OSP and IU Open Journals: FAQ

This post was authored by Scholarly Communication Department Graduate Student Jenny Hoops. 

Founded in 2012 by Indiana University Provost Lauren Robel, the Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP) is a collaboration between IU Press and the scholarly publishing activities at IU Libraries aimed at furthering the enterprise of scholarly publishing at IU and beyond. Within the OSP, IU Press members provide invaluable expertise in journal production, copyediting, and marketing, alongside IU Libraries representatives, who provide consultation on intellectual property matters, digital preservation of scholarly research, public outreach for publishing initiatives across campus, and encourage the utilization of open access publishing models. The Office of Scholarly Publishing serves as an essential venue for the publishing activities of faculty, students, and staff of Indiana University.

With the current migration to the latest Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3 update—the online journals hosting platform for IUScholarWorks and IU Press journals—we continue to receive questions about the Office of Scholarly Publishing and the services it provides. We hope to clarify these below, as well as offer information to those who are interested in the suite of  publishing services available to OSP journals and partners.  

What kind of content does the Office of Scholarly Publishing handle?

The Office of Scholarly Publishing primarily deals with open access journal content, but OSP representatives are available to consult with IU faculty and staff about the publication of other kinds of scholarly materials. Last fall, the OSP helped Kelley School of Business instructors create four different eTexts for their courses using the PressBooks platform, for example. Anyone affiliated with IU that is interested in open access publishing is encouraged to contact the OSP to discuss their project in more detail.

What is the difference between IU Open Journals and Office of Scholarly Publishing journals?

Both IU Open Journals and OSP journals utilize Open Journal Systems, an online journal publishing platform developed by the Public Knowledge Project. The IU Open Journals program offers a digital publishing platform for any editorial team associated with Indiana University. There are minimal restrictions to becoming an IU Open Journal as only an affiliation with IU and a regular publication schedule are necessary. Peer review is not required, and pieces of work not often found in academic journals—such as memos or experimental art/poetry—can find a place of publication with this program. Our IU Open Journal service is an excellent place for any serial publication, including more non-traditional forms of scholarship, to receive support and hosting in order to make publication possible.

In contrast, Office of Scholarly Publishing journals are a select set of journals that are more academically rigorous, usually exclusively faculty peer-reviewed and faculty-authored publications.  The OSP will assess journal candidates to determine if a new journal is a potential OSP journal. If it is, it will be supported by the OSP while IU Open Journals will receive support from IUScholarWorks and the Scholarly Communication Department at IU Libraries.

What services does the Office of Scholarly Publishing offer?

The Office of Scholarly Publishing offers assistance with new journal setup, editorial team education for journal workflow and website management, technical support with Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, increased user access and discoverability thorough indexing and metrics, and digital preservation of online content. OSP brokers copyediting, typesetting,  and on-demand printing services and its staff are able to consult with editorial teams on marketing and design needs.

I’m in interested in starting a new publication with Indiana University. How do I start this process?

Contact iusw@indiana.edu to start set-up for a potential new journal. We will work with you to figure out whether or not your publication should be supported by IU Open Journals or the Office of Scholarly Publishing, and then provide you with outreach and technical support for Open Journal Systems.

Driving Student Success through Affordable Course Material Symposium To Be Held on March 8

Indiana University Bloomington undergraduate students are estimated to pay $1,034 for course materials each academic year. Said another way, students must work 142 hours at a minimum wage job to purchase their course materials each year. Thus, high course material costs directly impact first generation, food-insecure, and low-income students and their ability to do well in class.

IUB students are estimated to pay $1,034 for books and supplies for the 2017-2018 academic year.  Be part of the solution: http://bit.ly/IUAffordableTextbooks

Image created by IU Press

A national survey of over 2,000 students found that if students cannot afford course materials, 65% of them will avoid renting or buying texts even though they know it may possibly impact their overall success in a course. Almost half of the students surveyed said that the cost of textbooks also “impacted how many/ which classes they took each semester,” potentially affecting student course loads and degree progression (pg. 5).

