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October 11th, 2013
Read the recent responses from the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association to the recent “sting” that was reported in Science in an article entitled, “Who’s Afraid of Peer Review.”
Filed under: Open_AccessOctober 9th, 2013
In the recent edition of the Digital Commons DC Telegraph, Bepress discusses how well the Digital Commons community is positioned to participate in the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE). Proposed by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), the SHARE model puts institutional repositories at the center of the response to the recent White House directive on public access to federally funded research.
Filed under: Open_AccessOctober 9th, 2013
Announced on September 16, 2013 the “Open Letter to the Higher Education Community” in support of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill. This important bipartisan bill introduced into both the House and the Senate in February, now has a growing list of higher education leaders who have signed an open letter underscoring their – and their campuses – support for FASTR. The letter and the current list of signatories may be found here.
Filed under: Open_Access
October 9th, 2013
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has recently released a summary of the feedback it has received on the revised DOAJ selection criteria.
Filed under: Open_AccessOctober 9th, 2013
In a recent American Libraries magazine article, Meredith Farkas, head of instructional services at Portland (Oreg.) State University, discusses the changing publishing landscape and libraries as publishers.
Filed under: Open_AccessOctober 9th, 2013
In a recent article Palo Alto, California CIO Jonathan Reichental addresses six things you may not know about Open Data.
Filed under: Open_AccessOctober 7th, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — Purdue University Libraries will celebrate Open Access Week – Oct. 21 to 27, 2013 – with three key events including an Open Education Event presented by David Ernst, University of Minnesota; Journal Editors’ Group Tea; and Open Research Event presented by Victoria Stodden, Columbia University. Awards will also be presented to key faculty members for their commitment and contributions to the advancement of Open Access at Purdue University. A live web stream of the presentations on Oct. 23 and Oct. 25 can be found at the following URL: http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/pvhfc.
“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. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.
OPEN ACCESS WEEK EVENT DETAILS
Wednesday, October 23: 2:00 – 3:30 pm, STEW 314. Open Education Event
Title: Open Textbooks and Educational Resources: New Approaches to Affordable Education
Speaker: David Ernst, University of Minnesota
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by Purdue Libraries and Purdue Student Government.
[Note: This event will commence with the presentation of an Open Access (Education) Award by Dr. A. Dale Whittaker, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs. It will be presented this year to Dr. Linda S. Bergmann, Director of the Online Writing Lab (OWL), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2013. Now featuring over 300 reference and instructional materials, all made freely available online, OWL has established itself as one of the premier Open Educational Resources on the web. After the presentation, James L. Mullins, Dean of Libraries, will introduce the speaker.]
Abstract: High college costs will keep as many as 2.4 million low and moderate-income college-qualified high school graduates from attending college during this decade. For those who do attend college, financial stresses are the main reason that 46 percent of students do not graduate with any credential within six years. College textbook and course material expenses are a significant part of college costs. The College Board estimates that the average student paid $1,200 on books and course materials during the 2012-13 academic year. These high costs put student success at risk.
Dr. David Ernst will describe efforts in the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development to improve college access, affordability, and success by reducing the impact of textbook and course material costs for students. Dr. Ernst spent the last two years identifying barriers to the adoption of open textbooks and finding ways to help institutions and faculty overcome those barriers. He created the Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) in April, 2012, as a single source for faculty to find open textbooks. The catalog has had over 70,000 visits from instructors in 173 countries. Dr. Ernst will also describe the Digital Course Pack project, which leveraged digital content already-licensed by the Libraries to create digital course packs that were free or reduced cost for students. Lastly, Dr. Ernst will explain how all schools can reduce textbook and course materials costs by leveraging the same tools successfully used by the University of Minnesota.
Bio: Dr. David Ernst is the Chief Information Officer in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. He brings his extensive background in education to his role, including 14 years of teaching and a PhD in Learning Technologies. His passion lies in developing innovations that help faculty teach and students learn. David is also the Executive Director of the Open Academics Textbook Initiative. This program works to improve higher education access, affordability, and success for all students through the use of open textbooks. David created and manages the Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) – a single source for faculty to find quality openly licensed textbooks. David and his colleagues are also developing a toolkit to help other institutions interested in starting their own open textbook initiative on campus.
Thursday, October 24, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, PMU East Faculty Lounge. Journal Editors’ Group Tea
Would you like to learn more about open access? Are you interested in sustainable business models for journal publishing? Are you concerned about predatory open access publishers? If so, join the Purdue Journal Editors’ Group for its fall meeting. Refreshments will be served.
When: Thursday, October 24th, 3:00-4:00pm
Where: East Faculty Lounge, Purdue Memorial Union
The meeting will be discussion-based. RSVPs are not necessary, but are appreciated – please email Becky Bunch at rsbunch@purdue.edu if you plan to attend.
