Legislative Update – Open Access Advances

Each year more faculty and more institutions acknowledge the importance of reforming scholarly communications by creating a new system that better supports publicly open access to research. One way in which this happens is when faculty senates approve Open Access Resolutions that encourage the open sharing of research articles by depositing them in institutional or disciplinary repositories. Significant progress also happens when federal law creates new guidelines and requirements for public sharing of research funded by taxpayers.

In 2007, with the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), federal law mandated that all articles published as a result of grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be made available to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication. Known as the “Public Access Policy”, it was a major advancement in open access. As a result close to 100,000 research articles are publicly accessible. However, since then, there has been no additional legislation passed to expand the Public Access Policy to other fields. It is not for lack of trying.

The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was first introduced in 2006, reintroduced in 2009, and reintroduced again in the 112th Congress on February 9, 2012 (as S. 2096 and H.R. 4004). FRPAA aimed to expand public access policies to other departments/agencies. Despite setbacks experience wiht FRPPA, the effort to pass new public access legislation continues. On February 14, 2013, The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR, HR708 and S350) was introduced. This bipartisan legislation would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

While it was beneficial for the White House, in 2013, to request the Office of Science and Technology Policy to direct each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to increase public access to funded research results published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications, it is still necessary to pass the FASTR bill in order to ensure that the expansion of public access requirments to other federal agencies is mandated by law. Despite the number of legislators from both parties co-sponsoring FASTR, in the current legislative environment, the prospect for it being approved this year is questionable. Whatever happens, the momentum continues to grow for public access legislation in both the library and higher education communities. With the undeniable success of the NIH Public Access Policy, in time we are likely to see the passage of FASTR.

 

 

Why Open Access Matters

Today marks the start of Open Access Week, a global event celebrated each year to acknowledge the importance of continuing to work towards reform in our system of scholarly communication. There are two significant reasons why it is important for faculty, researchers and librarians to work together to create change in a system that is in need of change and demands our collective attention.

The first is economic. The current system is not financially sustainable for higher education. The cost of tuition is already unaffordable for too many students. The irrational high cost of many scholarly journals, particularly in the fields of science, technology and medicine, contributes to the expense of a college education. The budgets of academic libraries are challenged to support these costs. Even with the advent of digital technologies that make new and more open systems of distribution possible – well proven by hundreds of viable, highly respected open access journals – we still scratch our heads and wonder why higher education continues to give away faculty research only to buy it back from publishers at inexplicable high costs.

The second is openness. The current scholarly publishing system keeps important research information behind subscription pay walls. While there is notable progress in making scientific research available to the public, it still represents a small portion of all published scholarly content. There are already many examples of the benefits of making this content openly accessible to the public. Taxpayers certainly have the right to the information their tax dollars fund. If higher education transforms the scholarly communication to advance openness, we all benefit.

Open Access Week is designed to create awareness. It is about more than economics or creating access for the public. It also brings attention to the importance of higher education supporting its right to use copyrighted content under the guidelines for fair use. We must defend the right of faculty to use copyrighted information to support student learning. It is also a time to remind faculty of their rights as authors. Instead of surrendering the rights to their intellectual property to publishers, faculty will want to think about adding language to author agreements that allows them to retain their rights to reuse or share their published content. Too many Temple University faculty have signed standard author agreements only to discover later on that they had no right to use their own content or could only do so for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

We hope that members of our Temple University community will take some time this week to think about the current scholarly publishing system and how we can work collaboratively to improve it. Temple University librarians are available to meet with faculty members who would like to learn more about open access, fair use or author rights. Take advantage of Open Access Week webinar events. Visit the Open Access Week website to learn more about what you can do to create change. And watch this blog for more posts about open access throughout this week as Temple University Libraries honors Open Access Week.

 

Get Ready For Open Access Week – Oct.21 – Oct.25

Each October academic librarians set aside a week to promote and celebrate the open access movement. Across the globe events are held to remind scholars of the importance of reforming the scholarly communications system in order to make the results of research and scholarship widely available to all the world’s citizens. According to the Open Access Week website:

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted.

