Tag Archives: open access

Resources

Open Access Week: Resources and Ways to Celebrate!

We are right in the middle of International Open Access Week!
This year’s theme is “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge.” During the week of Oct. 22nd – 28th, the academic and research communities make a special effort to share with the wider world the benefits of Open Access.

This week is also a time to “help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.”

What is Open Access, and why is it important? 
Open Access refers “the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need.” Having this ease of access to information can have a huge impact in the fields of medicine, education, and the world as a whole. Get more information at OpenAccessWeek.org.

This quick video does a good job of explaining how Open Access is beneficial and important:

And since we are library people, the more information the better, right? Here are some resources we found that get into Open Access in more detail:

  • ACRL has this Scholarly Communication Toolkit full of articles, links to organizations, videos, best practices, and more, all discussing Open Access Policies and Publishing. They even have a section to help you debunk common Open Access myths!
  • On IFLA’s Library Policy and Advocacy blog, they share the article “How open access can help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” which highlights the important role of the library community.
  • In this article from American Libraries, check out some stats regarding the effort to allow free access to scholarly research.
  • This article from Canadian Science Publishing called “Who Needs Open Access” explains the reasons behind the movement and also discusses many of the challenges that need to be handled.

CMLE also has a podcast episode on the topic of Open Access featuring CMLE member Susan Schleper from the Centracare Hospital Library in St. Cloud. Listen here:

Resources

Feds Come Around to OER — Slowly

Open Access PLoS

Open access resources are a very important issue in libraries of all types; and the issue of open access textbooks is crucial to academic libraries and the communities they serve.

Check out this article from Inside Higher Ed to get all the info on the latest developments:

“Congress has set aside $5 million for an open educational resources pilot program — the most significant federal push for alternative textbooks. Advocates are encouraged.

Three times since 2013, members in both houses of Congress have introduced the Affordable College Textbook Act, which would create a federal program to fund the creation of open educational resources on a nationwide scale. Each time, that bill has faltered in committee.

Meanwhile, advocates aimed for a more attainable goal: securing a one-time appropriation for OER funding in the annual federal budget. After a whirlwind few weeks that included a concerted lobbying push, a dramatic late-night bill reveal and an empty veto threat from the president, OER supporters last Friday scored a victory: $5 million for a pilot program of creating and expanding OER textbooks at institutions well positioned to save students money.

Precise details of the plan for implementing the funds are hard to come by. Funds could take several months to become available because the Department of Education needs time to figure out guidance on administering a new pilot program, according to a spokesperson for Senator Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who wrote the affordable textbook bill and has been active on these issues for a few years.

The appropriation cheered OER proponents including the Washington-based Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and a nationwide network of student activists organized by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). Observers of the publishing industry say the appropriation, while modest compared to ongoing efforts at the state level, represents a symbolic victory that could portend exponential growth for OER adoption.

The success of the appropriation, advocates say, will be measured not only by the funding’s immediate impact at partner institutions, but on the increasing volume of the policy conversation around the federal government’s role in ensuring the affordability of textbooks — and, by extension, higher education as a whole.

“Obviously there are lots of other ways to save students money that can have an impact,” said Nicole Allen, director of open education at SPARC. “By investing in OER, Congress is saying this is the one you should set your sights on.”

Allen said the funds can start having an impact on students “almost right away” — assuming the U.S. Department of Education makes them available promptly. The legislation calls for creating new content and expanding the use of OER; it’s unclear whether that mandate includes helping faculty members find and understand the resources. A spokesperson for the department didn’t respond in time for publication.

As for institutions that will benefit from the funding, Allen speculates the focus will be in part on member institutions of systems like the public institutions in Georgia and Missouri, which are well suited to resource sharing.

Kaitlyn Vitez, director of PIRG’s Campaign to Save Student Aid, said she believes the greatest potential for saving students money lies in high-enrollment introductory courses, where OER material can be applied to numerous sections simultaneously.”

Go through the rest of this article here, along with some resources to share with faculty about using open access!

