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October 19th, 2020
Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies is proud to announce the 2020 winner of the Leadership in Open Access Award, Professor Nicholas K. Rauh. Since 2010, the Leadership in Open Access Award has been awarded annually to a member of the Purdue community who demonstrates an exceptional commitment to broadening the reach of scholarship by making publicly-funded research freely accessible online through Purdue e-Pubs. This year, we honor Dr. Rauh, an Open Access champion who has long-partnered with both Purdue e-Pubs and the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR).
Dr. Rauh is a Roman archaeologist, teaching in the classics program in the College of Liberal Arts School of Languages and Cultures. He conducts survey archaeology in Turkey, exploring the ancient lives of Cilician pirates, who flourished in the eastern Mediterranean between 139 and 67 BC. For more than 70 years, these pirates waged economic war with neighboring Hellenistic realms, and most particularly, with the forces of the Roman Republic and its far-flung provincial empire. The material remains they left behind offer a rich, varied look at the ancient civilizations they regularly antagonized.
During his annual summer course, Dr. Rauh engages his students in the scientific process. In addition to collecting potsherds, the researchers collect GIS data for each artifact, bridging the gap between ancient sites and modern technology. Dr. Rauh has been working with Libraries’ data curator, Standa Pejša, for a number of years, curating this data and drafting reports for the Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey, a systematic surface survey of a 60 kilometer strip of Western Rough Cilicia, on the southern coast of Turkey. These reports are openly available in Purdue e-Pubs. The data itself is available in PURR; however, this project goes a step above—integrating the GIS data with the individual artifact data.
“He has been pushing content online since 1996,” Pejša said of Dr. Rauh’s commitment to Open Access. “Public and free, he has been practicing it. If there were more people like him, we would not need all those obfuscating monikers for open access – it would simply be access.”
At 11:00 am (EST) on Wednesday, October 21, 2020, Dr. Rauh will be one of four faculty panelists at a special virtual event in honor of Open Access Week. “Purdue Open Scholarship: Impacts and Implications” will be moderated by Libraries’ Associate Dean for Organizational Development, Inclusion and Diversity, Mark Puente. Registration is free and open until the event concludes at 12:00 pm (EST). All are welcome to attend.
Learn more about Dr. Rauh and his research:
https://purr.purdue.edu/groups/roughciliciasurvey
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/rcas/
Filed under: events, general, GIS, OAWeek2020, Open_Access, press_release