Letters of Intent received in 2013

LoI 2015-171
Focus Meeting: IAU Working Group Libraries

Date: 3 August 2015 to 6 August 2015
Category: Focus meetings (GA)
Location: Honolulu, HI, United States
Contact: Marsha Bishop (mbishop@nrao.edu)
Coordinating division: Division B Facilities, Technologies and Data Science
Other divisions: Division B Facilities, Technologies and Data Science
Co-Chairs of SOC: Robert Hanisch (Space Telescope)
Marsha Bishop (National Radio Astronomy Observatory)
Chair of LOC: ()

 

Topics

1. The Costs, Benefits, and Future of Scholarly Publication in Astronomy
a. Open Access,
b. What publishers do to enhance journals and submittals,
c. dynamic graphics, embedded and linked data, manipulable equations, etc.). and
d. Predatory publishers
2. New / Emerging / Growing Roles for Libraries and Librarians within the Astronomy community
a. Big data
b. Knowledge management
c. Database administration
d. Marketing
e. Advocacy within the organization for new and emerging technologies
3. Librarians as observatory metrics managers
a. Impact on budget within the library
b. Impact on the Library’s mission and the broader mission of the organization
c. Influencing use of metrics
d. Challenges of metrics gathering and dissemination

 

Rationale

Scholarly, peer-review publications remain a fundamental component of communication and validation of research results in astronomy. The nature of scholarly publication has changed dramatically in the past decade, and continues to evolve rapidly. New paradigms of publication are encroaching upon--and potentially may prove highly disruptive to--long-established practices and institutions. How do we as a research community embrace the positive aspects of change and guard against influences that might undermine the quality and integrity of the research record? Even the concept of "publication" has taken on new perspectives, including websites, datasets, and other digital materials presented in varying levels of formality and robustness. Librarians are facing ever-increasing challenges in managing access to this content, in some cases becoming digital content curators themselves. As funding for astronomical research and facilities tightens, measures of research impact--as determined from bibliometrics--become increasingly important and must themselves be scientifically rigorous.

The IAU Working Group on Libraries is actively engaged in understanding these issues and is working as a liaison between the research community and scientific publishers. The IAU General Assembly provides a superb venue for reinforcing the dialog, begun in Beijing in 2012, and that we hope to continue in Hawaii in 2015.