Open access community event - developing a skilled workforce

The demand for skilled and experienced staff in scholarly communications and open access roles continues to increase as the scholarly publishing landscape changes, driven by funder mandates. How do we meet this need and equip those new to these roles and responsibilities?

Whether the role sits in the library or the research office, it is a buoyant job market with many roles being advertised in recent months. Institutions find it difficult to recruit staff with the right experience and those wishing to enter these roles often struggle to find opportunities to develop their skills. Experienced staff are in demand leading to retention issues and competition between institutions for staff.

This workshop provides an opportunity to address these issues, share experiences, find out about current activities in this area and to shape future work.

Topics for discussion

• Sharing institutional perspectives on supporting staff development – what are the challenges and current activities?
• What essential knowledge and competencies are needed for these roles? How do we nurture and develop the "soft skills" required?
• The challenges of recruitment and whether there is a need for standardised language around job titles and basic job tasks
• Digital capabilities and scholarly communication – linking to our digital capability work
• Developing a sector wide approach to skills development

Contributors and facilitators

• Helen Blanchett and Caroline Ingram, Jisc
• Nancy Pontika, CORE/Open University
• Helen Dobson, University of Manchester
• Valerie McCutcheon, University of Glasgow
• Nick Sheppard, University of Leeds
• Michelle Blake, University of York
• Christina Kamposiori, RLUK

This will be of interest to:

• Those responsible for staff development in scholarly communications or open access support
• Repository staff
• Research support librarians
• Scholarly communications librarians
• Research managers and open access policy compliance staff
• Library and research decision makers

For further information please contact Helen Blanchett  (helen.blanchett@jisc.ac.uk).