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.
Enter for a chance to win a day of a reserved study room during final exams!
Using your preferred medium (text, video, audio, photos, or designed graphic), tell a true story of a professor who saved you money by using free course materials or textbooks. What was the course? Who was the professor? How did that impact your learning in the class or your savings outside of it?
Five winners will be randomly selected from all entries. Winners may select their date and library location (Charles Library or Ginsburg Library). The study room must be used M–F, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm, April 26–April 29 or on May 2.
Temple University Libraries is celebrating Open Education Week from March 7-11, 2022. Open Education Week is an annual celebration designed to raise awareness about open educational resources and practices.
What are Open Educational Resources and Practices?
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to read and reuse. Examples of OER include videos, images, lab activities, homework assignments, and textbooks. Open educational practices — also known as open pedagogy — use OER to support learning and invite students to be active participants in the teaching and learning environment, engaging in knowledge creation and sharing.
Faculty across Temple’s schools and colleges are using OER in their classes. Faculty often assign OER in order to make their course materials more affordable for students. By choosing an open textbook instead of a commercial textbook, faculty can save students hundreds of dollars a semester.
Another benefit for faculty is that OER are openly licensed, which means that faculty can revise, remix, and build upon the content created by others, customizing the material to meet the needs of their particular class. This can aid in bringing about a more culturally responsive teaching and learning experience.
There are many tools available to help identify OER, like the Open Textbook Library and OER Commons. Temple faculty can also use Temple’s Open and Affordable Learning Materials Inventory to see which faculty members are already using OER and other zero-cost learning materials in place of traditional commercial textbooks as well as obtain suggestions for affordable learning materials to adopt. Only Temple faculty/staff can view the Inventory; it is not available to the general public.
Open Education Week Events & Activities
To mark Open Education Week, Temple University Libraries will be offering the following virtual activities:
Contest
Tell Your Affordable Textbook Story Submit a story about a time when a professor saved you money in a course. You can win a day’s reservation to a study room in Charles Library or Ginsburg Library during final exams! Deadline to submit: March 18, 2022.
Accepting Applications for the Textbook Affordability Project Grant!
Open Education Week is also a great time to learn more about Temple University Libraries’ Textbook Affordability Project, which provides grants ranging from $500 to $1,500 to faculty for adopting, adapting, or creating free alternatives to commercial educational resources, in addition to exploring open educational practices. Applications are being accepted until April 8, 2022.
We hope you will join us for our Open Education Week events!
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:
Happy Open Education Week! During this week, we celebrate and advocate for open educational resources. Open educational resources (also called OER) are defined by the Hewlett Foundation as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.” In a nutshell, these are learning materials — like videos, slide decks, podcasts, worksheets, and even textbooks — that are free to access, use, share, and modify in the digital environment without copyright headaches because their creators have given others permission to do so.
Why are open educational resources so important that they are celebrated for an entire week? Their biggest appeal — for students — is they are zero or low-cost! Open textbooks especially can save students hundreds of dollars each semester. For faculty, OER is an opportunity to craft course materials that are highly relevant, current, and meaningful to their discipline. While faculty can remix and modify existing materials, there is also an opportunity for faculty to create new materials or textbooks!
At Temple University Libraries and University Press, we’re lucky to have the North Broad Press imprint. All North Broad Press titles are scholarly works that are peer reviewed and freely available online. View a list of open textbooks in progress, and consider applying to their call for proposals for faculty-authored textbooks, which comes with a stipend of $5,000.
To learn a little more about why Temple faculty are driven to author an open textbook, we sat down with Shawn Higgins, Academic Coordinator of the Undergraduate Bridge Program at Temple University’s Japan Campus. Shawn is the author of the brand new open textbook, Bridges: United States Academia for First-Generation and International College Students (Temple UP, 2021). This textbook was written for first generation students and English language learners to help them navigate life at United States colleges and universities.
We encourage you to listen to this 27-minute interview to learn why Shawn authored this textbook, what it was like to work with North Broad Press, and why open educational resources and open textbooks are so important to Shawn as a faculty member.
Listen to the entire interview or jump to a section that interests you!
Why write Bridges as an open textbook [1:40]
Process of producing this textbook with Temple’s North Broad Press [5:58]
Discussion of remix elements found in the textbook [10:27]
Familiarity with Creative Commons prior to this project [12:12]
How the metaphor in the textbook’s title relates to open textbooks/open educational resources [14:14]
How faculty and students can use this textbook [18:34]
Advice to faculty who might be considering authoring an open textbook [23:40]
If you feel inspired after listening to this interview, please know that you have support here at Temple Libraries! For more information about OER, visit our Discovering Open Educational Resources guide. Contact your subject librarian if you want help locating and implementing OER in your courses. If you’re interested in writing your own open textbook, respond to the call for North Broad Press book proposals.
Don’t forget to check out Shawn’s textbook. You can read the book on your browser or device or download the book in PDF and EPUB formats. Share your thoughts about this book on social media with the hashtag: #bridgestextbook.
Temple University Libraries is celebrating Open Education Week March 1-5. Open Education Week is a yearly celebration designed to raise awareness about open educational resources and practices.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are free to read and reuse. Examples of OER include videos, problem sets, slides, and textbooks. Open educational practices — also known as open pedagogy — use OER to support learning and invite students to be part of the teaching process, participating in the co-creation of knowledge.
At Temple, faculty across the schools and colleges are using OER in their classes. Faculty often assign OER in order to make their courses more affordable for students. By choosing an open textbook instead of a commercial textbook, for example, faculty can potentially save students hundreds of dollars a semester.
