A Recap of Open Access Week 2017

This is the tenth year Open Access Week has been celebrated. Each year, we celebrate a different piece of Open Access and its importance. For 2017, the emphasis was on “Open in Order to…” and the tangible benefits that scholars and institutions reap when research is openly available. The Open Access Week site lists several responses for the “Open in Order to…” prompt including “increase access to knowledge,” “facilitate collaboration,” and “raise your research visibility.”

At IU Libraries, we facilitated and promoted several programs that aligned with this year’s emphasis on the tangible results of OA. Staff from the Scholarly Communication Department, Teaching and Learning, Indiana University Press, the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH), and the Mathers Museum of World Cultures created and led these programs.

The “What Does Google Tell the World About You?” session focused on how openness can impact online presence and increase discoverability.  Our workshop entitled “Predatory Publishers, Open Scholarship, and Your Research” provided an overview of predatory publishing practices and strategies for finding a reputable publisher. “How Does Scholarly Peer-Review for Publication Work? An Introduction for Journals and Books” gave participants a practical, behind-the-scenes look at scholarly peer-review for journals as well as books. Additionally, as an extension of OA week, an info-share and group consultation on the new Open Access Digital Monograph Publishing Program will happen this Tuesday, 10/31. The program supports the publication of open-access monographs in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with a $15,000 subvention.

Finally, Indiana University Press made five IU faculty-authored books published freely available on the IUScholarworks platform from October 20 through October 27. The titles included Dealing with Dictators by Lazlo Borhi, Folk Art and Aging by Jon Kay, Abidjan USA by Daniel Reed, The Accompaniment in “Unaccompanied” Bach by Stanley Ritchie, and Guide to the Solo Horn Repertoire by Richard Seraphinoff.

OA week display case with open press books
The Open Access Week Display Case In Wells Lobby, Featuring some of the IU Press books made openly available 10/20-10/27

The “opening up” of these titles coincided with the annual IU Press Authors Event, which celebrates IUB faculty that have published a monograph in the last year. Authors were congratulated by Dean Walters, Provost Robel, and Vice Provost Van Kooten.

books publishing by IU faculty
A selection of the monographs published by IU faculty in the last year

Our focus for Open Access Week 2017 was to highlight the tangible, practical side of Open Access. Open Access increases impact, provides content to all, and is compatible with reputable and rigorous publishing. Our events this year dispelled common OA myths while highlighting these truths and emphasizing OA’s impact on the IU community specifically.

Exploring Open Journals: An Open Access Article Showcase on the Empathetic Classroom

This post was written by the Scholarly Communication Department’s graduate assistant, Jenny Hoops. 

This is our second post in a series that aims to highlight and showcase interesting, integral, and open scholarship at Indiana University. The Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP), a partnership between the IU Libraries and Indiana University Press, continues to facilitate the creation and preservation of open and accessible scholarship through the Open Journal Systems (OJS) publishing platform. Through OJS, the OSP has helped numerous editorial teams publish over a dozen open access journal titles on a variety of subjects. One of the Office of Scholarly Publishing’s most widely-read titles, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (JoSoTL), demonstrates the impact that open access research can have.

The Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (JoSoTL) has been dedicated to the publication of research examining contemporary problems, both practical and theoretical, in the teaching of higher education since its first publication in 2001. JoSoTL includes countless articles, essays, critiques, literature reviews, and case studies, authored by scholars around the globe. JoSoTL is indexed by several integral education databases including ERIC, Education Source, and Education Research Complete. All of JoSoTL’s journal content is immediately accessible, as open access is core to its mission. The journal’s editor-in-chief is Michael Morrone, lecturer in IU’s Kelley School of Business and director of the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching (FACET).

One example of the quality of work that JoSoTL publishes is the article “Managing Student Self-Disclosure in Class Settings: Lessons from Feminist Pedagogy,” a piece from this year’s first issue of JoSoTL. The article is authored by IU South Bend’s Catherine Borshuk, a social psychologist and Director of the University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Borshuk engages with a rising issue in higher education classrooms, particularly within the humanities and social sciences: the need to balance empathy with professionalism. The old feminist ideal “the personal is political” has entered the college classroom in unexpected ways, as students, encouraged by patterns developed from social media, feel more willing to share highly personal and occasionally upsetting anecdotes related (or sometimes not) to classroom lectures and topics. Borshuk argues that this impulse to share and create a more understanding classroom must be met with measured compassion, and attempts to foster empathy while still maintaining academic discipline and ethics are key.

