2023 Textbook Affordability Project award recipients
Guest post by Kristina De Voe, English and communication librarian, with the Open Education Group
The Temple University Libraries are happy to announce our 2023 Textbook Affordability Project grant award recipients:
Norma Corrales-Martin, Spanish and Portuguese, College of Liberal Arts
Marni Cueno, Psychology, Temple University Japan
Graham Dobereiner, Chemistry, College of Science and Technology
Anne Frankel, Social and Behavioral Sciences, College of Public Health
Shuchen Susan Huang, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Studies, College of Liberal Arts
Marian Makins, Greek and Roman Classics, College of Liberal Arts
Peter Marshall, Psychology, College of Liberal Arts
Mike McGlin, Greek and Roman Classics, College of Liberal Arts
Adrienne Shaw, Media Studies and Production, Klein College of Media and Communication
Jingwei Wu, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, College of Public Health
These course instructors have all committed to introducing open educational practices in their classrooms during the upcoming academic year and will be moving forward with project plans to adopt zero-cost learning materials into their courses.
As part of the grant, awardees will complete training over the summer, participating in a learning community in which they will increase their awareness around open textbooks, open educational practices, and affordable learning materials. They will also have opportunities to develop their projects.
The Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) is a grant program that awards funds to Temple faculty members who make their courses more affordable for their students by replacing costly educational resources with library-licensed materials or open educational resources (OER), including open textbooks. Alternatively, faculty can receive funds for engaging in other open educational practices, like creating learning objects or replacing a traditional assignment with renewable assignments that center students as creators of knowledge. The call for applications goes out annually in the spring.
Did you know that each semester the Libraries provides a list of textbooks and other course readings that are available as ebooks? The list is based on information Temple faculty provide to the campus bookstore. These materials are free for Temple students. Use the drop-down menu to find your course and see if your etextbook is on the list!
The Libraries are not always able to purchase ebooks, as many textbook publishers do not make their titles available to libraries electronically. When a book is available to us, we prefer to purchase a multi-user license for something we know will be used in a class, though we will buy a single-user license if that is the only option.
Since 2017, Temple University Libraries has been purchasing ebook copies of course texts whenever possible. In the 2021-22 academic year, the Libraries offered electronic access to 32% of course texts, saving students an estimated $450,000.
This week is Open Access Week, a yearly international celebration that aims to increase awareness about open access. Most academic work is locked up behind a paywall, available only to those who are affiliated with a college or university. Open access scholarship is completely free to read and reuse. Help us celebrate by showing your support for OA on social media or by attending one of our events.
Caroline Burkholder is the Sustainability Manager for Temple University’s Office of Sustainability. She is responsible for developing sustainability programming throughout the university, coordinating outreach and capacity building activities with students, faculty, and staff, providing support for new sustainability initiatives on campus, and assisting in the completion of institution-wide sustainability reporting. Burkholder recently spoke with Scholarly Communications Associate Alicia Pucci to discuss her work and how open can support climate justice and sustainability at Temple and beyond.
Help us to understand this year’s theme, Open for Climate Justice. What is climate justice and what should people know about it?
Climate justice is both a term and a movement centering equity in the application of sustainability principles in policy and practice. Climate justice recognizes that the social, material, and health impacts of a changing climate will be felt differently by different populations and will disproportionately impact poor and historically underrepresented and resource-deprived communities.
Unsurprisingly, people living in developing countries produce fewer emissions per capita than those in the major polluting countries while bearing the brunt of the consequences with less power and fewer resources for mitigation and relief.
This disparity in experience is not naturally occurring but rather the conclusion of a racist and colonial extractive global economic system. Climate justice focuses its attention on the structural contributors to crisis, understanding climate change will exacerbate existing inequality and social action is necessary to demand restorative justice and correct past wrongs to ensure future prosperity.
What role does open play in your work with Temple’s Office of Sustainability?
