1 Learning Opportunities
This chapter will explore the many opportunities librarians have to promote open science and preprints with their communities. First, let’s consider the reference interview. The one-on-one nature of the reference interview makes it a perfect opportunity to introduce a faculty member or graduate student to openly available scientific research. This chart shows some of the ways you can bring up preprints with your patrons:
|
Patron Request |
Library Action |
|
Student needs resources for an assignment |
Librarian includes preprints in addition to journal articles |
|
Faculty is looking for publishing opportunities |
Librarian suggests preprint servers based on discipline |
|
Graduate students needs professional development |
Librarian shares information on how to become a preprint peer reviewer |
|
Faculty wants to increase visibility of their work |
Librarian suggests publishing in preprint servers and creating an ORCID |
Another space conducive to promoting open science is in the classroom. Whether you are teaching a one shot information literacy lecture or a full semester research methods course, you can be a preprint champion! One way to encourage open science practices in the classroom is to emphasize to your students that they are both receivers and creators of information. Preprints are excellent ways to share a written work, and there are no prerequisites to becoming a preprint author. The classroom is the perfect place to have students take a deep dive into preprints and learn more. Here’s a sample lesson plan on teaching students to critically think about preprints:
A Deep Dive into Preprints
Introduce students to preprint repositories based on their scientific discipline. Ask students to choose a preprint article. After taking some time to scan the preprint, have the students do some basic research on the author. Ask them to write short reflection or share their findings with the group. Would they consider the author an expert in their field? Do they think this preprint would be published in a journal? What was their experience doing a search in the preprint repository?
