RIT Libraries Strategic Plan
Publishing & Scholarship Center
The Library proposes to establish a Publishing and Scholarship Center that will be both a physical space and virtual entity. It will centralize research and writing/publication support services and will provide a collaborative research and writing environment.
The Center will also provide RIT faculty, graduate students and other members of the RIT academic community with a one-stop service for advice and help in preparing articles, books, and other documents, including theses and dissertations, for publication. The Center will offer assistance with scholarly editing practices, appropriate citation control, editing, copyright and plagiarism issues, and publication tools and technologies, including print-on-demand opportunities. The virtual component of the Center will provide remote access to many of these services.
The Center will work in partnership with the Digital Media Library and the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press to ensure that research and scholarship is published, digitally archived and/or circulated in the most meaningful and useful ways.
Components and services of the Center will include:
- Work/study space to facilitate research, writing, editing, peer review and publishing.
- A collection of printed materials related to the research and writing processes, including materials to assist students with proposal writing and funding information for fellowships, grants, prizes, or other awards.
- Staffed by trained professionals to assist with both research questions and the writing/publication process.
- Workstations for access to writing tools and electronic resources.
- Instruction to improve research and writing skills (examples: Information Literacy, Evaluating the Internet, Copyright/Plagiarism, “Cite It Right” workshops, bibliographic management software, e.g. EndNote).
- Bulletin board exchange (both virtual and physical) to bring together students and/or faculty working on similar research projects and link members of the RIT community to each other for peer review, translation services, etc.
- Ready accessibility to writing support tools, such as assignment and dissertation calculators, bibliographic management software, translation software, etc.
- Access and support for both printed and electronic research tools.
- A self-serve “Turnitin” service to allow students to submit their own work for plagiarism review.
- Expanded support for bibliographic management software with filters, connection files, etc, and support for products that are accessible and available via the Web, e.g. RefWorks.
Some of the elements of the RIT Strategic Plan addressed by this goal include:
Goal A4: RIT will be recognized as a university that places teaching and learning above all other activities.Goal B2: All current and future RIT faculty will be excellent in their discipline, pedagogically sound, and institutionally informed.
Objective C4.2 Dedicated research space and shared collaborative spaces should be allocated for cross-disciplinary interaction and scholarly engagement by faculty, students and staff.
