If You Build It, They Will Come: Developing and Conducting Scholarly Communications Faculty Forums

Objectives: How do you inform faculty, students and administrators about the challenges facing scholarly communications? What strategies can you develop that resonate with faculty that get them engaged in learning about the issues and potentially transform them into advocates? Developing and conducting campus-wide faculty forums are an extremely effective way of getting faculty and students involved in the scholarly communications debate. Methods/Results: This poster demonstrates the lessons learned and best practices in developing and conducting successful faculty forums on scholarly communications/open access topics using illustrative examples from past forums. Issues addressed: developing forum themes that strike a chord with faculty and students, pros and cons of deciding whether or not to have an outside speaker and the challenges involved, recruiting faculty speakers, deciding on venues, dates, times, marketing tips and tricks, applying for continuing education credit, the nitty-gritty of successful event planning and project management.