The Office of Sustainability was founded to achieve Temple’s Presidential Climate Commitment – climate neutrality by 2050 – by greening the physical plant and decarbonizing campus operations; integrating sustainability principles into coursework, teaching, co-curricular activities and campus life; and facilitating research and resources to educate on critical issues of climate change and environmental justice.
As Philadelphia’s only 4-year public university, an urban institution that is deeply engaged in the community, we recognize the Temple University’s commitment to sustainability can have a profound impact on the health and quality of life of a large and diverse population within Temple and its surrounding community and the Philadelphia overall.
Open access and the availability of knowledge and resources is essential for solving pressing urban sustainability challenges, especially here in our own neighborhood. Our office engages with other sustainability professionals both inside and outside the academy, in city and state government, and across the region, country and globe to share best practices and strategize to reach our shared goal of decreasing emissions and building resiliency in communities, especially those who need it most.
An open and equitable exchange of ideas in climate action yields a diverse collection of data: climate action plan goals, various institutional reports, greenhouse gas inventories, waste audits, faculty and student research, student tools for community organizing and advocacy, engagement, campaign and event strategy documents, maps of sustainable features and amenities on campus, and more.
Temple has a detailed climate action plan. Are there any open tools or practices you hope to adopt to enable climate research and data?
Temple University’s Climate Action Plan and its goals were mandated by President Ann Weaver Hart signing onto Second Nature’s American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Among other foundational actions like setting target dates and calculating our carbon footprint, the ACUPCC commitment requires the university to make the action plan, inventory, and progress reports publicly available, underscoring the value of open access. The visibility of data and progress to goal reports is essential for all university stakeholders to ensure accountability for action, especially for those goals concerning equity.
Another key function of the Climate Action Plan document is to increase awareness of Temple’s sustainability initiatives and programs. When faculty and other university leadership understand what we’re doing on campus and how they can take part, they can translate the local climate action work at all levels of Temple administration, and within different academic disciplines, into community engaged research and experiential and service learning which increases access to research and data and promotes climate justice.
The 2019 Climate Action Plan had the following goal:
Create an online repository for existing and future sustainability exercises and course material to assist faculty in integrating sustainability into their courses by June 2020.
In 2022, in accordance with the research goals outlined in the 2019 Climate Action Plan, the Office of Sustainability, together with Temple University Libraries, established the Climate Change, Sustainability and Environmental Justice Collection for TUScholarShare.
The collection is a repository for articles, teaching and learning materials, data sets, research, books, and working papers related to climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice authored by researchers, staff, and students at Temple University. It features practitioners’ documents, namely, case studies and tools authored by sustainability officers and other institutional stakeholders as well as faculty, graduate and undergraduate research.
By recognizing, incentivizing and connecting the faculty community, the repository facilitates a institution-wide development of a transdisciplinary sustainability science research agenda that integrates discovery and solutions-based research.
This open access repository creates support for sustainability research, tools, and resources by not only connecting sustainability scholars and practitioners within Temple community but also by connecting the work of the Temple community to the broader local and global coalition of climate advocates by sharing knowledge and collaboratively building a just climate future for Philadelphia and beyond.
The Libraries recently launched the Center for Scholarly Communication & Open Publishing (SCOP). SCOP’s initiatives and events support open publishing across the Temple community and provide opportunities for faculty and students to come together to discuss and shape the future of scholarly communication. SCOP’s core initiatives include TUScholarShare, Temple’s institutional repository; North Broad Press, our joint Libraries/Press imprint; the open journal publishing program; and the Open Access Publishing Fund.
We’re pleased to announce that Julia Scheffler is SCOP’s first Graduate Student Ambassador. Scheffler specifically supports the institutional repository, TUScholarShare. We spoke with Scheffler to learn more about her background and her work for the Libraries.
