Job description
Boca Raton, FL
Established in 1964 as the first public university in southeast Florida, Florida Atlantic University serves 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students on six campuses along Florida’s beautiful southeast coast in Broward, Palm Beach, and St. Lucie counties. Florida Atlantic has ten distinguished colleges that offer more than 180-degree programs, including the Schmidt College of Medicine, and is home to one of the world’s preeminent marine science education and research centers, the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. Florida Atlantic University is taking its place among the world’s great research centers and has been given the designation of a “High Research Activity” university by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The Florida Atlantic University Libraries have prioritized working collaboratively with an R1 campus community on a Top 100 research initiative that includes a highly library engaged campus and community environment. FAU Libraries house approximately 3.7 million items and provide access to over 80,000 electronic journals, nearly 500 databases, and a growing collection of e-books and streaming videos. The Libraries house many distinctive collections, including artists’ books, sound recordings, print music, rare books and manuscripts, and University Archives. The Digital Initiatives and Scholarship Unit provides the Research Hub learning space for graduate students, post-docs, doctoral students, researchers, visiting scholars, and community users. In addition, this unit creates online collections from unique materials held in Special Collections and University Archives, serving as the University’s repository for intellectual output generated on campus including FAU created journals and curated displays.
The Florida Atlantic University Libraries seek a student-focused, high-energy, collaborative, organized, engaged, positive, innovative, strong written and verbal communicator, and self-starter, who adapts well to change and can manage multiple projects. We endeavor to be a highly engaged organization that believes in striving for excellence, utilizing assessment and data for decision-making, and maintaining a culture of appreciation/gratitude, as an R1 University pursuing a Top 100 national ranking. Successful candidates are also expected to demonstrate commitment to professional development and lifelong learning.
Reporting directly to the Assistant Dean for Access, Research, and Learning Services, the successful candidate will provide leadership, direct outreach, and support to the University Community on issues related to scholarly communications, copyright, open access, and open education, delivering focused services to promote faculty, student, and staff engagement with Open Educational Resources, Scholarly Publishing, and Open Pedagogy. This position provides expertise in alternative publishing models, open scholarship, author rights, copyright, and compliance with public-access requirements for federally funded research, ORCID ID usage, and is responsible for tracking trends such as predatory publishing that affect access to scholarly information. This position will primarily work on the Boca Raton Campus but may at times be asked to work at one of five other FAU campuses.
Essential Functions
- Serve as the Libraries’ primary contact for scholarly communication questions and initiatives and strengthens the Libraries’ leadership role in scholarly communications for Florida Atlantic.
- Provide Guidance and education regarding policies relating to copyright, open licensing, and attribution of Creative Commons licensed materials.
- Deliver timely presentations and educational and instructional programs, empowering faculty, staff, students, and community partners to make informed decisions regarding copyright and fair use; authors rights and open access publishing; institutional and open repositories; and other related topics.
- Participate in outreach services to promote faculty, student, and staff engagement with Open Educational Resources, Scholarly Publishing, and Open Pedagogy.
- Promote and market open access, OER, and other issues related to scholarly communications to faculty and researchers in collaboration with liaison librarians, Libraries’ External Relations, and campus stakeholders.
- Create subject guides, and social media content for Open Access Week, literature reviews, plagiarism, predatory publishing, and artificial intelligence.
- Support faculty in adopting and creating open educational resources (OER) and promote open pedagogy practices, including renewable assignments and student knowledge creation.
- Work with Libraries’ Administration, liaisons, and University departments to raise awareness and encourage and generate broad participation in advancing course material affordability initiatives including adopting OER into their curriculum and low or no-cost textbook alternatives.
- Actively support and promote the Libraries’ physical and electronic textbook reserve initiatives including working with the Florida Atlantic bookstore, students, and faculty to request donations for textbooks for the Libraries’ Textbook Reserve collections at the Boca Raton and Jupiter Campus libraries.
- Support and serve as a champion for Digital Commons and access to materials beyond paywall.
- Stay current and track trends on regional, national, and international developments in the field (e.g. copyright, bibliometrics, scholarly publishing, open access/open educational resources.
- Serve as the Libraries representative to scholarly communications related groups and ad hoc committees including serving on the Textbook Transparency and Affordability Committee (a University level committee co-chaired by the Libraries and the Provost’s Office).
- Participate in FAU programs and events that promote student recruitment, academic preparedness, engagement, and graduation.
- Support the Libraries’ KPIs and other strategic initiatives.
- Participate in Libraries’ engagement events.
- Contribute to developing and strengthening a positive view of the FAU Libraries as an active partner in the University’s educational and research mission and assist with promoting the Libraries’ needs and services.
- Develop an annual professional development plan.
- Investigate opportunities to carry out, publish, and present original scholarship, research, and scholarly projects related to the area of expertise or responsibility.
- Serve on appropriate Libraries, University, regional, state or national committees including professional committees, and actively participate in faculty governance.
- Perform other job-related duties as assigned.