In recognition of Open Access Week, Temple University Libraries will use its website and this blog to share information about open access. We hope this will create more awareness about open access issues and opportunities across our institution.

There are two webcasts scheduled for Open Access Week that may be of interest to you. On Monday, October 21 at 3:00 pm ET the Open Access Week Kick Off Event is sponsored by SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the World Bank. The webcast is “Open Access: Redefining Impact” and will feature a panel discussion of multiple experts from different disciplines discussing their open access experiences. You can view a listing of other Open Access Week live events being sponsored by SPARC.

The live webcast “Protect Your Patrons From Predatory Publishers” will be held on Tuesday, October 22 at 3:30 pm ET, and it will feature Jeffrey Beall speaking about low quality open access journals that use misleading techniques and claims to lead faculty to publish for outlandish fees. It is important for researchers and scholars to be aware of predatory publishers.

Stay tuned for more information on open access the week of October 21, 2013.

 

“Groove dreams whipped stiff”: Poetry, Performance, and the (In)finitude of the Archive

As a kick-off for Archives Month Philly, Paley Library hosted “Live from the Collections: In and Out of Poetry” Tuesday, October 1st. Stemming from an exhibition of small press and alternative poetry entitled “The Fun in Speaking English” done by TU Libraries in spring, the afternoon saw the assembly of three poets who, through their own work’s thematic concerns and by their very participation in the event of the reading, interrogate and explore the notion of The Archive. Challenging the audience to consider the reading as more than a recitation of poetic product, Moderator Matthew Kalasky (director of Philadelphia cultural organization Nicola Midnight St. Claire) prefaced the reading by posing the question, “How does the current reading color the writing process of the past?”

The reading began with Penn Ph.D. student/writer/media archivist Daniel Snelson sharing work exploring the infinitude of the poetic page. Snelson read from Ronald Johnson’s Radi O’s, a poem which, through the careful, meticulous removal of text from Milton’s Paradise Lost, recontextualizes and reinvents the work. Snelson then shared one of his own projects of reimagining, audio of himself reading over archived audio of a reading by poet Rosmarie Waldrop of her work Differences for Four Hands reading over audio of a previous reading of her poem. Yes, you did in fact read that correctly: note the layers! Waldrop’s last stanza in particular, speaks toward the process & performance theme of the reading:

“Clara, play for us. The performance over, your name drops back out of the air. Records now, of course. Groove dreams whipped stiff. You never stepped twice…”

Next, the program featured prolific contemporary poet Lyn Lifshin, a writer whose work is partially housed in TU Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (check out the extensive list of the Library’s holdings here). Plumbing her own archive of material, Lifshin read a number of poems, sometimes pausing between each to give the audience a history of the poem, in terms of both its initial writing and its life as a performed piece. The following piece, the beautiful and devastating “I Remember Being Lovely But,” was one of these historicized poems, allowing the audience a glimpse into the moments of its creation. The work itself functions as the poeticized written trace of lived experience, each performance of the work a further instance of documentation:

“There were snakes in the
tent. My mother was
strong but she never
slept, was afraid of
dreaming. In Auschwitz
there was a numbness,
lull of just staying
alive. Her two babies
gassed before her, Dr.
Mengele. Do you know
who he is? She kept
her young sister alive
only to have her die
in her arms the night
of liberation. My mother
is big-boned but she
weighed under 80 lbs.
It was hot. I thought
the snakes lovely. No
drugs in Israel, no
food. I got pneumonia,
my mother knocked the
doctor to the floor
when they refused,
said I lost two in
the camp and if this
one dies I’ll kill
myself in front of you.
I thought that once
you became a mother
blue numbers appeared
mysteriously, tattooed
on your wrist.”

The SCRC also contains a substantial amount of Lifshin’s papers, including poem drafts and correspondences.

Poet Elaine Terranova ended the afternoon’s readings, reading from several of her seven collections of poetry. (Some of Terranova’s work is housed in the SCRC–see the list here). Her poem “Stairway”, from her most recent collection Dollhouse, nicely summates many of the tensions of the archive:

“Think of the dollhouse
as a collection, a museum,
even a prison, but a little doll,
a tiny chair, mean nothing
if not in the context of a house.