What brought you to Temple? I grew up just under two hours away in Kutztown, PA and have frequently visited Philadelphia. My mentor from undergrad is a graduate of Klein College, and after researching the faculty here it felt like the perfect fit for me. I initially planned to come to Temple for my undergraduate study, but I just wrapped up my first semester of the Media Studies & Production Master’s program! I took a few years off of school after receiving my B.A., but was eager to return to academia and connect with the faculty here at Temple to fully utilize all of the resources this campus has to offer.
What do you hope to do after you graduate? I hope to pursue my PhD in Communication and Media Studies while also working in the creative media industry. My current research focuses on the discursive use of memes and aesthetics online to establish digital communities and political subcultures. Ideally I would like to connect my passion for research and writing with my creative outlets of art, music, and fashion. I am still in the process of honing in on a specific area within the broad field of communication and media.
Can you tell us a little bit about your work at the Libraries? Working at Temple Libraries really opened my eyes to the vast amounts of research coming from Temple across all disciplines. I really enjoy browsing the abstracts of articles from departments that I do not regularly interact with in my own studies. Most of my time with TUScholarShare is spent reviewing research done by current and former faculty, validating and organizing metadata for our institutional repository, and confirming copyright status for published works.
What has surprised you the most about this work? I was surprised to learn so much about the multitude of Creative Commons licenses an author may have for their work, and how researchers go through the publication process. I don’t have much experience working with copyright, so it has been interesting to learn about author’s rights in regards to distribution of their own work. It has also shown me how many layers of review articles must go through before we are able to access them as students.
What has TUScholarShare taught you about scholarly publishing? I have learned the value of open access publishing for both students and authors alike. Without the institutional access provided by Temple, a majority of these published works are behind paywalls that limit the public’s access to that research.
If there’s one thing you could tell faculty and graduate students about TUScholarShare, what would it be? I would strongly encourage other graduate students to utilize TUScholarShare for their own independent research and assignments! We are really fortunate to have renowned faculty that have been published many times, and it is a great way to dive deeper into a research area you may have connected with a professor on. Also, it never hurts to cite your own professor in your writing. I would also encourage faculty, especially those that may be new to Temple, to connect with us and have their publications deposited to our repository. This is an accessible way to share your work with the Temple community and share your experience with the students here.
This week isOpen Access Week, a yearly international celebration that aims to increase awareness about open access. Most academic work is locked up behind a paywall, available only to those who are affiliated with a college or university. Open access (OA) scholarship is completely free to read and reuse. Help us celebrate by showing your support for OA on social media or by attending one of our events.
Professor Jules Epstein is the Edward D. Ohlbaum Professor of Law and Director of Advocacy Programs at Temple University Beasley School of Law. He teaches advocacy, criminal law, and evidence courses and is the co-author of an Evidence course book used at other law schools. He recently publishedCollective Wisdom: One Bit of Advice with NITA. Epstein also works with the Temple trial team students, teaching ‘advanced evidence’ and working with individual students on their evidence, analytical and advocacy skills. Professor Epstein is an advocate for assigning free and low-cost resources to students in his classes to lower the overall debt incurred while attending law school. Epstein recently spoke with Director of the Law Library Michelle Cosby about these efforts.
Tell us about the Integrated Trial Advocacy Program (ITAP) and what open access or free resources you use or assign to your students.
The ITAP program integrates the teaching of courtroom skills with two substantive topics – the Law of Evidence (Fall) and Civil Procedure II (Spring). For Evidence the free resources I provide are:
A complete evidence textbook that I have authored and make available in chapters class by class across the semester.
A free copy of the federal rules of evidence.
A study guide that I authored.
Evidence “decision trees” that I created.
A mock case file that we use to test our understanding of the evidence rules by applying them to a case file.
Has your work in trial advocacy had a role in your decision to use these resources?
Yes it has. Based on trial experience, I can select the cases and examples that best illustrate the rules the students will rely on and how they are applied. As well, I know from litigation experience that a law school textbook has little or no utility once in practice, and what students need instead are the *statutory* Rules themselves.