Affordable and open course materials offer a potential solution to this issue. Affordable course materials are offered to students at a reduced price, often at a fraction of what they would normally pay. IU’s eText program has helped IU instructors integrate affordable course material into their classrooms since 2010. Students play a reduced, flat fee for their eTexts and they are guaranteed access on the first day of the semester, increasing engagement for the entire class. Students retain access to eTexts throughout their time as an IU student.

Similarly, Open Educational Resources (OER) are course materials that are shared under an intellectual property license that explicitly allows others to use and revise them freely. Examples of OER include textbooks, videos, activities, syllabi, and lectures shared under a Creative Commons license. In addition to cost savings, OER have been connected to student retention and completion. A study at Virginia State University found that students who took courses that utilized OER “tended to have higher grades and lower failing and withdrawal rates.” Thus, affordable and open course materials save students money while also helping instructors improve learning outcomes.

Still, many faculty do not know how to find, evaluate, or create affordable and open course material. The Office of Scholarly Publishing and UITS have partnered to hold a day-long Driving Student Success through Affordable Course Material Symposium on March 8, which will explore the connection between course material costs and student success, progression, and retention. The symposium will feature three experts on affordable course material from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Steel Wagstaff (Educational Technology Consultant), Kris Olds (Professor of Geography), and Carrie Nelson (Librarian and Director of Scholarly Communication) will share their experience locating, creating, assessing, and integrating OER and affordable course material into courses in several disciplines.

Morning workshops will explore tools and repositories for finding and creating affordable course materials firsthand. The afternoon panel will provide an overview of current initiatives at IU and UW-Madison and address how course material costs impact students in more depth. The day will conclude with an informal reception, where attendees can meet one-on-one with IU experts to get started on adopting or creating affordable course material in their own courses.

All IU Bloomington instructors interested in course material creation, new forms of pedagogy, and tools for finding and evaluating affordable/ open content are welcome! Space is limited and registration is required by February 16, as lunch is provided.

Instructors interested in working with the Office of Scholarly Publishing to find or create either OER or eTexts can e-mail iusw@indiana.edu.

The Importance of Undergraduate Student Research at IU

This semester I had the privilege of teaching “Academic Editing and Publishing,” a one-credit hour course for the Indiana University Journal of Undergraduate Research (IUJUR) student editorial board. I co-taught the course with a current undergraduate student and the former editor-in-chief of IUJUR, Sonali Mali. The purpose of the course was twofold: to give students a practical skillset for publishing a multidisciplinary undergraduate scholarly journal at Indiana University while also informing students of larger conceptual academic publishing issues.

Striking a balance between practical fundamentals—for example, learning the ins and outs of our publishing platform and evaluating submissions using IUJUR-specific rubrics—with larger concepts was sometimes challenging. Overall, I think that students appreciated the authentic learning experiences that resulted from using an active journal as a tangible example throughout the course.

I learned a lot about myself as an instructor and the importance of librarian perspectives in undergraduate publishing education. Library publishers are experts in ethical publishing practices, open access funding, and various peer review models. Students were most passionate when we discussed the cost of information, open access publishing, and new publishing innovations, including post-publication peer review, data publishing, and including 3D and media in traditional journal publishing. I was excited to talk about these developments in the context of the work that IU Libraries is pursuing and several of the case studies we discussed in class were pulled from work that the Office of Scholarly Publishing (OSP) and IU Press is currently engaged in. 

The Importance of Undergraduate Research

Throughout the course, I learned about the importance of undergraduate research and the integral role that IUJUR editors play as ambassadors for undergraduate research at Indiana University. I kicked off the first session of our course with asking students to articulate why undergraduate research was important. Students shared that IUJUR gave IU students a voice and presence on a research-intensive campus. They explained that an institutional commitment to undergraduate research provided space for all students to ask their own research questions and share their perspectives. They also noted that IUJUR gives student editors and authors access to faculty advisors, tangible career preparation, and opportunities to refine their voice and collaboration skills. Here were a few of my favorite responses from this activity:
undergrad research primes a generation of future researchers

prepares students for grad school and beyond

gives students the ability to take a proactive role in shaping the research climate on campus

