Demonstrating WashU’s Commitment to Open Research – University Libraries | Washington University in St. Louis

“During Open October, University Libraries and Becker Medical Library shine a spotlight on open research and open scholarship, highlighting its impacts on our campus and promoting the tools that the libraries provide to support it. The hallmarks of open scholarship are inclusivity, transparency, collaboration, and barrier-free dissemination of scholarly outputs (publications, data sets, code, etc.), and thus open access publishing, open science, open source, and open data are all subsets of open scholarship. While WashU is engaged in a variety of initiatives supporting open scholarship, and we encourage you to review other Open October programs to learn about them, one that merits special attention this year is Washington University’s participation in the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS).

Convened by the National Academies in early 2022, HELIOS is a cohort of colleges and universities who have committed to advance open scholarship within their institutions, and WashU has been engaged from the early days. HELIOS now has more than 80 of our peer institutions as members and has established four working groups to create a framework for moving institutions forward in support of open scholarship. These working groups are focusing on:

Institutional & Departmental Policy Language

Developing a collective action plan for embedding open scholarship considerations within hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure guidelines, respecting institutional and disciplinary differences.

Shared Open Scholarship Infrastructure

Developing a framework of key considerations that go into informed decision-making for infrastructure development, beyond just, “what does it cost?”

Good Practices in Open Scholarship

Curating current good practices resources that institutions can adapt and adopt and scoping an on-demand open scholarship support service.

Cross-Sector Alignment  

Catalyzing discussion between the scholarly community and other relevant groups (funders, societies, government agencies, etc.)…”

New Journal Publishing Platform – University Libraries | Washington University in St. Louis

“The Digital Library Program Services (DLPS) unit has relaunched its university journal publishing program as Open Scholarship Journals in an open-source scholarly publishing platform called Janeway. This refresh aligns with Washington University Libraries’ open access values and provides flexible workflows for managing submissions, editorial and peer review, copyediting, production, and publication.

DLPS is available to provide publishing support for journals developed by members of the university community. This support includes advising on journal development, free hosting, platform training, assigning persistent identifiers like DOIs, and consulting on copyright and licensing through the Scholarly Communications unit. Eligible journals must be scholarly, educational, and/or related to the university’s mission; be open access and not charge author fees; and have an editor-in-chief or editor at Washington University. Student journals need to be supported by an active faculty or staff advisor.  

All current publications are available on the new Open Scholarship Journals platform, which offers a beautifully designed and highly intuitive reader experience, in addition to a structured workflow for author submissions and editorial work. …”

Repository Services Manager

“Reporting to the Head of the Digital Library, the Repository Services Manager will develop, coordinate, deliver, monitor, assess, and advance the services, infrastructure, and operations for the University Libraries’ digital repository and management of digital assets generated by the Libraries and campus community partners. The incumbent will be responsible for creating a customer-first approach to developing technical infrastructure and requirements for the Libraries’ digital repository, delivering robust repository services, and maintaining related technical resources for supporting the University’s mission of preserving and disseminating Libraries’ digital collections and the diverse scholarly output produced by students, faculty, and research affiliates at Washington University….”

Repository Services Manager

“Reporting to the Head of the Digital Library, the Repository Services Manager will develop, coordinate, deliver, monitor, assess, and advance the services, infrastructure, and operations for the University Libraries’ digital repository and management of digital assets generated by the Libraries and campus community partners. The incumbent will be responsible for creating a customer-first approach to developing technical infrastructure and requirements for the Libraries’ digital repository, delivering robust repository services, and maintaining related technical resources for supporting the University’s mission of preserving and disseminating Libraries’ digital collections and the diverse scholarly output produced by students, faculty, and research affiliates at Washington University….”