What advice would you give to other faculty members looking to move away from traditional textbooks in their courses?
Unless the textbook you assign has exemplary materials for every point you teach, find the cases and other sources that do. Take a year to gather your materials and begin creating a document with case excerpts, hypotheticals, sample transcripts, etc. Once you have them in a Word doc or similar format, it is easy to update.
Are there any free resources, tools, or technologies being used in trial advocacy?
The web is filled with examples of case transcripts, lectures, video clips from courtroom proceedings, recordings from mock trial competitions, and blog posts. [For the last, see, e.g.,https://www2.law.temple.edu/aer/advocacy/ ] Similarly, Zoom and other technologies permit recording and review of student performances.
Is there anything else you wanted to share?
My final statement is an equitable one: Our students spend an enormous amount of money on their education, and if we can reduce these costs while ensuring quality education, we should.
Congratulations to all of Temple’s recent graduates! The Library is proud to host our graduate students’ outstanding research in Temple’s new institutional repository, TUScholarShare.
We received 107 dissertations and 57 masters theses this May. Of those, only 13% of students chose to embargo their work. This means that the vast majority of these important publications are freely available for the public to read right now.
In addition, 67 authors included their ORCID iD. We recommend that all Temple faculty and graduate students register for an ORCID iD in order to distinguish themselves from other researchers.
Graduates of the doctoral program in Educational Administration deposited the most dissertations (10), followed by Business Administration/ Finance (8), Physics (8), and Business Administration/ Strategic Management (6). Graduates of the MA Program in Urban Bioethics deposited the most masters theses (22), followed by History (4), Music Performance (4), and Oral Biology (4).
Medical ethics, urban bioethics, business administration, management, education, computer science, higher education, and physics were some of the top subjects written about by Temple students who graduated in May.
Several students wrote about the COVID-19 pandemic. Titles include:
The following is a guest post written by Maria Aghazarian, Digital Resources and Scholarly Communications Specialist at Swarthmore College Libraries.
Chances are you already maintain some kind of scholarly presence online, whether that’s on your personal website, Twitter, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or somewhere else. But individually maintaining these profiles takes a lot of time and energy that could be better spent in other ways.
ORCID is a multidisciplinary not-for-profit organization that provides persistent numeric identifiers that can streamline the way you present your research online. It takes just 30 seconds to register for an ORCID identifier. ORCID iDs can save you time, help you distinguish yourself in your field, and boost the visibility of your research. How does one number do all that?
By adding your ORCID iD to the systems you already use, you can authorize automatic updates to your ORCID profile, and use it as a way to link together your already existing profiles. There are 61 publishers and 22 funders that require ORCID iDs during the submission or application process. When the work is published/complete, these organizations will push updates to your ORCID profile with the details of the work, so you don’t have to.
Don’t want to spend a lot of time manually adding all your publications? ORCID has 12 different wizards designed to help you add works to your ORCID profile in just minutes. If you already maintain a Google Scholar profile, you can easily export your citations as a BibTeX file and import that file into ORCID, populating your profile in one easy step.
ORCID isn’t just for traditional peer-reviewed publications, though–use it to present all of your scholarship. With 39 supported work types, including encyclopedia entries, magazine articles, newspaper articles, websites, working papers, conference papers, conference posters, patents, artistic performances, lectures, software, you can represent the full range of your scholarship with your ORCID iD. To round out your profile, add membership and service for organizations as well as invited positions and distinctions.
Unlike your email, your affiliation, or even your name, your ORCID iD will never change. Your iD is persistent throughout your career, from student scholar to tenured professor, making it easier for others to discover and read your works. It’s reliable no matter how your name appears in publication. Your number is unique to you, and can be used to distinguish yourself from researchers with similar names. You can also add variations to your name to your profile (“also known as”) if you have published under several names or nicknames.
