Publishing Open Access and Transformed Datasets

October 24th, 2019

Oct. 21-27, 2019, is International Open Access Week. This is part of a series — written by Purdue faculty and staff — that demonstrates the benefits of open access scholarly publishing. For the entire series, visit https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/category/oaweek19/.

by Sandi Caldrone, Data Repository Outreach Specialist

Publishing open access data requires imagination. When I review datasets submitted for publication in the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR), I try to put myself in the shoes of a scholar hoping to reuse this dataset, and I try to imagine every question the scholar might have. When you share your data with the world, you open it up to new possibilities—possibilities that are hard to anticipate.

On November 10, 1981, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave a lecture on cinema in a Paris university. When he prepared his notes for class that day, he could have had no way of knowing that a student’s audio recording of that lecture, along with dozens of his other lectures, would eventually find their way to the French National Library, and from there to PURR, where anyone can download it to hear his words or text mine the transcriptions.

When Deleuze gave this lecture a little less than 40 years ago, that tape recorder was the most advanced technology in the room. Now, digital humanities students can plug his words into online tools that spin out word clouds, bubble charts, and network graphs. That’s why data curators are always pushing for richer descriptions of data. We want to give future researchers everything they might need to conduct analyses we can’t even imagine yet.

The cycle of imaginative reuse doesn’t have to take forty years. In PURR, we’re already starting to see second-generation open access data—open access data that has been combined, transformed, and republished as a new open access dataset.

As it was in Deleuze’s classroom, it is students who are in the vanguard.

In 2019, PURR has started to see examples of student-faculty collaborations in which students collect data from various open access datasets and put in the labor required to prepare those data for analysis. By publishing their transformed data, they give other researchers the opportunity to pick up where they left off and push scholarship forward, instead of reinventing the wheel. See two excellent examples:

• from agriculture at https://doi.org/10.4231/5P9A-KQ03 and
• from environmental engineering at https://doi.org/10.4231/NYGF-BH18.

It’s hard to imagine what students might do with data 40 years from now, but I’m really looking forward to finding out.

Explore the Purdue University Research Repository at https://purr.purdue.edu/.

Learn more about Purdue’s Open Access resources, including Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue’s open access digital repository, at www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess.

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/.