Dean Beth McNeil: Advocating for Open, Transparent, and Sustainable Access to Scholarship

October 25th, 2019

by Beth McNeil, Dean of Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies and Esther Ellis Norton Professor of Library Science

During International Open Access week each year, those who work in libraries around the world lead conversations on our campuses, sparking discussion on the changing nature of scholarly communication and the benefits of open access. We often offer OA-related programming and sometimes celebrate our successes during the past year. This year’s theme, “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge,” is timely, as conversations have expanded beyond the benefits of open to the challenges of building new systems for sharing that offer full access for all.

Earlier this week here at Purdue, four faculty members from across campus described what “open” means to them during an engaging panel program moderated by Justin Race, director of Purdue University Press. Kris Bross, associate dean for research and creative endeavors, Honors College, and professor of English; Gaurav Chopra, assistant professor of chemistry; Wayne Wright, Barbara I. Cook Chair of Literacy and Language and associate dean for research, graduate programs, and faculty development, College of Education; and Michael Witt, associate professor and interim associate dean for research, Libraries and School of Information Studies, each offered examples of how open scholarship/open science influenced their individual academic work and teaching. Their personal experience, plus comments and questions from the audience, made for a very engaging program.

When I think about what open means to me, I know that I, as a librarian, care deeply about making information available to all who need it. In university research libraries we work hard and, sometimes very creatively, to find ways to meet the information needs of our faculty, students, and campus community. Finding the balance between a scholarly communication ecosystem that I know needs deep and sustained change and meeting day-to-day local research information needs can be challenging and complicated.

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/.

Each year personnel in libraries, including here at Purdue, are forced to make tough decisions regarding which journal subscriptions to renew. Subscription cost increases of 5-7 percent each year are not sustainable, and when major for-profit publishers report profit margins in the 30–40 percent range each year, higher than Apple, Google, and Amazon — it just seems wrong.

I believe the scholarship and data produced by our researchers, scholars, and faculty can change the world, but to do so, it needs to be open and freely available for all. Contracts and licenses with publishers and content providers should be transparent across institutions and equitable for all parties, and the costs of scholarship should be financially sustainable for libraries. Open. Transparent. Sustainable. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

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

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.

The Evolution of the Joint Transportation Research Program

October 22nd, 2019

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

by Darcy Bullock, Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering and Director, Joint Transportation Research Program

The Purdue e-Pubs open access model for publishing Joint Transportation Research Program (JTPR) reports and conference proceedings is widely regarded as a best practice for rapid, cost-effective dissemination to transportation agencies, practicing professionals, and academia. Including JTRP reports, specialty series, and conferences, this open access material has received more than 2.3 million downloads from individuals in 29,000+ institutions, representing 230 countries.

Our partnership with Purdue University Press enables JTRP research to have global impact through the e-Pubs online publishing system. JTRP reports provide a treasure trove of invaluable information for transportation professionals and academia, but were previously buried in the basement of the engineering library [now the Library of Engineering and Science]. To promote knowledge sharing and increase impact, JTRP partnered with Purdue Press in 2011 to modernize report publishing and digitize previous reports.

As an example, when Purdue Civil Engineering Emeritus Professor Sidney Diamond published his report on “Methods of Soil Stabilization for Erosion Control” in 1975, he expected it to be read by state engineers to assist them with improving Indiana’s transportation infrastructure. Today, however, his report has been downloaded 1,883 times, with readers just as likely to be in India, Brazil, and China as in Monticello or Frankfort, Indiana.

Thanks to Purdue e-Pubs, Diamond’s research is helping practitioners worldwide to cheaply and safely reinforce dirt roadways made unstable by heavy rainfall. More recently, Professor Rodrigo Salgado published a technical report entitled “Dynamic Cone Penetration Test (DCPT) for Subgrade Assessment” in 2003 that has been downloaded more than110,000 times.

These examples show how making JTRP research openly and freely accessible online increases the value of the state’s investment in transportation research, while providing worldwide impact.

In addition to technical reports, JTRP publishes a variety of conference proceedings on e-Pubs. One example is the Purdue Road School Transportation Conference and Expo, produced in collaboration with the Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program, which attracts more than 3,000 attendees annually.

Approximately 4,000 Road School presentations and proceedings have been posted on e-Pubs. These publications have been downloaded more than 447,000 times, extending the impact of Road School well beyond the conference attendees. Downloads for Purdue Road School have exceeded 131,000 in just the past year. We are particularly pleased by the magnitude of these Road School downloads, as approximately 65% are from government agencies and private sector companies. This demonstrates the impact the scholarly work is having on government and private sector entities.

Information about other 2019 Open Access Week activities at Purdue is available at https://blogs.lib.purdue.edu/news/2019/09/26/oa-week19/.

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