Another benefit for faculty is that OER are openly licensed, which means that faculty can revise, remix, and build upon the content, customizing the material to meet the needs of their particular class. There are many tools available to help identify OER, like the Open Textbook Library and OER Commons.
To mark Open Education Week, Temple University Libraries will be offering the following virtual activities:
Copyright and Creative Commons Licenses Workshop
Tuesday, March 2, 12:00-12:30PM
Join us as we cover the basics of Creative Commons licenses—what they are, how to find CC-licensed material, and how to license your own work. It’s simple and empowering.
Educational videos have become a critical part of health education, providing an important content-delivery tool in flipped, blended, and online classes. Come learn what resources are available to you through the library to use in your classroom – online or onsite.
Assignments that Live Beyond the Course: Student Success and Engagement through Open Pedagogy Workshop Series (co-sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching)
Thursday, March 4, 11:00AM- 12:30PM
Thursday, March 11, 11:00AM-12:30PM
Thursday, March 18, 11:00AM-12:30PM
Join us for this three-part, interactive workshop where you will learn the theory of Open Pedagogy, get ideas for possible renewable activities/assignments, and put it into practice by revising one of your own assignments.
Open Education Week is also a great time to learn more about Temple University Libraries’ Textbook Affordability Project which provides grants ranging from $500 to $1500 to faculty for adopting, adapting, or creating free alternatives to commercial educational resources, in addition to exploring open pedagogical practices. Applications will be accepted in Fall 2021.
We hope you will join us for our Open Education Week events!
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.
Professor of Evolutionary Genomics Sergei Pond is one of the many Temple faculty members who support open research practices. Pond recently spoke with Librarian Sarah Jones to discuss his work and his thoughts on how open data can help with the current reproducibility crisis.
Tell us about your recent research on COVID-19. What role did open data play in your work?
My group at Temple (Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine) is a computational biology group. We use sequence data to watch what the virus is doing and evaluate how certain intervention efforts are going. Sequence data have never been generated at a faster pace than during the COVID-19 outbreak. As of today, around 130,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes are available. In March there were 500. The rate of accumulation is really remarkable.
We’ve done a lot of collaborative work to look at the early evolution of SARS-CoV-2. Viral genomes change all the time; the trick is to figure out which changes matter and which ones don’t. At this moment, there are some changes but none that appear to be particularly important. Once we start giving it something to work against, like large scale drugs and vaccines, then we’ll watch it.
Something the public may not appreciate is that you have to do a lot of tedious work to make sure that the data you’re analyzing makes sense. You have to clean it up and make sure that your tools run fast enough. One of the issues everyone has run across is the volume of data–typically you’re talking about hundreds or maybe thousands of sequences, but tens or hundreds of thousands brings it up to a different scale. One of the issues with these large datasets is that they’re so big and the techniques that you use tend to be fairly complicated, so it turns into this hard-to-interpret black box. We’re trying to design something that’s easy to understand.
Ideally, what you would like to be able to access are the original files that came off the sequencer. Typically what you see is the final genome; it’s a product of many steps that translate these data from raw sequencing data to genomes. It’s been the bane of computational biology that it’s not very common to share the original data. More importantly, it is next to impossible to find sufficient detail about how people went about processing these data to generate the genome. So basically you receive a genome but you’re missing how it was assembled. This is what creates the crisis of reproducibility. You have to be able to trust the data that you’re putting into your analyses.
There’s absolutely no excuse with modern tool availability not to publish the entire chain. If you’re an experimental scientist and you don’t publish your lab protocol nobody will believe it; it has to be recreatible. But in computational analysis there’s no standard like this. There’s no expectation that you will release the data and the tools that you used to analyse these data.
Tell us about your work with the Galaxy Project. How does this platform encourage open practices?
Galaxy is a computational framework for open data and democratizing data analysis. Every step from extracting raw data to doing comparative analysis can be done in Galaxy. I think the strongest aspect of it is the longstanding focus on the reproducibility and shareability of research. When you develop a process for doing something, you can publish it and share it. It will record which tools you used, which settings, and how they were connected to each other. Each step you can store and share, so when you publish your work you instantly release your entire workflow.
Are there any misconceptions that you would like to address regarding open data? What do you wish people knew about it?
There are a few things that tend to slow down or prevent people from doing open data and sharing. One, the logistics of it: will you find the time to annotate and format everything correctly and submit it? That excuse is becoming harder to use because there are large entities that have databases and tools that allow you to do this as easily as possible.
The other issue is data ownership. If you release open data it will be good for science, it will be good for discovery, and it will enable other people to extract more information from it. But as a data producer, how do you get proper credit for it? As a scientist you get rewarded for publishing papers and bringing in grants, but for being a good citizen of the open community, it’s not there.
I want to mention the idea of privacy. Human genomic data is personal health information, which needs to be guarded and protected. Viral data are a little different, you can’t track them down to specific individuals. But nonetheless, that could be a concern. It definitely is a concern in the area of HIV because in many jurisdictions in the United States HIV transmission is still a felony. That’s changing, but it’s still there. You don’t want to have a potential disclosure of an infection route.
Is there anything else you wanted to share?
I want to emphasize that SARS-CoV-2 genomics has been a unique effort when it comes to collaboration and open science. It’s not ideal and we can improve on it, but compared to previous outbreaks this is probably the most open environment that we’ve had. It’s obviously a necessity, considering how much damage this pandemic has already caused. A truly international, truly open effort is necessary.
Fortunately, a lot of it was set up prior to SARS-CoV-2. There are people that took the time and strategically thought about how they could accelerate all of the necessary steps when the next big pathogen came out, and we’re reaping the benefits now. That really is important and worth emphasizing. That would not have happened without planning.
