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Minimum Viable Skills for Scholarly Communication Professional

According to UNESCO, “Scholarly communication is the process of sharing, disseminating and publishing research findings of academics and researchers so that the generated academic contents are made available to the global academic communities”. The Minimum Viable Skillset for Scholarly Communication Professionals describes the Open Science and Data Management skills required for those roles contributing to the creation, curation, and dissemination of scholarly outputs, with a particular attention to publications. Publications and scholarly outputs in general are not only the result of scientific activities, but a component of the open science ecosystem and therefore requiring the same OS and RDM skills as other OS products.

Subtypes: Publisher, Editor, Librarian

Organisational context:

  • Libraries
  • Research Performing Organizations (learned societies, universities, research centers)
  • Scientific publishers
  • Research Infrastructures

Mission

The Scholarly Communication Professional (SCP) deals with Scholarly Communication Artifacts, which entail, but are not limited to: articles, books, posts, annotations. SCPs engaged in Open Science ensure open access to the Scholarly Communication Artifacts, and more broadly their full integration into the OS environment. SCPs not only apply OS and RDM principles to the traditional and innovative forms of Scholarly Communication Artifacts, but they also address OS aspects beyond RDM best practices.

In that prospect, the SCP designs and/or implements OS policies and recommendations and applies methods and standards to ensure high- quality, accessible and reproducible research outputs.

OS Activities

  • Maintains and/or uses a publishing platform or a repository providing interoperable contents
  • Guides and supports users in disseminating standardized and FAIRified scholarly communication artifacts
  • Guides and supports users in enhancing their data literacy skills and working effectively with various types of data
  • Negotiates with publishers for open access publishing
  • Curates and enriches the data to ensure semantic and technical interoperability with a range of aggregators’ specifications
  • Uses tools and follows procedures to achieve sustainability of published resources
  • Ensures compliance of published output with ethical and legal recommendations
  • Organises and monitors processes of content creation, review and dissemination
  • Integrates the aspects of diversity, inclusiveness and integrity in the process of information sharing
  • Participates and contributes in trans-professional networks (including librarians, publishers, IT experts, legal experts, etc.)

OS Outcomes

The SCP manages Scholarly Communication Artifacts as research data, following OS and RDM principles, including the FAIR principles, both for the contents (e.g. using interoperable standard structured formats), and for their metadata (e.g., using PIDs and standard metadata schemas). The SCP ensures this way that Scholarly Communication Artifacts are not only disseminated as research results, but made available as reusable research data.

LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) identifies the following contributions to OS proper to librarians that also characterize any SCP’s activity:

  • Scholarly publishing
  • Research integrity
  • Citizen Science
  • FAIR data
  • Metrics and Awards

Essential Skills and Competences

Technical skills and competences

  • Expertise in data literacy both as a practitioner and a trainer
  • Knowledge of repositories and aggregators types, scope, and requirements
  • Capacity to generate and/or understand bibliometrics, altmetrics, and usage metrics
  • Knowledge of open publication models(green, gold, diamond)
  • Expertise in persistent identification of contents
  • Good knowledge of discipline-specific output types and standards
  • Expertise in standard metadata generation and storage
  • Capacity to apply FAIR principles to a variety of scholarly outputs
  • Knowledge about Linked Open Data and semantic interoperability
  • Expert-level awareness of legal aspects related to IP/copyright/privacy, as well as the use of data and information which may be considered sensitive, balance data protection requirements with open science/FAIR principles (taken from Senior Researcher MVS)
  • Capacity to understand and apply Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and the CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) principles
  • Ability to organize, and manage physical and digital events
  • Ability to design, organize, and manage physical and digital trainings

Soft/ transversal skills

  • These are personal attributes or aptitudes required for interpersonal, communication, or leadership dimensions of an OS activity, and which are improved with practice.
  • Select terms as above but referring to the list of ESCO transversal terms.

Link to any other MVS that this MVS is based on (from those in Skills4EOSC D2.1)

Reference sources

1 2 3

  1. Karla Avanço and Arnaud Gingold. FAIRifying a scholarly publishing service: Methodology based on the OpenEdition’s internal FAIR audit. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, December 2022. Number: 2 Publisher: Michigan Publishing. URL: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/1540/ (visited on 2024-03-16), doi:10.3998/jep.1540. ↩

  2. Lisa Federer, Erin Diane Foster, Ann Glusker, Margaret Henderson, Kevin Read, and Shirley Zhao. The Medical Library Association Data Services Competency: a framework for data science and open science skills development. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 108(2):304–309, April 2020. Number: 2. URL: https://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/909 (visited on 2024-03-16), doi:10.5195/jmla.2020.909. ↩

  3. Ciara McCaffrey, Thorsten Meyer, Clara Riera Quintero, Cecile Swiatek, Nathalie Marcerou-Ramel, Camilla Gillén, Karin Clavel, Anna Wojciechowska, Helene Brinken, Mariëlle Prevoo, and Frank Egerton. Open Science Skills Visualisation - Visualisation des compétences en science ouverte. April 2021. Version Number: 2. URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4727592, doi:10.5281/zenodo.4727592. ↩