After a review of the problem and its theoretical background, Borshuk offers potential solutions for this challenging task. She suggests several initial strategies for teachers engaging with her work: avoiding “othering” students by avoiding assumptions about student backgrounds and experiences and using the pronoun “we” rather than “they” or “them”; building diverse materials and subjects into class readings; and finally, focusing on societal and institutional narratives rather solely the personal (pgs. 80-82). Borshuk concludes with her own experiences of utilizing such techniques and encourages other educators to engage with feminist pedagogy to solve issues of student disclosure. Work such as this article provides philosophical explanations for educational issues while also beginning discussion on how to solve such problems to benefit both the teacher and the student.

The improvement of education relies on communication and collaboration between instructors. Further, in order to develop the best educational techniques, instructors must learn from mistakes and elaborate on successes. The Office of Scholarly Publishing is excited to assist JoSoTL in their work to improve both instruction and education.

Open Access Policy Guide: Opting Out

This post is the first in the “Open Access Policy Guide” series. This series will address components of the IU Bloomington Open Access Policy and its implementation. We have written other posts about passing the policy, leveraging the license (Part I & Part II), and resources to support it.

What is Opting Out?

The IU Bloomington Open Access Policy is an opt-out policy. This means that if faculty do not wish to make a version of their published article openly available, they must opt out of the policy. When a faculty member opts out of the policy, a waiver letter signed by the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs is generated. This letter waives the university’s license for your article.

The Scholarly Communication Department is working to make it as easy as possible to opt out of the policy and generate a waiver letter. Are you a faculty member who needs to opt out of published articles? There are two methods you can use to opt out.

Method One

In IU’s annual reporting system – Digital Measures Activity Insight – faculty will see a new option in the Publications/Scholarship of Discovery category. This option is “Opt out of the open access policy for this article (IUPUI & IUB only).” To opt out of the policy for an article, simply click this box. A waiver letter will be generated and emailed to you.

Opting out in DMAI

Method Two

This is the best opt-out method if you need a waiver letter instantly and prefer not to wait for us to email you one. In IUScholarWorks Open (our repository extension to support the policy which will be launched shortly), complete the ‘Opt-out’ submission form. Enter your name, article title, and journal name (ISSN and DOI are recommended but optional). Select submit, and a waiver letter will be automatically generated for download. You will also receive an email with the waiver letter as an attachment. If you opt out using this method, you are not required to check the box in method one – we will track your waivers and ensure that it applies when you complete your annual report.

Opting out in IUScholarWorks Open

Frequently Asked Opt Out Questions

Do I need to opt out for every article I have ever published?

No. The policy only applies to articles published after it was passed on February 21, 2017.

What if I forget to opt out for an article but realize later that I need a waiver?

The policy states that you are able to change the archival status of an article at your discretion. Please contact us to make this change and generate a waiver letter.

What if I co-author a paper with another IU Bloomington faculty member and one of us opts out in DMAI but the other does not?

In the event that there are multiple IUB faculty members who have co-authored an article and one opts out in DMAI, we will honor the request of the faculty member who opts out. Or, as the Head of our Copyright Program puts it, “While the creator of a joint work can license a work separately, their license cannot override another co-author’s denial of a license.”

I want to opt out for all of my articles, how do I do that?

According to the policy, “Upon express direction by the Faculty member, the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, or his or her designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article.” This means that faculty members must opt out for each article published after February 21, 2017. The fastest way to achieve this is by clicking the opt out button for each article when you are completing your annual report.

My publisher says that I need to apply an embargo (make an article unavailable for a predetermined amount of time) – does this mean I need to opt out? How do I make it available when the embargo has elapsed?

You do not need to opt out for an article that requires an embargo period before it can be made openly available. The IUScholarWorks Open repository will restrict the article and automatically release it after the designated amount of time has passed.

I have more questions – where can I find help?

We have an FAQ for the policy available on our website that provides helpful answers to a range of policy questions. We are also available by email at iusw @ indiana . edu and will soon be announcing drop-in sessions to answer questions about the policy.

Why DOI?

Oprah meme, everything gets a doiWhile many researchers have heard of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), some may not know why and when they should be used. The single most important characteristic of DOIs is that they can be attached to just about any digital, online research output. If something has a URL, or a specific location on the web, it can be assigned a DOI. The versatility of DOIs means they can be tied to journal articles, datasets, supplemental material and addendum; to video, audio, streaming media, and 3D objects; to theses, dissertations, technical reports, and visualizations. More recently, DOIs are being assigned to pre-prints of articles, acknowledging the pre-print’s role in some disciplines to be as valuable as the published version.