When your ORCID iD appears on an article you’ve published, it links back to your profile, presenting interested readers with a reliable representation of your scholarly work, no matter where they’re coming from. Since your iD will never change, it’s a stable URL, unlike a personal websites which could change location with site reorganization.
Once you have your iD, you can use ORCID to market yourself. Link your education, employment, grant funding, publications, and more, like an interactive component of your CV. You can also link out to other pages such as your website or your Google Scholar page. When someone is looking to learn more about you and your work, you can direct them to your profile. You can even add a link to your profile in your email signature, CV, grad school applications, or generate a QR code to include in conference posters and presentations.
ORCID uses OAuth which means that it can act as a single sign-on for many different systems — leaving you with one less password to remember and a way to connect these siloed profiles and accounts together. You can securely register with your Temple credentials, or link your Temple account to your profile for even easier sign in. Since your account is not tied solely to your Temple credentials, you will be able to access your ORCID profile even if you graduate or leave the Temple community.
Temple University Libraries is proud to be an institutional member of ORCID.
Jacqueline Phillips and other attendees at OpenCon. Photograph courtesy of Erin McKiernan.
OpenCon is a unique conference that brings together leading early career academic professionals and students from across the world to catalyze action toward a more open system of research and education. This year, Temple University Libraries was proud to sponsor Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Kinesiology (College of Public Health) Jacqueline Phillips to attend OpenCon. The following is a guest post from Dr. Phillips about her experience.
This past weekend I participated in the 2018 OpenCon conference. Since this was my first OpenCon conference I wasn’t very sure of what to expect, but knew it was a gathering of early career professionals with a passion for open access (OA), so I was eager to take part. As a newcomer to the OA world this was my first exposure to an open community beyond my university. Overall, I was completely blown away by the programming and the passion of everyone there to collaborate and better their communities.
Open scholarly work was a new topic I was introduced to at this conference. Although I’ve known about open access journals and the concept of open data, I learned about other ways to make your work open such as posting preprints. Preprints are drafts of manuscripts that are posted online prior to being peer reviewed and formally published. Since a paper can sit in a purgatory-like state for a lengthy amount of time during the standard journal submission process, “pre-printing” enables the author(s) to share their work right away with those in their field. Readers can leave comments or questions, and the paper can be updated with revisions or with a final manuscript after it’s been published. By getting a DOI for a preprint, someone’s work is protected, and others are able to cite the paper. This format enables an early conversation to occur while also helping to connect individuals and advance their work.
As an instructor, my ears always perked up when the topic of open education resources (OER) arose. Strategies on finding already made resources were discussed along with troubleshooting areas of creating resources, like finding or making images (an issue commonly faced in the sciences). Some of the most useful bits of information that I’ll be taking home in this area came through networking and talking to others who have been through this process and were able to provide me with practical tips and wonderful sources. Beyond the making of or incorporation of OER, the discussion that most resonated with me in this area was the importance of student advocacy on campus for OER. A few students were in attendance at OpenCon who spoke about the clubs they were a part of whose mission it is to educate other students about what OER are and how they are impactful. Beyond educating their fellow peers on the subject, they also push for their administration to recognize the importance of the incorporation of OER on campus. This is the type of movement that can help to incentivize faculty to incorporate open materials into their classes, and encourage administration to change the metrics of success that faculty are graded upon for merit or promotion. Student advocacy was a different approach to fostering a cultural change on a campus that seemed to be very successful within these communities.
One particular aspect of the conference I was impressed by was the diversity. Not only the diversity of the attendees, but also presenters and organizers. By having people of different backgrounds and perspectives from around the world involved with all aspects of this event, it contributed to the depth and range of discussions that were held. A topic was presented about how sometimes our mainstream movement to advance OA can inadvertently perpetuate the marginalization of communities this movement aims to help. A lack of diversity at events such as this would only reinforce this oppression; however, I feel the organizers were sensitive to this concept and handled the conference in a way that will help to break down some of these barriers. There was even transparency about the demographics of the conference. The organizers informed us all about the numbers and breakdown of gender, ethnicity, profession etc. of everyone at and involved with the conference. This holds the conference to a higher standard and only helps to make the event even more productive. I hope that we’ll see other conferences begin to incorporate this presentation of the statistics into their events to show commitment to diversity and equity.