There is in a house, despite
its safety, I don’t know,
such capacity for movement and change.

At night, for instance, a house
talks back, crackles and knocks.
Turn on the alarm and it is like
setting the alarm of your fear,
little birdcall of eternity.

Downstairs you have only just
shut the door on the world
and you float up, giddy with sleep.
You fly–don’t they call the sets
of steps flights? At the top,
massive dark, a wind that rushes through the hall.

Everything moves around.
Nothing is stable. Then you open
a door, look through a window,
and find there, pocketed by the sky,
the nearly perfect moon.”

Terranova reminds us, “Nothing is stable”, and such is the archive, not merely a static collection of printed texts “whipped stiff”, to borrow from Waldrop, but an animate entity that circulates beyond its physical repository, full of a “capacity for movement and change,” each performance a circuit on a current that loops both backward and forward. The works shared by these three wonderful poets that afternoon were indeed dreams grooved and regrooved, each performance an instance of truly moving beyond the page, renegotiating the boundaries of the printed word.

IMG_1264 (2)

Poet Daniel Snelson explicates his poetic process to the audience while Moderator Matthew Kalasky and poets Lyn Lifshin and Elaine Terranova look on.

Interested in future library programming? Take a look at this calendar for the Beyond the Page schedule of events.

Browzine Takes Your Journal Reading to a New Level

Temple University Libraries provides access to thousands of journals in electronic format. The challenge is identifying all the ones relevant to your needs, and then setting up a system that makes it convenient to keep up with the latest issues and articles.

That’s where Browzine comes in handy. It’s an app for both Mac and Android tablet devices that makes tracking, reading and managing journals a simple task. The Temple University Libraries has acquired a site license for Browzine that will allow Temple community members to easily gain access to a vast majority of the journals to which we subscribe – as well as many more open access journals. While viewing articles, Browzine facilitates saving and sharing them.

When you become a Browzine user you begin by selecting the journals you wish to regularly follow, by title or by browsing different subject areas. The selection covers journals that the Temple University Libraries subscribes to, as well as open access journals. Browzine creates a virtual bookshelf on your device. Just click on individual journal issues to proceed to the table of contents for each issue.

Ipad screen showing thumbnails arranged as if on a wooden bookshelf.

Screenshot of the Browzine Bookshelf Where Journals Are Organized

 

 

To get started just download the Browzine app from the App Store or Google Play. If you are interested in learning more about Browzine take a few moments to watch this introductory video. Your Libraries subject specialist can also provide you with more information about or guidance with Browzine.

Do You Have My Textbook?

One of the first things students do as the new semester begins is figuring our their textbook strategy. Which ones can they borrow from friends that took the course before. Can it be rented in e-format from B&N, Amazon, Google or Chegg? Does the bookstore have a used copy? For which courses could a textbook purchase be delayed or even ignored? With the high cost of textbooks, figuring out how to get them at the cheapest possible price is high on the students’ beginning of the semester to-do-list.

That’s why one of the most frequently asked questions at the Temple Libraries during the first week or two of the semester is about textbooks. Students want to find out if the Libraries hold a copy of their textbook. Some assume we buy them, but they find out that’s not the case. Sometimes their book is placed on course reserve by the instructor. Sometimes a fairly out-of-date edition, a past reserve item, can be found in the book stacks. Some students will choose to take that outdated edition over the current edition.

Student interest is growing  in having faculty point them to open education resources instead of assigning traditional textbooks. In a research paper titled “Online and Campus College Students Like Using an Open Educational Resource Instead of a Traditional Book“, Brian Lindshield and Koushik Adhikari of Kansas State University, report that data gathered over several semesters using an alternate textbook they called the “flexbook”, that utilized an open-source textbook platform to allow faculty to collaboratively offer freely available learning materials, was preferred by students over the traditional textbook. They conclude  “that students are willing to move beyond traditional print textbooks.” An article in Inside Higher Ed titled “Expense Experiments” identifies how different institutions are experimenting with both e-textbooks and technology for reading them.