Why does this matter? As the APA Style Blog explains,

The DOI is like a digital fingerprint: Each article receives a unique one at birth, and it can be used to identify the article throughout its lifespan, no matter where it goes. (https://shar.es/1VECYv)

This digital fingerprint grows in importance as we move into an era that scholar Péter Jacsó has described as a “metadata mega mess.” Keyword searches by title or author in Google, for example, and even Google Scholar, which relies on mechanisms rather than unique IDs, often return inaccurate information: titles are attributed to the wrong authors, especially those with common names; citations of articles are mistaken for the original article; publication years become volume numbers; and a score of other inaccuracies. Researchers who rely on Google Scholar often quip that the service provides an easy way to begin a citation search, but that sources must be verified by DOI through Crossref and other registries. An article with a DOI reduces its risk of becoming lost in this “metadata mega mess” (Péter Jacsó, “Metadata mega mess in Google Scholar”, Online Information Review 2010: 34.1: 175-191, https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011024191).

The second essential feature of the DOI is that it is persistent. As a unique identifier, it enables digital objects to be found anywhere, anytime with a one simple click on a link. This means that a paper or dataset is accessible and discoverable without requiring a separate search. Incorporated into a citation, the DOI becomes a guaranteed location for the item cited because it will always resolve to the right web address (URL). When attached to a resource, the DOI is also machine-readable, supporting online discovery as well as targeted aggregations and indexes.

The Anatomy of a DOI
Every DOI has three parts:

anatomy of a doi diagram
Source: http://www.ands.org.au/online-services/doi-service/doi-policy-statement. CC-BY
  • Resolving Web Address. Like web addresses (URLs), DOIs enable research output to be discoverable and accessible. Online publishing and digital archiving have made them almost a necessity for scholarship, and they have become the de facto standard for identifying research output.
  • Prefix. The prefix is the beginning of a unique, alphanumeric ID that irrefutably represents a digital object, and as such it creates an actionable, interoperable, persistent link to the work. The prefix is almost always associated with the entity or organization, and can allow users to trace the digital material back to its source.
  • Suffix. The final part of the alphanumeric ID is unique to its assigned object.  Integrity of DOIs are guaranteed because they do not rely alone on URLs and the web’s DNS (Domain Name System) servers for resolution. A DOI, then, is both an online location and a unique name and description of a specific digital object. Moreover, while the DOI base infrastructure is a species of the Handle System, DOIs run on a managed global network dedicated to their resolution.

A recent data DOI created for a data set in the IUScholarWorks repository (https://doi.org/10.5967/K8SF2T3M) illustrates one of our unique prefix “shoulders” (10.5967/K8) and a randomly generated alphanumeric string that is unique to this object (SF2T3M). Our open access journal system, on the other hand, is configured to create DOIs that are more semantic and tell us more about the object. This DOI (https://doi.org/10.14434/v17i3.21306) also has a unique prefix for Indiana University’s open journal system (10.14434). What’s more, the rest of the ID tells us that it is from Volume 17, Issue 3, article number 21306 of its originating journal.

So, Why DOI?
The short answer is that DOIs increase the reach and impact of your work. Publishers, repositories, aggregators, indexers, and providers of research and academic profiles are now relying on DOIs to identify specific works accurately, which in turn more reliably links that work to its authors and creators. Furthermore, metadata and information about individual works are increasingly tied to DOIs.

Crossref — one of the largest providers of DOIs for publications and the provider of DOIs for our open journal program — continues to expand the metadata that can be tied to DOIs, thereby increasing what your work can do in the world. The Scholarly Communication Department plans to deploy two specific Crossref programs that use DOIs to improve the accuracy and accessibility of usage data, bibliometrics, research profiles, and altmetric impact. Cited-by uses an object’s DOI to track where and how a digital publication or data has been cited, and can be displayed alongside an article with other metadata, such as authors’ bios (https://www.crossref.org/services/cited-by). Event Data, a program currently being rolled out by Crossref, goes even further. It will leverage the increasing ubiquity of DOIs to enhance the metrics available to scholars for their work. Known commonly as altmetrics, Event Data will collect a publication’s appearance on social media and online communities, such as Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Stack Exchange, and blog posts (https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data).

Furthermore, for any research products — from software and datasets to technical reports and presentations –created and authored by IU faculty, staff, and students that do not have a previously assigned DOI, the IUScholarWorks Repository can mint them free-of-charge for any and all submissions.
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