What We Talk About When We Talk About Journal Club: Scholarly Communication Advocacy and Public Access to Federally Funded Research

The past decade has seen attempts by librarians and their allies to respond to inefficiencies in the market for scholarly journals and introduce infrastructure to support open solutions. Recently these efforts have contributed to success at the national level, first with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's 2013 policy memorandum on Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research and in 2014 with the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which incorporates the substance of the memorandum into law. This column provides a review of efforts by librarians to advocate for open scholarship, describes the federal actions that will expand public access to research, and concludes with a discussion of next steps in this evolving effort.