Research

With new guidelines stating that by Dec. 31, 2025, all federally funded research should be made freely available to the public moving forward, the momentum toward open access publishing at colleges and universities is growing.

Research assessment, or the process that universities use to measure the value of published papers and other research outputs, plays a critical role in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. It can have a profound effect on the job stability and reputation of researchers. 

Although lacking 2022’s dramatic job market gains, this year’s Placements and Salaries survey demonstrated a hard-won stability.

In 2022, librarians at Utah State University collected 58 survey responses and conducted 10 interviews with high school librarians and teachers in Utah to better understand information literacy instruction happening within our high schools. Along with investigating the skills being prioritized, our study looked at how teachers and librarians are collaborating as fellow educators.

Research data are the underlying evidence that supports the claims made in scholarly publications, and making these data publicly available is a fundamental aspect of open access publishing. Yet, owing to a number of obstacles—some real, some perceived—many researchers are reluctant to share their data with the broader research community.

The OSTP memo has important, and far-reaching, implications for how universities and other institutions share their research findings with the public moving forward. While it will advance the future of open-access publishing significantly, it also will impose many challenges on the academic community.

The Civic Data Education Series is an educational program for library workers to better support their civic data literacy and participation in their civic data ecosystems. Following the development of this program, Jane Thaler (Perot Museum of Nature and Science, Dallas), Eleanor Mattern, and Marcia Rapchak (both of University of Pittsburgh) shared their instructional design process and first round of evaluation in the proceedings of the 2022 Association of Library and Information Science in Education Annual Conference.

LJ and SLJ’s 2022 Job Satisfaction Survey shows that most librarians are glad they chose their career, but significantly fewer than in 2012.

In “Uprooting Racial Health Disparities: Genealogy as a Community Health Library Service,” Lynette Hammond Gerido, University of Michigan School of Public Health, studies the outcomes and affordances of genealogical and family health history research.