Scholarly communication is a rapidly changing field within librarianship which has numerous focus areas: open access, open data, open education, open research, and open scholarly publishing. The proposal that I set in 2018 for my 2019 sabbatical overlapped several of these focus areas and had three main goals:

1.       to conduct an in-depth review of the current state of institutional repositories (IRs) to determine next steps to take towards a next generation IR for UMass Amherst      

2.       to further the work of the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) IMLS-funded curriculum project and the University Libraries’ publishing efforts within the Office of Scholarly Communication then explore possible alignment with other departments in the libraries, academic programs and departments at UMass Amherst such as the UMA College of Information and Computer Science curriculum and externally with the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science

3.       to continue conducting research in the emerging topics of open scholarship and knowledge commons to determine the best areas to continue developing these topics within the academy and librarianship specifically.

I was awarded a year-long state Department of Higher Education consortia grant in October 2018 to create a team to advance the awareness and use of open educational resources (OERs) throughout the state and to put forward plans for a sustainable ongoing statewide efforts in this area. As detailed later in the report, this impacted the amount of time that I could allocate to each of the above goals but added a worthwhile dimension to the opportunities afforded by this sabbatical.