These responses align with the growing body of literature that discusses how impactful and effective undergraduate research is. The Council on Undergraduate Research supports institutions of all sizes and missions that provide some kind of undergraduate research opportunity for faculty and students to collaborate on. They have a variety of publications, many of which are freely available to access. Some of the benefits of intensive undergraduate research that CUR has identified include:

Enhances student learning through mentoring relationships with faculty

Increases retention

Increases enrollment in graduate education and provides effective career preparation

Develops critical thinking, creativity, problem solving and intellectual independence

Develops an understanding of research methodology

Promotes an innovation-oriented culture

Similarly, undergraduate research has been called a “high-impact practice” or HIP. George Kuh wrote a landmark paper for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) on high-impact educational practices in 2008. When researching why intensive undergraduate research, service learning, learning communities, and other learning opportunities were particularly effective, he found several similarities between HIPs (pgs. 14-17), including:

An extensive investment from students

Interaction and relationship building between peers and with faculty to solve “substantive” or real-world problems

Exposure to diverse perspectives and viewpoints

Consistent feedback to foster improvement and growth 

Kuh’s list applies to the intensive work that IUJUR authors and editors do to publish a multidisciplinary journal regularly.

Throughout the course I always tried to come back to our first session and the reasons that students identified for why undergraduate research is important. I can now articulate that the product–the final research output that others can read and cite–is only a piece of the puzzle. The process that IUJUR student editors and authors go through is just as fundamental. The process is where learning takes place. It’s where we train future researchers, scholars, and citizens to think critically about access to research and how we evaluate scholarship. It’s where we build relationships with students that transform their future career paths and broaden and enhance their existing interests. I am thankful to play a small part in the IUJUR student editors’ process and be part of a campus that prioritizes undergraduate research.

Additional resources:

Additional reading on undergraduate research journals:

  • Dawson, D. D., & Marken, L. (2017). Undergraduate Research Journals: Benefits and Good Practices of Involving Students in Content Creation and Other Scholarly Communication Activities. WILU 2017 Conference, University of Alberta. https://ecommons.usask.ca/handle/10388/7899
  • Riehle, C. F. (2014). Collaborators in Course Design: A Librarian and Publisher at the Intersection of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication. In 2014 LOEX Conference Proceedings. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/lib_fsdocs/119/
  • Weiner, S., & Watkinson, C. (2014). What do students learn from participation in an undergraduate research journal? Results of an assessment. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 2(2). http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.1125

New Issue of International Journal of Designs for Learning (IJDL) Published

This post was authored by Scholarly Communication Department graduate assistant Jenny Hoops. 

The International Journal of Designs for Learning (IJDL) has published its second issue of 2017, continuing a long tradition of working with IU Libraries and IU Press in order to provide open access to a wide variety of content. IJDL has been publishing since 2010, but as a result of the collaboration between the Office of Scholarly Publishing and the journal’s team of editors, several key changes have improved the journal’s online presence. The journal has recently minted DOIs for their most recent articles as well as all the articles in their archive, ensuring easier discovery and identification of the journal’s content.

IJDL is dedicated to providing publishing opportunities for designers from all disciplines, recording various methodologies, debates, and materials dealing with the design process in an open access format. The journal aims to reach a broad audience of designers at every level of education, from complete novices and students to experienced teachers and designers. As a publication of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, the improvement of education through technology remains a constant focus of the scholarship of the International Journal of Designs for Learning.

Articles from the newest issue such as “Designing Authentic and Engaging Personas for Open Education Resources Designers” highlight IJDL’s dedication to open scholarship and learning. This article helps inform readers on how to craft engaging, authentic, and useful personas for designers open education resources. Another article, “Confessions of Novice Designers and Their Instructor”, examines the multidisciplinary nature of design, utilizing a graduate-level message design course as a compelling case study. Students of the course completed small, client-based design projects as instructors worked to give them the most effective feedback possible, ultimately creating an honest and interesting dialogue for the reader to examine. This issue also features works from the Student Design Case SLAM, the results of an intensive one day workshop for graduate students at the 2016 Association for Educational Communications and Technology Convention in Las Vegas. These students worked to create a publishable design casing, acting as writer, designer, and editor for each other’s projects.