The Editors’ Group is open to Purdue faculty, staff, and students who edit journals or proceedings, or serve on editorial boards.
Friday, October 25: 9 – 10:30 am, LWS 1142. Open Research Event
Title: Scientific Reproducibility: Opportunities and Challenges for Open Research Data and Code
Speaker: Victoria Stodden, Columbia University
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by Purdue Libraries and the Cyber Center in Discovery Park
[Note: This event will commence with the presentation of an Open Access (Research) Award by Dr. S. Laurel Weldon, Interim Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. It will be presented this year to Dr. Mark S. Lundstrom, Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). The award is presented in recognition of Dr. Lundstrom’s leadership in creating NanoHUB, a radical departure from traditional forms of scholarly communication in nanotechnology with a strongly open access character. Annually, nearly 250,000 users in 172 countries access over 3,000 resources from more than 1,000 authors for research and education, including over 250 simulation tools. After the presentation, James L. Mullins, Dean of Libraries, will introduce the speaker.]
Abstract: It is now widely recognized that the traditional published article is insufficient to permit verification of computational results. The emergence of powerful computational hardware combined with vast data collection and storage capabilities presents many novel opportunities for researchers. Unfortunately current standards for communication of published computational findings make verification and validation next to impossible. A movement toward reproducible research – dissemination that includes sufficient experimental details such that results can be replicated by others in the field, i.e. the code and the data – has developed in many disciplines and research areas to address this shortcoming in research communication. In this talk Dr. Stodden will explore the problem and address solutions emerging from researchers and institutions, federal policy efforts, and journal publication standards.
Bio: Victoria Stodden is an assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University whose research centers on the multifaceted problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. This includes studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research. Her work has resulted in platforms and tools such as SparseLab, RunMyCode.org, and the Reproducible Research Standard. Stodden is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate Subcommittee on Support for the Statistical Sciences at NSF, the National Academies of Science committee on Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process, and several committees in the American Statistical Association. She completed her PhD in Statistics and her law degree at Stanford University, and her Erdös Number is 3.
Filed under: events, general, Open_Access, press_release, scholcomm
October 7th, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN — Purdue University Libraries will celebrate Open Access Week – Oct. 21 to 27, 2013 – with three key events including an Open Education Event presented by David Ernst, University of Minnesota; Journal Editors’ Group Tea; and Open Research Event presented by Victoria Stodden, Columbia University. Awards will also be presented to key faculty members for their commitment and contributions to the advancement of Open Access at Purdue University. A live web stream of the presentations on Oct. 23 and Oct. 25 can be found at the following URL: http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/pvhfc.
“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. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.
OPEN ACCESS WEEK EVENT DETAILS
Wednesday, October 23: 2:00 – 3:30 pm, STEW 314. Open Education Event
Title: Open Textbooks and Educational Resources: New Approaches to Affordable Education
Speaker: David Ernst, University of Minnesota
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by Purdue Libraries and Purdue Student Government.
[Note: This event will commence with the presentation of an Open Access (Education) Award by Dr. A. Dale Whittaker, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs. It will be presented this year to Dr. Linda S. Bergmann, Director of the Online Writing Lab (OWL), which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2013. Now featuring over 300 reference and instructional materials, all made freely available online, OWL has established itself as one of the premier Open Educational Resources on the web. After the presentation, James L. Mullins, Dean of Libraries, will introduce the speaker.]
Abstract: High college costs will keep as many as 2.4 million low and moderate-income college-qualified high school graduates from attending college during this decade. For those who do attend college, financial stresses are the main reason that 46 percent of students do not graduate with any credential within six years. College textbook and course material expenses are a significant part of college costs. The College Board estimates that the average student paid $1,200 on books and course materials during the 2012-13 academic year. These high costs put student success at risk.
Dr. David Ernst will describe efforts in the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development to improve college access, affordability, and success by reducing the impact of textbook and course material costs for students. Dr. Ernst spent the last two years identifying barriers to the adoption of open textbooks and finding ways to help institutions and faculty overcome those barriers. He created the Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) in April, 2012, as a single source for faculty to find open textbooks. The catalog has had over 70,000 visits from instructors in 173 countries. Dr. Ernst will also describe the Digital Course Pack project, which leveraged digital content already-licensed by the Libraries to create digital course packs that were free or reduced cost for students. Lastly, Dr. Ernst will explain how all schools can reduce textbook and course materials costs by leveraging the same tools successfully used by the University of Minnesota.
