About a year and a half ago, three Canadian librarians working on scholarly communications issues decided to start an online community to share information, advice and support around this kind of work. The Canadian Schol Comms Community of Practice has since grown into an active and lively group, with members from across the country representing many different kinds of institutions. This grassroots organization primarily meets online via a shared Slack channel (online discussion forum) and holds semi-regular calls for members to connect. We’ve also held meet-ups at associated conferences, such as the PKP conference in Montreal this past summer.

What is a Community of Practice?
Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner describe communities of practice as: “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”  Read (much) more here: http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

The primary goal of the Canadian Schol Comms COP is to create opportunities for scholarly communications workers to learn from each other, share experiences and information, test assumptions and theories, develop confidence, solve problems, reduce isolation, and ultimately build an effective community of practice with peers engaged in similar work.

Who is our Community?
We invite participation from anyone engaged in work on the front-lines of scholarly communications, whether you manage an institutional repository, support open access journal publishing, are involved in outreach and education around OA and copyright, or any of the other diverse roles that fall under the scholarly communications umbrella. We welcome workers from institutions of any size, and in any role, especially those for whom scholarly communications work is a primary responsibility. Nous encourageons la participation des membres francophones de notre communauté!

How can you join?
Please email one of the founding members of the Community of Practice to join the Slack channel and participate in the conversations! We are:

Leah Vanderjagt