information intervention that cross-randomizes whether parents receive information about school quality (school value-added) and peer quality. Using a spillover design that…

This paper describes key discoveries and lessons learned about the practice of reciprocity in community-engaged learning (CEL). We draw from an example of a multi-partner, multi-year CEL project that addresses a community-identified priority to access jargon-free research findings about their community. Our project benefits community members in an…

Academic libraries are essential to teaching, learning, and national development, making adequate library resources crucial for academic institutions. This study examines how limited library resources, particularly recommended textbooks, affect library operations in Ghanaian public universities. Through semi-structured interviews with eleven…

This article reports the results of a 2019 survey of academic librarians that investigated their attitudes, practices, and policies regarding open access (OA). This study asks if academic librarians write policies to ensure that they approach OA intentionally and systematically across all library services. The results indicate that, though…

This Guide provides universities with a road map to initiate or bolster current efforts to create a robust system for ensuring effective public access to high-quality research data. The Guide aims to assist universities and their senior administrators in crafting consistent and uniform approaches to all aspects of research data management and…

This multiple-methods two-part study included a collection analysis of the holdings of trans books in 35 randomly selected public high school libraries in one state in the southeastern United States. Also, the attitudes and practices of 37 high school librarians (in the same state but not necessarily at the same schools whose collections were…

Although much is known about how students evaluate scientific information about contentious issues in classroom or laboratory contexts, less is known about how students do so in their daily life. This study hopes to address that gap, using survey data to study how high school students from the Midwest United States obtained and evaluated…

This paper reports the results of a pilot project conducted Spring 2021 in which Milner Library licensed seventy-five assigned texts to fifty-two courses at Illinois State University. The authors used the pilot as a springboard to explore faculty perspectives on textbook selection, textbook affordability, and the role of the academic library in…

The rapid shift to online instruction at academic institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic increased demand for streaming media resources offered by academic libraries. This shift prompted many academic libraries to employ new methods to provide access to streaming content. The authors sought to survey academic libraries with the purpose of…

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech established an Open Access Subvention Fund (OASF) in August 2012. Although it began as a two-year pilot project, the Fund has continued to the present. Anyone at Virginia Tech is eligible to apply for funding to offset the cost of an article processing charge to publish in an open access journal. To learn…

This qualitative study examines perceptions of open access from focus groups including thirty-eight faculty who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). In responses, BIPOC faculty reflect on the culture and support of open access within their departments, institutions, and professional associations. It was at a time of…

About half of Library and Information Science (LIS) journals continue to charge authors to publish articles open access (OA) or do not offer OA publishing at all. To further investigate the financial and other perceived barriers preventing these LIS journals from transitioning to no-publishing fee OA models, this exploratory project surveyed lead…