The last day of the conference featured a do-a-thon (similar to the concept of a hackathon) where attendees worked in groups to create solutions to particular issues that were brought to the table. All of our work and action plans are available online to the public so that anyone can help and contribute. Overall, I felt very productive at OpenCon. I learned how to use design thinking to solve issues, walked away with actionable items to promote the incorporation of OER, and most importantly, I made connections and became a member of a community that is inspired to collaborate to progress this movement. The conference was closed by Nicole Allen, from SPARC, who left us with the quote: “We are the people we are waiting for.” This perfectly sums of the message I hope to spread to others. We have the ability to break down barriers in education, and now after having attended OpenCon I feel I have more tools to help not only myself, but others accomplish this.
In honor of Fair Use Week 2018, the following is a guest post from Digital Projects and Services Librarian Rachel Appel and Bibliographic Assistant III for Digital Projects Gabriel Galson. At the Libraries, Appel and Galson work on the PA Digital project. PA Digital is a statewide partnership that collects materials from Pennsylvania cultural heritage organizations and transmits them to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The DPLA aggregates digital collections (images, photographs, text, maps, audio and video) shared by libraries and archives’ special collections all across the United States.
Fair use is a US legal doctrine that allows limited reuse of copyrighted materials. It is an invitation to the sort of intellectual/artistic exchange that keeps our culture vibrant, and a counterbalance against the the US’s increasingly strict copyright laws. Sampling, artistic appropriation, creative or educational quotation, parody, and text mining/textual analysis are all activities that flourish under fair use’s protection, shielded –to a degree at least– from the threat of litigation. Likewise, libraries, archives and museums around the country have been able to digitize their archival objects and make them freely accessible online because of the fair use doctrine. Many digital collections that are available through PA Digital and the Digital Public Library of America, for example, are in copyright; digitizing and making them publicly discoverable through a database platform is considered fair use. However, it is important to communicate clearly to users, such as scholars and researchers, that such works remain in copyright and have use restrictions and limitations. Fair use is a key concept that enables both digitization and reuse of digital facsimiles and is the rationale for making cultural heritage collections available online, in local repositories as well as the DPLA.
That’s where RightsStatements.org comes in. The site provides 12 normalized, standardized statements that cultural heritage institutions can use to describe the copyright status of online cultural heritage materials. A joint global project of Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, New York Public Library, University of Michigan, and other institutions, Rightsstatements.org went live in 2016. It creates three categories of statements (with four statements in each) to be used with cultural heritage materials, including some terms for use in the EU. The goal is to provide cultural heritage institutions with simple and standardized terms to summarize the copyright status of works in their collection and how those works may be used.
There are three overall categories with four specific rights statements within each: In Copyright, No Copyright, and Other. Rights Statements and Licenses are critical for digitization and data reuse. A normalized rights statement or Creative Commons license makes it so much easier for a member of the public to understand how that item can be used. The Digital Public Library of America has incorporated RightsStatements.org statements into their portal to function as a facet for searching because they are all machine readable and normalized. A similar metaphor is shopping through an online retailer – when we buy from online retailers what do we look for? Ideally, items with Free Shipping. This makes it easy for scholars to look for works that can be used in their publications and research.
Beyond traditional scholarship, normalized rights statements can also encourage creative reuse of works if people know what they can and can’t do. For example, DPLA’s annual GIF IT UP campaign, where users make images into gifs, and the #ColorOurCollections nationwide promotion by galleries, libraries, archives and museums, where end users are encouraged to reuse digital objects as coloring pages.