Additionally in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Almanac of Higher Education 2013, there is a chart that summarizes student responses to a question asking them what technologies they would like to most see their professors using – and what they’d like to see used less often. Nearly half of the students surveyed indicated that they would like to see more use of freely available course content beyond the student’s own campus. A slightly lesser number of students wanted more use of e-books and e-textbooks.

The Temple University Libraries offers a resource page for faculty seeking more sources for open educational resources – such as the University of Minnesota open textbook catalog that can subject search the holdings of numerous open textbook repositories. The Libraries also owns thousands of e-books that may be used as an alternate to a textbook. Using the SUMMON search (on the Libraries homepage) it is possible to modify a search to locate book chapters in electronic sources:

With the growing number of open educational resources available to faculty, and the increasing student acceptance of e-resources, the possibility of replacing traditional textbooks with open learning materials is greater than ever.

Library Virtual Learning Lunches to be held September 3-6, 2013

Screenshot of WebEx software

When the Temple University community returns from summer break, students will be attending classes from off-campus, and from locations well outside the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Luckily, even at this distance, all Temple students still have access to the incredible wealth of databases, eBooks, and streaming media available through the library. Now, more than ever, students can engage directly with the library staff who are positioned to guide them towards academic success.

Temple librarians already provide specialized assistance to remote students with through our “Ask a Librarian” service. We also offer in-class information literacy instruction to students enrolled in some online-only courses.

In order to extend library instruction to remote learners and faculty teaching online courses, Temple University Libraries is pleased to offer our first ever Virtual Learning Lunch Week on September 3rd-6th. Each session will consist of 20 minute long presentations, designed to jumpstart your use of various library services and resources, with additional time to ask the librarian your questions on the topic.

Sessions are open to the whole Temple community, no matter whether you are many miles away or right next-door. To attend, login to https://webex.temple.edu with your AccessNetID and password. Click on “Live Sessions” under “Attend a Session” and look for the day’s “Library Virtual Learning Lunch”. (Please note: first-time WebEx users should arrive a few minutes early to install the WebEx Add-On on their computer or the Cisco WebEx Meeting app on their mobile device.)

The event starts off with a Tuesday session designed to help faculty use the new Ares course reserve system, followed by one explaining the legal ins-and-outs of using video in both face-to-face and online classes. On Wednesday and Thursday, we continue with sessions fostering basic research skills and highlighting some of the useful databases and unique resources available at the library. Then, Friday sessions introduce both students and faculty to the streaming media available through the library, resources equally useful for research and leisure.

September 3rd
12:00pm – Ares course reserves system (Justin Hill)
12:30pm – Video copyright basics for faculty (Brian Boling)
September 4th
12:00pm – Refworks for citation management (Fred Rowland)
12:30pm – Basic research in education (Jackie Sipes)
September 5th
12:00pm – Learn about primary sources (David Murray)
12:30pm – Special Collections Research Center orientation (Josue Hurtado)
September 6th
12:00pm – Streaming Music Databases (Anne Harlow)
12:30pm – Streaming Video Databases (Brian Boling)

Come celebrate Welcome Week with TU Libraries!

Planning on hitting the TUFest tables on Liacouras Walk? We’ll be there, too, handing out bags, bubbles, buttons, and information about the libraries. Feel free to drop by and ask us any questions you may have about our services, and don’t forget to grab some candy before you leave!

Thumbnail link to larger version of librarians at an open air table at the TU Fest.

We’re here to answer your questions!

Paley Library will also be hosting CeLIBration, a party for students that will include fair-themed food (think: cotton candy, popcorn, and hotdogs), arcade games, & a DJ spinning jams. Stop by and bring your friends!

While it’s still Spring: A recap of TUL @ Spring Fling

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On Wednesday, April 17th, Temple Libraries joined 200-plus Temple organizations and vendors at Spring Fling 2013.  It was delightful to participate in our second year at Spring Fling. Here’s a little recap, with big thanks to everyone who volunteered.  . . … Continue reading