University researchers must navigate a “staggering complexity” in scholarly communication today, says Jessica Clemons, an account executive for research solutions at Ex Libris.

The amount of scholarly output is growing exponentially, with rapidly changing models and newly emerging channels for publishing research outcomes. At the same time, the stakes are high for researchers — and the institutions that employ them — to showcase their work effectively.

For universities, the volume and impact of their research are important factors in the ranking systems that affect everything from their reputation to the quality of their faculty and the number of applicants they receive. For researchers, these factors play a key role in determining whether they earn tenure or win grants to support their projects.

“There is so much pressure to publish, so many ways to publish, so many things to publish,” Clemons says. “It can be overwhelming for researchers.”

Meanwhile, securing research funding is becoming more competitive. In a survey commissioned by Ex Libris, 61 percent of researchers said that finding relevant funding opportunities is difficult, and only three out of five researchers secure funding more than 25 percent of the time they apply. “The number of opportunities is limited, and competition is fierce,” one respondent said.

Effectively sharing, promoting and tracking the impact of research is essential for success. Yet, universities often struggle to manage these increasingly complex tasks. With their skills in understanding and navigating the information landscape, librarians are uniquely positioned to help.

Collect and showcase faculty research

Librarians can add significant value for their institutions by collaborating with individual researchers and research office staff to identify new publishing channels, catalog university research and make these works more easily discoverable, among other activities.

In fact, researchers would like more support from libraries in areas such as showcasing their research, data citation and ensuring compliance with regulations, the Ex Libris survey revealed. The survey also found that demonstrating the impact of their research is a growing priority for universities, but more can be done to ensure that researchers’ online profiles are comprehensive and kept up to date.

“Keeping track of everything their faculty have published is not something that universities traditionally have been able to do well,” Clemons says. This is an area that is especially ripe for libraries to contribute.

At many universities, information about faculty research is scattered across multiple departments, says Jeff Horon, director of research information solutions for Ex Libris. Like Clemons, Horon was a former university employee before joining Ex Libris; both have extensive insight into the challenges that institutions face in managing scholarly communication.

Horon says he has found that universities often gather data about faculty productivity in three different ways: (1) faculty activity reporting that is manually keyed in within the provost office; (2) deposits that are made voluntarily by faculty into an institutional repository, typically managed by the library; and (3) algorithmically gathered data that are formed into a researcher profile by the research office.

“All three of these data sources are managed by different departments,” Horon observes. This makes it nearly impossible to get a single, cohesive picture of a university’s research activity.

“To unify these efforts,” he says, “universities need to consolidate this information. The library is a logical candidate for that, because it’s a central point of connection between these various offices.”

Leverage emerging tools

To help universities catalog and assess the impact of their research, librarians need effective tools. One problem with many institutional repositories in use today is that they tend to operate as standalone systems, “like an electronic version of a filing cabinet in the middle of an office,” Clemons says.

She adds: “The real value lies in connecting these systems to the larger research ecosystem, so institutions can see how their research has been used to impact policy or mentioned in media outlets, for example.”

Libraries can leverage emerging technologies to collect and showcase institutional research more effectively. For instance, the Smart Harvesting AI capabilities within Esploro, a cloud-based research data management platform from Ex Libris, use machine learning technology to match faculty with their published works, populate their researcher profiles and share publications with search engines automatically. This helps institutions understand the scope of faculty research and promote this work with much less time and effort.

The Ex Libris survey also revealed that interdisciplinary collaboration is becoming increasingly important for researchers, yet only 27 percent of researchers are satisfied with the level of support they receive from their institution in finding potential collaborators. This is another key area where librarians can help, because of their existing relationships with faculty. Librarians often play a key role in helping to manage public-facing faculty profiles and developing research information management systems, and they are typically knowledgeable about faculty members’ areas of expertise.

“Librarians are generally critical in this area, because they are connectors and collaborators by nature,” Clemons says. “Few things make a librarian happier than when they can bring people together and connect them with people and resources that can help them.”

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