Gif made by Michael Carroll for GIF IT UP 2017. Drawing (Two Birds on Flowers) from the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Rightsstatements.org is still getting off the ground, but it promises to make the process of identifying usable works far simpler and less time-consuming for researchers, scholars, and students. Take a look at the Europeana aggregator’s eight million plus ‘free reuse’ results for an example of what’s possible via machine-readable statements. Go forth and reuse!
More resources:
Ballinger, Linda, et al. “Providing Quality Rights Metadata for Digital Collections Through RightsStatements.org.” Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 144–158. http://palrap.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/palrap/article/view/157
No matter what discipline you are in, it is hard to ignore the major shift from traditional journal publishing to open access publishing. In honor of Open Access Week 2017, we are celebrating faculty at Temple University who support open scholarship in a variety of ways.
One of these faculty members is David Sarwer, the Associate Dean for Research, and Director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at the College of Public Health. Sarwer is also the Editor-in-Chief of an open access journal, Obesity Science & Practice. He sat down with Biomedical & Research Services Librarian (Ginsburg Health Sciences Library) Stephanie Roth to discuss his experiences as the editor of a new open access journal.
Please tell us more about Obesity Science & Practice. How did you become involved as the Editor-in-Chief?
Obesity Science & Practice is a Wiley journal. They publish four other journals in the area of obesity and were quick to recognize that there was an increasing number of high quality papers not making the cut in those journals. When they approached me about serving as the inaugural Editor-in-Chief, I was still skeptical about publishing in open access journals. The more the Wiley team taught me about their approach, I came to believe that open access publishing was likely to play a significant role in the future of academic publishing.
What gave you confidence to believe in open access?
The early success of the journal has given all of us a great deal of confidence. We have quickly moved to publishing four issues a year. We now receive a steady stream of articles that are either direct submissions to the journal or are referred to us by other Wiley obesity journals. Many of the papers published in the journal have come from internationally recognized authorities in the field of obesity. All of these developments give me a great deal of confidence about the future of the journal and open access publishing more generally.
When you first heard about open access publishing what were your immediate thoughts?
Like everyone else, I was familiar with the old school publishing model. So, I was hesitant and skeptical. The Wiley team did a great job to make me comfortable that open access represented the path to the future.
Did you ever publish to an open access journal prior to becoming the editor of one?
No, but I wouldn’t hesitate to publish in a high quality, reputable open access journal today.
Now as an editor, what are your thoughts about open access publishing?
I am very impressed with open access compared to traditional publishing and especially by our journal. The speed at which we are able to process papers and push them out to our readers is a great strength. We have published a number of high quality, impactful papers in the field. Several of them have received mass media coverage as well, which is an important, yet often overlooked aspect of academic productivity.
What has been your experience with OA journals vs. traditional publishing?
I haven’t noticed much of a difference. Many non open access journals are now putting their papers online. That shows the potential growth and acceptability of open access in the future.
What has contributed to more authors embracing your journal?
It has helped that Wiley is well recognized for their journals. That has helped to increase our journal’s credibility. Wiley has also done a good job identifying high quality submissions that were rejected from one of their four other major obesity journals. When a paper is referred to us from one of those journals, we often use the previous reviews to inform the editorial process and decision making. This has allowed us to move papers through the review process quickly.
What are your future plans for the journal?
I would like to stay on our current path of success. We recently moved to publishing four issues a year and continue to receive a steady stream of papers. I would like to see the first impact factor be appropriately robust and to have it grow over time.
Do you provide tools for graduate students or residents to publish in your journal?
At the journal level, we aren’t doing anything specific for graduate students. We do receive a fair amount of submissions from those who may be working on their first papers and launching their own independent careers and that is also encouraging.
What tips would you give to researchers looking to publish in an OA journal?
I would like to encourage them to make sure they don’t discount them. Be thoughtful. Make sure the journal is a legitimate outlet, and not one associated with predatory publishing. Researchers should see open access as an important and central part of academic publishing in the future.
