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The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise Journal of eScience Librarianship Volume 2 Issue 1 Special Issue: Role of the Informationist or Embedded Librarian in the Scientific Article 4 Research Process 2013-05-02 The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise Christopher J. Shaffer Oregon Health & Science University Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Follow this and additional works at: https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib Part of the Library and Information Science Commons, and the Medicine and Health Sciences Commons Repository Citation Shaffer CJ. The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise. Journal of eScience Librarianship 2013;2(1): e1043. https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2013.1043. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol2/iss1/4 Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This material is brought to you by eScholarship@UMMS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of eScience Librarianship by an authorized administrator of eScholarship@UMMS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. JESLIB 2013; 2(1): 8-15 doi:10.7191/jeslib.2013.1043 The Role of the Library in the Research Enterprise Christopher J. Shaffer Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, USA Abstract Libraries have provided services to re- library services, briefly describes the eSci- searchers for many years. Changes in tech- ence and publishing landscape as it relates nology and new publishing models provide to libraries, and explores possible library pro- opportunities for libraries to be more in- grams in support of research. Many of the volved in the research enterprise. Within new opportunities require new partnerships, this article, the author reviews traditional both within the institution and externally. Introduction journals – free and online. They see little need to visit the library or communicate with Data collection, management, and analysis librarians. Information professionals can technologies are changing the landscape of certainly do many things to improve the usa- research. Digital technologies, from sensors bility of the journal literature. More and bet- to analytical instrumentation, are increasing- ter tools are available to study researcher ly a core component of observational and use of articles, from reading to citation pat- experimental research. Meanwhile, changes terns, which can be leveraged to better tar- in scholarly publishing offer new opportuni- get purchasing and licensing decisions. ties for researchers to share the products of Search engines, from Google Scholar to their work in ways that weren’t previously PubMed, are continually being improved to possible. enhance retrieval of relevant information. Libraries have long provided training and There has been an increasing interest in the research consultation services to improve library field to better connect with the re- the efficiency with which end-users search search needs of faculty and students, and to literature databases. Librarians help re- explore how the skills, knowledge, and prac- searchers manage citations and articles, tices of librarianship could be applied to- providing training and support for products wards supporting evolving eScience para- such as EndNote and RefWorks. digms, particularly in the area of data cura- tion. Proponents of open access are trying to in- troduce new financial models in support of Traditional Library Services transparent sharing of research results (Butter et al. 2012). The scholarly publishing In the naïve view, all researchers want from crisis (aka the library funding crisis) is forcing the library are journals, journals, and more research institutions to rethink services to Correspondence to Christopher Shaffer: [email protected] Keywords: Library, eScience, research, data 8 JESLIB 2013; 2(1): 8-15 doi:10.7191/jeslib.2013.1043 support researcher access to the literature, senting new data management challenges especially in times of shrinking budgets in for researchers. Resource Navigators work- higher education. Increasingly, when re- ing with The eagle-i Consortium discovered searchers can’t access the journal articles that the vast majority of academic biomedi- they need, they bypass traditional library ser- cal research laboratories do not have an ef- vices such as document delivery and interli- fective inventory system for managing physi- brary loan, which may be perceived as ex- cal or digital resources (Shaffer 2012). The pensive and cumbersome, and instead email proliferation of computer files can transform authors and colleagues. Commercial organi- the traditional lab notebook into a complex zations, from publishers to aggregators, are mess of spreadsheets and documents that marketing individual articles via pay-per- can only be interpreted by the producer, if view, in partnership or competition with li- they can be found and interpreted at all. braries. Breaking down the traditional unit of the journal volume or issue into commercial- Beyond the simple, yet massive, increase in ly marketable units challenges the old mod- the volume of research data collection, the els of collecting and acquiring journal litera- complexity and diversity of data is increas- ture for researchers. ing. Data manipulation technologies and algorithms can be so intricate that some re- Changes in Research and Researchers searchers have posed fundamental ques- tions about the reproducibility of computa- As Jim Gray described it, eScience is a tional research (Stodden 2010). Technology “transformed scientific method” or “the fourth is also allowing the integration of quantitative paradigm.” Research was originally empiri- and qualitative data in ways not previously cal. In the last few hundred years, theoreti- possible, raising new data management is- cal models emerged. More recently, re- sues (Estabrooks 2009). Funding agencies searchers have been able to use computa- are beginning to mandate data sharing plans tional tools to explore simulations of complex in grant applications to facilitate data reuse environments. Now we have access to vast and eliminate redundancy. Technology is quantities of data from experiments and in- facilitating the sharing of research infor- struments, massive simulations, meta- mation prior to traditional publishing pat- analysis of research results, and more. Gray terns, as seen in the emergence of “Science argues that this is a new way of doing re- 2.0” or open science (Waldrop 2008). search and requires a new model for con- ducting scientific inquiry (Gray 2009). How- Technology is also changing the culture of ever, not all research that falls under the ru- research. The emergence of team science bric of eScience is conducted at the grand challenges investigators to work together in scale of particle physics or genomic experi- new ways. In the example of health scienc- ments. There are many challenges facing es, the dominance of the R01 grant is slowly researchers working at a variety of scales of giving way to the rise of Program Project and data. Center Grants. Wuchty, et al. (2007) showed that teams are growing larger, and The explosion of publishing, driven by an their articles are more highly cited than solo increasingly competitive tenure and promo- authored articles. The National Institutes of tion environment and the growing specializa- Health’s emphasis on translational science is tion of science, has made a vast amount of bringing basic science investigators together journal literature available to researchers. with clinicians to speed the transfer of Researchers are reading more and more knowledge from the bench to the bedside. articles every year, yet spend less and less Schools are revising tenure policies to rec- time reading each individual article (Tenopir ognize that not every researcher will have 2009). It is clear that technology is also pre- the opportunity to be first author, and articles 9 JESLIB 2013; 2(1): 8-15 doi:10.7191/jeslib.2013.1043 Figure 1: Knowledge Transfer Data Life Cycle (Humphrey 2012). with 20 or more authors are not uncommon. ducted by the teams took place with an un- The institutional organization needed to derstanding that an exploration of the re- manage multidisciplinary and team research search environment must include perspec- and is promoting the development of new tives that are outside of the normal context skill sets and support structures (Boardman of library research. Participation in planning 2013). Superstar researchers are managing by researchers, research administrators, and teams of hundreds, rather than individual other service providers is essential. Outside labs staffed with a small group of students, voices provide important contextual infor- research associates, and postdoctoral schol- mation and opinions that help to inform the ars. broader discussions taking place around eScience and data management. The Research Enterprise The E-Science Institute teams, which includ- In order to identify new roles for libraries in ed at least one person external to the library, the research enterprise, librarians must first created an inventory of the services and re- gain a deep and multi-faceted understanding sources currently available to research of the research environment at their own in- teams. Some teams found that there was stitutions. In the DuraSpace/ARL/DLF E- significant centralization of research admin- Science Institute, teams from dozens of re- istration, information technology, financial search libraries examined their local environ- services,
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