The most recent issue of IJDL is the journal’s eighth volume and this year’s final issue. The International Journal of Designs for Learning publishes semi-annually and is available in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

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.

New Open Access Resources for OA Week 2017

Open Access Week 2017 is quickly approaching! This year, OA Week is October 23-27. We will publish more information about the IU Libraries 2017 Open Access Week events in a subsequent post, but I wanted to share all of the new and exciting resources we have created to prepare for OA Week now.

Open Access Week is a time to celebrate collaboratively working toward the shared goal of open and accessible research for all. The most important part of this shared vision is that when all work is open, we can build upon each other’s ideas, discoveries, and innovations. The first step in achieving this vision is simply sharing materials so that others can re-mix and re-use them.

In addition to a new Open Access guide, we’ve created a guide for detecting and avoiding predatory publishers and conferences. Publishers and conferences categorized as “predatory” are uninterested in sharing properly reviewed work or respecting the rights of authors; they are interested solely in profit and often ask authors to pay costly publishing or presenting fees. While some legitimate open access publications charge article processing charges (or APCs), predatory publishers are different. We will use this new guide in our OA week event on predatory publishers, but we hope that it will serve as an information source for graduate students long after the session. The guide walks students through how to evaluate a potential publisher or conference and also dispels some myths about the connection between predatory publishing and open access.

Image 1: Open Access Week Event Flier

Flier Created by IU Libraries Advancement

The Scholarly Communication Department has also collaborated with the Reference Department to create an Open Access Week 2017 display in the Wells Library Lobby. The display will run from October 13 until Thanksgiving. The display was inspired by Open Access Week materials created and shared by OpenCon organizer Lorraine Chuen. Because Lorraine shared the posters under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0), we were able to take her design and revise it to include Indiana University branding and information about IU Libraries events.

Images 2 & 3: Open Access Week Promotional Materials

Images 2 & 3: Open Access Week Promotional Materials

Layout by Leanne Nay, Digital Engagement Librarian

Finally, we are excited about our OA week event for undergraduate students, which is centered on how students can share their work openly and refine their online presence in order to secure employment after graduation. This event is the result of a partnership between the IU Libraries Teaching and Learning Department and the Scholarly Communication Department and is being promoted by the IU Career Development Center.

Learn more about Open Access at Indiana University by visiting https://openscholarship.indiana.edu/

Image 4: IUB Open Access Policy

Layout by Leanne Nay, Digital Engagement Librarian

Leveraging the License: Part I

The Scholarly Communication Department attended several orientations and events for new faculty over the last few weeks. During these events, I have had the privilege of chatting informally with a faculty members about IU Bloomington’s new Open Access Policy. Faculty have a lot of questions about how the policy works, what kinds of scholarship the policy applies to, and author processing charges (or APCs).

The question that has been most difficult to explain quickly and effectively in these informal conversations has been about how faculty can “leverage” or utilize the license established by the Open Access policy when negotiating with potential publishers. This post will explain in more detail what “leveraging the license” means and clarify when in the publishing process faculty should attempt to negotiate. This post on leveraging the OA policy license is part one of a two-part series. The second post will explore the OA policy license in more detail, particularly when it concerns utilizing third-party content.

Our new Open Scholarship website includes a detailed FAQ that answers common questions faculty have about the OA policy. One of the questions listed is, “Will I have to negotiate my copyright transfer with my journal publishers?” Our answer is no. The policy maintains faculty agency and empowers them to make the best decision for their research. Faculty can always embargo their article to comply with their selected journal’s policies or opt out of the OA policy for a specific article.

However, we note that in many cases, it is in the faculty member’s best interest to negotiate. Moreover, the license that IUB OA Policy establishes can support faculty efforts to retain their copyright. Under the question about negotiating copyright transfers we state, “The policy operates automatically to give IUScholarWorks a license in any scholarly articles faculty members complete after its adoption… communicate this policy to your publisher and add to any copyright license (or assignment for scholarly articles) an addendum stating that the agreement is subject to this prior license. That way, you will avoid agreeing to give the publisher rights that are inconsistent with the prior license to IUScholarWorks that permits open-access distribution.”

