Future of the scholarly communications professionals

Abstract

During the period March 2015 to September 2017 job postings advertising positions relating to Open Access were collected. The total number of the collected job postings was 72.

The collection was done manually throughout this whole period from job advertising sites, such as Jobs.ac.uk, CILIP Lisjobnet and the Times of Higher Education. In addition, the author is subscribing to open listserves, such as the Jisc-Repositories, OAGoodPractice and a closed one, the UKCoRR-Discussion list, and managed to collect job descriptions from those list list servers as well. The author saved job postings that met the following criteria: a) when the words “Open Access”, “Repository (-ies)”, “Research Data Manager” would appear in the job title, and b) when the words “Scholarly Communications”, “Research Publications”, “Research Services”, “Research Support” and “Research” would appear as well.

In the latter case, the job posting was further investigated and the full text of the job was scanned to see whether the job related to the field. In general, when the words “Open Access”, “Repository (-ies)”, “Research Data Management” would appear in the job’s full text then the job was saved.

Each job posting could have more than one associated files and all of them were saved locally in the author’s personal computer and a folder was created per job. At the end, a spreadsheet containing all the related information per job posting was generated and used for the analysis of the jobs.

This presentation aims to present the findings from the collected job postings. The areas that will be mentioned are: - Number of advertised full-time and part-time, and permanent or fixed term jobs - Salaries per grade - University Mission Group - Skills required with regards to: - Qualifications - Experience - Knowledge Skills - Specific skills required with regards to: - Open Access - Repositories - Research Data Management - Open Data

The aim of this work is to identify the most important skills required in the jobs advertised in our field, educate the new comers in the field and identify how our profession is evolving.