Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Purdue Faculty Recognized for Contributions to Open Access Publishing

October 22nd, 2018

Seven individuals from Purdue University are being recognized (Monday, Oct. 22) for their contributions to open access with the Leadership in Open Access Award from Purdue University Libraries and the Office of the Provost.

This week (Oct. 22-28) academic institutions and libraries across the globe are celebrating the benefits of Open Access for research and scholarship during the 11th annual International Open Access Week commemoration.

The individuals selected to receive the award this year include: Dean of the Purdue Polytechnic Institute Gary Bertoline; David Huckleberry, coordinator of digital instruction, Purdue Department of Physics and Astronomy; and five continuing lecturers with Purdue Department of Mathematics, including: Owen Davis, Huimei Delgado, David Norris, Patrick Devlin, and Timothy Delworth.

According to Scholarly Publishing Outreach Specialist Nina Collins, the individuals contributed to the following open access projects:

• Dean Bertoline and Purdue Polytechnic Institute collaborated with Purdue e-Pubs to build a bridge between the content entered into Digital Measures (an online tool faculty use to organize, manage, and report on activities and CV data) and Purdue e-Pubs’ repository content. The new bridge enables faculty using Digital Measures to opt in easily in order to have citations for their publications harvested by Purdue e-Pubs staff. Once harvested, Purdue e-Pubs staff review publisher-sharing policies and work with faculty, providing free, mediated deposits to Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue University’s institutional repository (which provides free, global access to the scholarly outputs of Purdue University).
• In 2014, Delworth and Delgado participated in a workshop by the Open Textbook Network sponsored by Purdue University Libraries. Delgado, Devlin, Norris, and Davis worked with Huckleberry and ITaP staff to launch LON-CAPA, an open-source learning content management system, to support the adoption of open education resources in mathematics courses. To date, the Purdue Department of Mathematics, in collaboration with ITaP, have provided LON-CAPA courseware for more than 25,000 students, saving these students the burden of purchasing expensive math textbooks.

According to Interim Dean of Libraries Rhonda Phillips, the individuals were selected to receive the recognition this year for leading by example in the Open Access movement at Purdue University.

“These individuals have demonstrated leadership in Open Access to scholarly resources, and they truly exemplify what it means to ‘design equitable foundations for open knowledge,’ the theme of International Open Access Week 2018,” Phillips said. “I am pleased to present the 2018 Leadership in Open Access Award to each of them, in recognition of their outstanding leadership in this area, as well as of their continued commitment to increase visibility of scholarship at Purdue in partnership with Purdue e-Pubs.”

Since 2012, Purdue e-Pubs has more than 17 million downloads from users all over the world, with the average download rate of more than two million downloads per year.

For more information about Open Access at Purdue, visit www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess. Learn more about Purdue e-Pubs at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/.