What does this mean in practice? How do you begin to start a conversation with a publisher that has a restrictive publishing agreement? When should you mention the IUB OA Policy and subsequent license? We have created a flowchart to answer these questions:

Image 1: IUB Open Access Publishing Flowchart

Flowchart created by Jamie Wittenberg

After your manuscript is complete, you should identify a journal that offers the readership and audience that you are most interested in. If this is an open access journal, once your article is accepted and published you have complied with the OA policy! If this is a closed journal, you will need to determine if your publishing agreement allows self-archiving (or posting an open version of your article in a repository). The Scholarly Communication department is always happy to help faculty review their publishing agreements. If the publishing agreement allows you to share a version of your work, preferably the publisher’s final version (after peer review with typesetting), then you will submit that version to the institutional repository. Archiving the author’s final manuscript will nevertheless meet the OA policy’s requirement. If the journal does not allow self-archiving, it’s time to consider negotiating.

Negotiating with a publisher is both personal and contextual. Your decision to negotiate may be impacted by your level of comfort, goals, co-authors, and the importance of the publication venue. Is this the only venue that makes sense for your article? Does this journal have impressive metrics or important readership? Or are there other publication venues that might accept the article? Is it non-negotiable to you that others have access to your article, regardless of library affiliation or socio-economic status? Asking these questions can help you decide if publisher negotiation is in your best interest. In general, many publishers are familiar with open access policies so starting a conversation about the publishing agreement is not harmful and can help clarify how or if you should continue to negotiate.

After you have reviewed the publishing agreement and you’ve decided that you would like to negotiate, you can contact our Copyright Program Librarian and lawyer, Naz Pantaloni, for guidance. In addition to having expertise in copyright, Naz has worked with several scholars to retain their author rights and is familiar with strategies for negotiating with publishers. Naz will either assist you with preparing an addendum to present to the journal or help you construct a response that includes information about the IUB Open Access policy. One addendum template that Naz might help you utilize comes from the Big 10 Academic Alliance (formerly CIC). An example of a response to a publisher in order to start the negotiation process is found on our Open Scholarship Q&A:

“[Journal] acknowledges that [Author] retains the right to provide a copy of the final manuscript, upon acceptance for [Journal] publication or thereafter, for compliance with the Indiana University Open Access Policy and for public archiving in IUScholarWorks as soon as possible after publication by [Journal].”

If you cannot come to an understanding with your publisher and need to sign over the exclusive rights to your work, you must complete the opt out process.

In a previous post, I wrote about the spectrum of openness that exists and the Scholarly Communication Department’s goal of supporting all manifestations of open. It is worth stating that the IUB Open Access policy is about making content open and available to readers everywhere. But it is also true the OA policy is about author rights. When authors retain their rights, including the right to reproduce, distribute, display, and make derivative works of their scholarship, they retain the life of their work. I have consulted with many faculty members (and graduate students) that need to interlibrary loan their own work because they don’t have access to it. I’ve worked with numerous faculty that wish they would have retained at least some of their rights so that they could make their work available to their students or share it more broadly. In addition to resources like our copyright program and publishing resources, the OA policy provides a mechanism for faculty to find their seat at the negotiation table. I’m excited for what this means for the research profile of IU Bloomington.

New Resource to Support Open Scholarship

The Scholarly Communication Department recently launched a new Open Scholarship website. The site serves as a central hub for researchers interested in open access, open data, and/or open publishing. The site is particularly useful for finding information about how faculty can comply with the recently-approved IUB Open Access Policy. The Open Access Policy will provide a mechanism for faculty to assert their rights as authors, enabling them to share their scholarship more widely and increasing readership and engagement of IU-faculty work.

