Staff Notes from March 6

Library employees may find the notes taken during the follow up conversation on March 6 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day Two

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Near the end of the conference we heard from the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, Lorraine Harricombe. She shared the process on the KU campus for creating a campus-wide open access policy and adoption of the institutional repository. Over two years the library worked closely with the Provost’s office and faculty council to write and adopt an open access policy that encourages authors to maintain at least some of their copyright and deposit their work into the institutional repository at KU, known as KU ScholarWorks.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion made up of Kevin Droegemeier, the OU VP of Research, and Jerry Malayer from the OSU Center for Veterinary Health Sciences. The discussion ranged across all the topics covered in the conference, but focused largely on bringing OU and OSU together to work on addressing the need for more robust and fully supported institutional repositories as well as open access policies for our campuses and better support for our researchers and authors when they want to use or publish open access resources.

The conference was wonderful and the conversation has only started. Many questions still need to be answered. If you are interested in Nicole’s notes from the conference she would be glad to share them. Just let her know.

What opportunities do you see for collaboration across the state? What does OSU have to offer that is unique?

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day One Continues

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Continued from “Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome & Opening Remarks
The other speakers were wonderful too. We heard from Jennifer Lin from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). She talked about Article Level Metric or ALMs which allow authors to see (at varying degrees of granularity)

• how often their article is viewed and/or downloaded,
• which countries the readers are from,
• comments, tweets,
• citations, referring URLs
• and more.

ALMs are a great way to convince faculty of the benefits of OA in terms of widening their audience. These sentiments were echoed by University of Kansas Professor, Marc Greenburg.

Some speakers touched on the idea of copyright in the world of Open Access. Michael Carroll, American University Law Professor, evangelized on the necessity of authors maintaining at least some of their rights to the articles they write. Publishers often ask authors to give all of their copyright to the publisher. By holding on to some of their rights authors can share their work freely and deposit their work in the university’s institutional repository.

Carroll also talked about the Creative Commons license which allows the original author to maintain their copyright but gives others permission to repost and use their work as long as the author receives credit or attribution.

Mark Morvant from OU’s Center for Teaching Excellence talked about open access course materials. Open Education Resources or OERs give faculty the freedom to customize their curriculum, because they aren’t dependent on a textbook. Additionally students are spared the punishing costs charged by some textbook publishers. Because using OERs is more work for faculty the Center for Teaching Excellence at OU is offering support and education for faculty who want to use open access materials for their classes.

How can the library help faculty adopt open access and protect their copyright?

Work Groups-A Message from the Dean

Library Faculty and Staff –

Since last May we have considered the Library’s future. We’ve explored some technological advances, how 21st century students learn and study, and how other academic libraries are evolving their services, collections, and spaces. We have had some thought-provoking presentations from innovative library leaders and some engaging staff discussions facilitated by Raynna. Many thanks to all of you who have attended these learning opportunities and participated in the brainstorming.

We are now ready to begin to make some choices about how we will best support the mission of the university going forward and about some transitional organizational changes. We will charge two small groups of faculty and staff who have participated in the Library Futures process to work with DAG, Library Department Heads and Raynna in order to synthesize critical information that will inform our decision making.

One group will develop a University Priorities Environmental Scan. Similar to the University of Connecticut’s experience to align the Library’s Strategic Plan with the University’s priorities, we want to be sure that our planning reflects current OSU directions. Our first small group will scan key University documents, reports, web sites and announcements to determine the top OSU priorities with which the Library must align and support. I will serve as the group’s mentor and, along with other members of DAG, will be a resource to the group in achieving its work. The group will discuss its findings with DAG, department heads and Raynna on Tuesday, April 9. The next morning they will present their work to an all-staff meeting for discussion and questions. Their written document will be made available to all staff. The University Priorities Environmental Scan will insure that all of us have the opportunity to understand current University directions and how the Library can align with them.

A second group will develop a Research Libraries Environmental Scan. We want to synthesize the key developments in research libraries – both new initiatives being implemented by many peer organizations as well as work that libraries are moving away from. This group will read selected research reports (such as the Redefining the Academic Library report), review the presentations from our guest speakers, and scan web sites and announcements from other research libraries. They will use this material to summarize the work performed in a contemporary research library. Again, I will serve as the group’s mentor and, along with other members of DAG, will be a resource to the group in achieving its work. This group will discuss their results with DAG, department heads and Raynna on Tuesday, May 7. The next morning they will present their work to an all-staff meeting for discussion and questions. Their written document will be made available to all staff. During these meetings we will begin to assess what progress the OSU Library is currently making vis-à-vis these contemporary initiatives, what initiatives are priorities for OSU in light of the University’s plans, and what current library work may be less of a priority going forward.

Informed by these scans and an assessment of the Library’s future priorities, DAG will develop a preliminary and transitional new organizational structure for the Library and will draft updated (if needed) mission and vision statements. We expect that by the end of May we will begin recruitment for an Associate Dean position and possibly other priority staffing needs.

From now on, we’ll consider our priorities and our organizational structure to be more fluid than they have been in the past. We’ll continue the Library Futures Series in the fall, and we’ll regularly monitor both the University and research library landscapes so we can adjust our initiatives and our structure periodically as different opportunities arise.

I hope you’ll continue to be engaged in discussions about the future of OSU and the Library. I will send out another message soon regarding the make-up of these two groups.

Regards,
Sheila Grant Johnson
Dean of Libraries and Clerico Family Chair for Library Excellence
Oklahoma State University

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

The “Open Conversations about Open Access” conference started some exciting conversations. Rick Luce, Dean of Libraries at OU introduced the speakers for the conference as his “Open Access Dream Team.” In his introduction he included a little about his vision of Open Access.
Open access (sometimes abbreviated as OA) is “the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters,” according to Wikipedia. Luce went on to describe how OA should look to readers, authors and to the university.

• Readers should see OA as immediate, free, worldwide access.
• Authors should be able to protect their traditional rights.
• The university should see open access as an extension of their mission where works created at the university should be used for the greatest possible benefit and should stimulate innovation.

The first speaker on Thursday, Heather Joseph, the executive director for The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition or SPARC, kicked off the meeting with an overview of where open access started and how far it has come in terms of acceptance in the scholarly community and in national legislation and regulation. She described the situation we are already familiar with here at OSU. Budgets continue to shrink while costs continue to rise at a faster pace than inflation. Happily, recent legislation followed by some important regulations at the federal level are requiring researchers who receive funding from government agencies to make their research available to the public. In essence, if taxpayers fund the research, then taxpayers should have free and open access to that research.

Joseph also talked about the current state of OA publishing in terms of infrastructure and popularity. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals offers 8,600 journals in nearly every discipline imaginable.

What are your perceptions of open access? What do you think the perception of open access is on our campus?

Brinley Franklin's Presentation

Library employees may find the slides from Brinley Franklin's March 5 presentation to the staff and faculty on the staff drive at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on the presentation can be added to the comments section below.