Promoting Interactions and Engagement with Scholarly Research: Speculations on the Role of the Librarian in Advancing Experimental Publishing

This paper reflects on the role librarians and Library and Information Science (LIS) curricula can play in promoting experimental publishing and in nurturing and facilitating interactions with openly available books. It outlines research conducted for the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) and Open Book Futures projects, which mapped the different kinds of experimental (book) publishing currently taking place—including information about the (open source) tools, resources, software, best practices and guidelines for experimental publishing presently available—in response to a professed need of publishers and academics to experiment more with the format of scholarly publications. Experiments with open, multimodal, processual, and more bibliodiverse forms of publishing question how the hegemonic scholarly communications system is currently set up. What does this imply for the role of the librarian within scholarly communications? This paper positions the support of and facilitation of experimental publishing as an extension of the traditional role of librarians to promote interactions and engagement with research (with librarians playing a key role in community building), while also lining up with growing demands from libraries and faculties for scholarly communication services, and library efforts to promote social justice, decolonisation, and excluded and indigenous knowledges. Furthermore, it reflects on the growth of libraries as publishers, and the important role library presses have played in promoting open access and innovative forms of publishing. Finally, this paper describes one of the outcomes of the COPIM project, the Experimental Publishing Compendium, and outlines how it could be used as a resource in LIS curricula.