Expanding Academic Librarians' Roles in the Research Life Cycle.

Research depends on prior results. The cycle of transforming research output to disseminated knowledge is changing to engage more researchers to openly discover and thereby shape future contributions to scholarship. No established framework helps librarians understand the opportunities that transition offers librarians. However, through four propositions, this paper addresses some of the changes facing academic librarians as they expand their roles: 1) Research cycles embrace interactive sharing and reuse of data; 2) Managing open research data expands librarians' roles; 3) Intellectual entrepreneurship roles provide a model to empower others; 4) Librarians demonstrate their entrepreneurial leadership by creating partnerships outside the library. Now academic librarians have opportunities to strengthen their role in how higher education shapes research by shifting greater focus toward research data management [RDM]. Two seasoned administrators and librarians illustrate pathways to prepare academic librarians for these new roles. They offer two practitioners' impressions of the demands and opportunities for librarians to extend their expertise to support RDM, and illustrate how academic librarians have begun doing so through professional association work (through the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)) and at one academic library (at Drexel University). They urge academic librarians to step out of their comfort zones of organizing, preserving and servicing discovery of information resources and embrace emerging roles for which their values and expertise have prepared them. If librarians ignore these opportunities, they risk being bypassed in efforts to ensure that managing research data and scholarship are central to research protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]