Bio: Dr. David Ernst is the Chief Information Officer in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. He brings his extensive background in education to his role, including 14 years of teaching and a PhD in Learning Technologies. His passion lies in developing innovations that help faculty teach and students learn. David is also the Executive Director of the Open Academics Textbook Initiative. This program works to improve higher education access, affordability, and success for all students through the use of open textbooks. David created and manages the Open Academics textbook catalog (http://open.umn.edu) – a single source for faculty to find quality openly licensed textbooks. David and his colleagues are also developing a toolkit to help other institutions interested in starting their own open textbook initiative on campus.
Thursday, October 24, 3:00 – 4:00 pm, PMU East Faculty Lounge. Journal Editors’ Group Tea
Would you like to learn more about open access? Are you interested in sustainable business models for journal publishing? Are you concerned about predatory open access publishers? If so, join the Purdue Journal Editors’ Group for its fall meeting. Refreshments will be served.
When: Thursday, October 24th, 3:00-4:00pm
Where: East Faculty Lounge, Purdue Memorial Union
The meeting will be discussion-based. RSVPs are not necessary, but are appreciated – please email Becky Bunch at rsbunch@purdue.edu if you plan to attend.
The Editors’ Group is open to Purdue faculty, staff, and students who edit journals or proceedings, or serve on editorial boards.
Friday, October 25: 9 – 10:30 am, LWS 1142. Open Research Event
Title: Scientific Reproducibility: Opportunities and Challenges for Open Research Data and Code
Speaker: Victoria Stodden, Columbia University
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by Purdue Libraries and the Cyber Center in Discovery Park
[Note: This event will commence with the presentation of an Open Access (Research) Award by Dr. S. Laurel Weldon, Interim Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. It will be presented this year to Dr. Mark S. Lundstrom, Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). The award is presented in recognition of Dr. Lundstrom’s leadership in creating NanoHUB, a radical departure from traditional forms of scholarly communication in nanotechnology with a strongly open access character. Annually, nearly 250,000 users in 172 countries access over 3,000 resources from more than 1,000 authors for research and education, including over 250 simulation tools. After the presentation, James L. Mullins, Dean of Libraries, will introduce the speaker.]
Abstract: It is now widely recognized that the traditional published article is insufficient to permit verification of computational results. The emergence of powerful computational hardware combined with vast data collection and storage capabilities presents many novel opportunities for researchers. Unfortunately current standards for communication of published computational findings make verification and validation next to impossible. A movement toward reproducible research – dissemination that includes sufficient experimental details such that results can be replicated by others in the field, i.e. the code and the data – has developed in many disciplines and research areas to address this shortcoming in research communication. In this talk Dr. Stodden will explore the problem and address solutions emerging from researchers and institutions, federal policy efforts, and journal publication standards.
Bio: Victoria Stodden is an assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University whose research centers on the multifaceted problem of enabling reproducibility in computational science. This includes studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research. Her work has resulted in platforms and tools such as SparseLab, RunMyCode.org, and the Reproducible Research Standard. Stodden is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, the Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate Subcommittee on Support for the Statistical Sciences at NSF, the National Academies of Science committee on Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process, and several committees in the American Statistical Association. She completed her PhD in Statistics and her law degree at Stanford University, and her Erdös Number is 3.
Filed under: events, general, Open_Access, press_release, scholcomm
October 4th, 2013
Welcome to Database of the Week. This feature from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics is intended to give you a brief introduction to a database that you may not know. These weekly snapshots will have only basic information about our most relevant and beneficial online resources, and hopefully tempt you to explore. Feedback is always welcome. If you have a suggestion for a database or research topic that should be covered, please let us know.
This Week’s Featured Database: GREENR, from Gale Cengage Learning.
Find it:www.lib.purdue.edu/parrish, Under the column headed Collections, click on List of Business Databases.
Description/focus: GREENR is a resource for environment and sustainability research.
Try this: The GREENR landing page has links to broad issues such as Resource Management, and more focused topics such as nuclear energy, coal energy, and wind energy. You can do a keyword search in all content or in specific collections (videos or case studies), or use an interactive world map for country information. Search results can be limited by subject or type of resource. See here for a short video tutorial on the basics of searching GREENR
Why you should know this database: GREENR covers food security, environmental law and politics, economics and trade, pollution, ecology, energy, and more. It includes many of the academic resources that appear in text-only databases, but GREENR also includes podcasts, websites, newspapers, videos, magazines, and case studies. You can navigate country, organization, and country portals for news, video, and primary source documents.
Why students should know this database: GREENR is easy to navigate and students can use it to narrow a broad interest to a specific topic, or find content on an assigned subject.
Tags: agribusiness, agricultural economics, agriculture, articles, companies, countries, country profiles, demographics, economic conditions, energy, environmental research, full text, international markets, international news, news, resource economics,
Cost: Paid annually by Purdue University Libraries..
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Database of the Week comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Database of the Week is archived at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/MGMT/. For more Purdue Libraries news, follow us on Twitter (@PurdueLibraries).