The launch of our open scholarship site begs the question, “what is open scholarship?” More pointedly, what qualifies as “scholarship” and how “open” does that output need to be? We think that our site presents a definite answer. We believe that the term scholarship should be inclusive of all of the ways that scholars communicate: through journal articles and books but also through sharing their research data, making visible their learning objects and teaching materials, and even creating new and innovative publications to fill a distinct gap in a body of literature. The new site illustrates that we as the Scholarly Communication Department support scholarship in all of its modes and formats, formal and informal.

Similarly, while open is a core value and essential principle of our work, we recognize that there is an entire spectrum of openness. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) recently collaboratively authored a “How Open Is It?” spectrum, which helps illustrate this point.

They break open down to reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability. For each, they note the spectrum of open to closed that can exist, which illustrates just how complex and contextual open is. For example, there might be an “open” article that is accessible to readers, but the author wasn’t able to retain all rights to the article and it isn’t in a format that is machine readable. Or, alternatively, an author might retain their copyright and make their work their open but only with strict and limited reuse permissions. The Scholarly Communication Department’s goal is to support all manifestations of openness, regardless of where researchers fall on this spectrum.

Our new website showcases the many services and resources our department offers to facilitate open scholarship. In addition to managing IUScholarWorks and providing faculty a space to make their work open, we provide one-on-one consultations to researchers interested in a variety of topics including advocating for their author rights, evaluating their impact, crafting a data management plan, or starting or making open a journal. We work collaboratively with other library and campus units, including the Indiana University Press, Digital Collections Services, and UITS, to assist researchers with digital scholarship, publishing ventures, and data storage. We look forward to continuing to enhance and develop our suite of services to better support the IU research community.

We’re interested in your feedback! Please send questions and comments about the new Open Scholarship website to iusw@indiana.edu

The Scholarly Communication Department would like to thank the Discovery and User Experience Department, specifically Matt Fitzwater and Courtney McDonald, for their assistance and expertise throughout the development of this site.

The Office of Scholarly Publishing Welcomes Newest Version of Open Journal Systems

The IU Office of Scholarly Publishing is working on a lot of exciting projects this summer. One of those projects is planning its rollout of Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3. The Public Knowledge Project announced the release of OJS 3 last summer and they have been continually updating and improving the open source journals publishing software since the upgrade. The latest version of OJS offers more robust functionality and several new features, making it a major enhancement to the platform we currently provide to over 30 journals. We hope to migrate all of our journals to OJS 3 by spring 2018.

We believe that the new upgrade will make editors’ work more straightforward and will streamline the editorial processes from article submission through final publication. In addition to offering a more flexible interface for customizing each journal’s homepage, OJS 3 enables editors to easily tailor the editorial workflow to their journal’s specific needs and processes. OJS 3 was developed after extensive usability testing with both authors and editors and, as a result, the new system provides more flexible permissions and less restrictive author registration requirements.

OJS 3 will also include a plugin gallery, with new and updated plugins to improve our assessment of journals and DOI registration process. One of the most exciting plugins that OJS 3 will offer is Open Typesetting Stack (OTS). OTS will enable editors to publish their journals in full-text HTML as well as PDF. The plugin will make each journal’s born-digital content more readily accessible to all readers while enhancing the archiving and preservation of its content. We are excited about this new functionality, as it will enable us to integrate multimedia, 3D objects, and other innovative forms of scholarship into our publications.

We recognize that our editors will need personalized support as they learn to use and customize OJS 3 to fit their editorial needs. We plan to meet with each journal individually before next spring to discuss the migration timeline in depth and provide each editorial team with one-on-one training. We are committed to making sure that all content is migrated correctly and efficiently. In addition, we plan to customize PKP’s extensive documentation to our specific OJS instance and our editors’ needs.

The Public Knowledge Project has created an OJS 3 demonstration journal for your perusal. We encourage you to explore OJS 3 in more depth and send any questions you may have about the migration or the new platform to iusw@indiana.edu. If you aren’t one of our current editors but are still interested in launching or moving a journal to the new OJS platform, please contact us. The Office of Scholarly Publishing is excited to work with editors on this important update.
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isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-13
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-146-23-210.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/