Academic, Communication

Journals and Articles are Increasingly Out of Reach: SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN

Research JournalsIf you are involved in any type of academic research, you know how totally out of control prices are for your community members. I was recently looking for an article I wrote – and the publisher offered to charge me $36 to look at it for 24 hours!! (Note that as the author, I get $0 of that price.) I laughed out loud.

Subscription costs for journals keep spiraling upward, but library budgets do not match them. As library people, we want to support our community members in their search for information, and we are responsible for ensuring everyone follows copyright laws and DRM requirements, along with publisher requirements. It can all be a serious challenge to anyone who needs to find academic research material.

So I am always intrigued to read about the “pirates” of the research world – sharing articles with anyone. We are definitely not advocating steering your patrons to these illegal sources (that tend to be easier to use than your catalog, and cost them nothing) – we would much prefer for journals to become more accessible for people in a more fair system.

But you should be aware of the developments in the world of academic research, so we are sharing this article from The Verge about one woman’s efforts to share research – not just with scholars in the US, but also around the world.

“In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”

It wasn’t long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. “I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like ‘Well, that’s… that’s a real problem.’ There’s no literal translation,” Elbakyan tells me in Russian. “It’s basically ‘That’s an ass.’ But it doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It’s more like ‘That’s fucked up. We’re fucked.’”

The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name, and it wasn’t happy about either of the sites. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access; Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. She went back to work. She was in Kazakhstan. The lawsuit was in America. She had more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her religious studies program; writing acerbic blog-style posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte; participating in various feminist groups online; and attempting to launch a sciencey-print T-shirt business.

That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. In just six years of existence, Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was available to anyone.

But as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers. Continue reading Journals and Articles are Increasingly Out of Reach: SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN →

Podcast, Services, Tech

Episode 212: Open Access

Open Access PLoSThis is Open Access week, and we are celebrating with a podcast! (Check out our full information page here!)

This is a topic with a lot of passion involved, and lots of big feelings on all sides of the discussion. Today we are just going to walk through some of the basics of how OA works and what it means; and talk with Susan Schleper, from Centra Care Health hospital library in St. Cloud, about one aspect of using it in a library setting in her institutional repository.

As so often happens on this podcast, we are just introducing you to a big topic – and we want you to get comfortable with the basics and then be able to move on to a larger look that may work for your organization and professional interests.

So, as always, we have a lot of material on the podcast page to help you keep building up your knowledge. And of course, we are always available to come to your library to help you, to talk with you, and to help you set up policies and procedures and training for yourself, your colleagues, and your organization!

Want to listen to an episode?

  1. You can download an app, subscribe to “Linking Our Libraries” and all episodes will appear on your phone – it’s so easy!
    • Apps we like include Pocket Casts, iTunes, and Stitcher.
    • Download any of these, search for “Linking Our Libraries” and hit Subscribe.
    • If it is not readily available, just enter this RSS feed: http://libraries.blubrry.com/feed/podcast/.
  2. Or, you can stream an episode right now on your computer by going to our streaming page, by clicking here.

Whatever tool you use, we hope you enjoy it! Thanks for listening, and sharing ideas on libraries!

Communication, Materials, Tech

It’s Open Access Week!

Welcome to the 10th Annual Open Access Week! What is Open Access (or OA) you may wonder? According to Open Access Week.org, the term means “the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need.” Open Access is important because it “has the power to accelerate scientific advancements and spur job growth in a wide range of fields, from healthcare to energy to agriculture.”

From Oct. 23rd to Oct. 29th, celebrate this year’s theme of “Open in Order to…” which is “meant to move the discussion beyond talking about openness itself and instead focus on what openness enables—in an individual discipline, at a particular institution, or in a specific context; then to take action to realize these benefits. The theme also recognizes the diverse contexts and communities within which the shift to Open Access is occurring and encourages specific discussion that will be most effective locally.”

Check out this link to OA events held all around the world this week. Keep your eyes open this week for extra resources regarding OA, including CMLE’s podcast on the subject, featuring Guest Host Susan Schleper! Tune in to Linking Our Libraries on Thursday to hear the discussion.

 

#OAWeek