Scholarly communication and academic librarians

• Perceptions of researchers and academic librarians regarding scholarly communication are explored.
• A similar (low) percentage of researchers and librarians believe librarians can assist with scholarly communication.
• Researchers are more willing to involve librarians in scholarly communication than are librarians.
• Librarians in smaller libraries have a deeper knowledge of research in their department.
• Appointing trained research librarians may improve the contribution of the library to scholarly communication.

It is generally accepted among library and information science scholars that academic librarians can potentially assist faculty members with formal and informal scholarly communication processes. However, it is not clear to what extent faculty members and academic librarians are indeed aware of this potential and materialize it in the field. Following interviews with 20 faculty members and 15 academic librarians employed by a university or an academic college in Israel, questionnaires were constructed and delivered to 191 faculty members and 50 librarians. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that both the faculty members and librarians believed that academic librarians are potentially capable of contributing to scholarly communication processes. However, more faculty members than librarians expressed the expectation that librarians should be involved in scholarly communication, and were willing for this to be the case. Bridging this gap—for example by appointing designated “research librarians”—may contribute to the increased involvement of academic librarians in scholarly communication processes, which will benefit both the faculty members and the academic library.