If you would like us to promote your favorite database, send an email to mdugan@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMTOctober 2nd, 2013
February’s executive memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy required over twenty federal agencies who have annual research and development budgets of more than $100 million to submit plans to the White House to ensure that “the direct results of federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.” This includes openly and freely sharing the publications that result from sponsored research as well as datasets. Purdue and the Libraries have supported this new policy and helped to inform its development.
The goal of the memo is to ensure that data that are produced with federal funds are made as available as possible for access and reuse by other researchers as well as the general public. Some agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health already require data management plans and have been encouraging data-sharing for years. Datasets such as spreadsheets, instrument and sensor data, software source code, transcripts, images and video, and the other “raw ingredients” of research need to be shared in order to reproduce experiments and validate their findings. Efficiency is gained by reusing instead of reproducing the same data in different studies, and new discoveries and economic opportunities can be created.
What does it mean for researchers on our campus? In practical terms, our researchers will be required to submit data management plans with their grant proposals to the major federal funding agencies. The agencies will be required ensure the evaluation of the merits of the data management plans, including how well the researcher identifies and describes what data will be produced by the research and how the data will be made accessible and preserved.
Since the establishment of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) by the Libraries in 2006, we have been preparing to help our researchers meet these requirements. In collaboration with the Office of the Vice President of Research and Information Technology at Purdue, the Libraries launched the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR, http://purr.purdue.edu) to give researchers a platform for collaborating and publishing and archiving their data. We have been involved in the creation of solutions such as the DMPTool (http://dmptool.org) that walks a researcher through the process of writing an effective data management plan, step-by-step. Purdue is also a founding member of DataCite (http://datacite.org), which is an international organization to assign unique, globally resolvable digital objects identifiers to datasets and promote the scholarly use and attribution of data in research.
Most importantly, our subject-specialist librarians are advocates, consultants, and collaborators in research data management, helping to write and review plans, working with faculty and students to understand issues related to data use and stewardship, and contributing as co-principal investigators on sponsored, data-intensive research.
As many of the parties involved in this new policy work on drafting potential solutions, the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has offered their proposed policy solution. Published in June of 2013, the Shared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE model, proposes that academic universities and libraries are well suited as a solution to the new OSTP policy requirements due to their long standing history of investing into the services, tools, and infrastructure to support the dissemination, access, and preservation of research. One of the key components to the infrastructure of this model that universities already have in operation is institutional repositories, such as Purdue e-Pubs (http://purdue.edu/epubs). Institutional repositories, including Purdue e-Pubs, are poised to play an important and significant role in the continued discussions on these new funder requirements, and the promotion of scholarship and research by Purdue faculty, staff, and students.
Established in 2005, Purdue e-Pubs is the open access institutional document repository of Purdue University providing free and open access to research and scholarship authored by members of the Purdue community. Submitting work to Purdue e-Pubs is open to anyone affiliated with Purdue, and can serve the public deposit requirements for any Purdue Principal Investigator (PI) on federally funded research projects. Once the work has been uploaded to the repository many of the services, tools, and infrastructure currently in place in Purdue e-Pubs are poised to fulfill several components of the policy’s requirements. After an item is deposited, Purdue e-Pubs makes the metadata and full text submission of the work available to commercial search engines, such as Google Scholar, and other discovery systems through the implementation of the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It is also at this time that the repository will create within the metadata a link to the publisher’s version of the work through the creation of an Open URL. Purdue e-Pubs also belongs to a cross-institutional repository system, the Bepress Digital Commons Network (http://network.bepress.com/). The Digital Commons Network is a federated institutional repository-based discovery tool aggregating works from over three hundred institutional repositories. Built upon the Bepress institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, the Digital Commons Network further illustrates solutions to the OST memorandum’s accessibility requirements.
There are also several methods to ensure compliance with using the Purdue e-Pubs repository and other institutional repositories as components to the new policy requirements. Upon submission and final deposit of a work an automated notification is currently sent to all authors. This automated notification could be potentially sent to other designee’s including the author’s institutional research offices, the publisher of the work, and to the funding agency to ensure notification and compliance with the new policy. Authors currently also receive an automated monthly email informing them on the industry recognized COUNTER (http://www.projectcounter.org/) compliant download statistics. These download statistics, as well as the access and site statistics from Google Analytics and altmetrics, could also be supplied to administrators and other invested parties by Purdue e-Pubs and its additional services.
At the time of this publication, the federal agencies have turned in their plans to the White House, which will review and respond to them over the course of the next six months. Because of our involvement and early engagement in issues related to research data management, Purdue is prepared and equipped to meet these new funder requirements and promote the research of our faculty and students through global data-sharing and reuse.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter