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| Jacklyn Rander & Sarah Beaubien of GVSU, Sarah Shreeves of Univ. of IL Champaign-Urbana and Stephanie Davis-Kahl of Illinois Wesleyan University |
Stephanie
Davis-Kahl was the local organizer (I met her at the repository manager
certification), while Sarah Beaubian of Grand Valley had organized the program.
Stephanie mentioned a great list of things that had happened with open access
this year alone, including the federal and other funding agencies requiring
open access to work done with their monies and the White House Open Data Policy.
Since next year’s
focus for ScholarWorks will be on faculty publications, my new ScholarWorks
grad assitant and I were happy to see sessions that focused on getting faculty
publications into the repository. Margaret Heller form Loyala University in
Chicago talked about searching for
current faculty article publications, importing them into RefWorks,
exporting the file into Excel, using OpenRefine and JSON to check Sherpa Romeo,
and getting liaisons to help contact faculty to get permissions and
post-prints. I like the idea of concentrating on most recent publications
across campus. I did a quick search of WMU publications in Web of Science in
2013 and came up with 155 hits. Margaret also suggested using OpenRefine and
JSON on CV’s. I am not familiar with these tools, but it looks like they can
save a lot of time. Looks like even book chapters can be posted, if the right
permission is received. Another interesting idea was to celebrate faculty
publications with a wine and cheese event at the library.
Joshua Neds-Fox
and Damecia Donahue of Wayne State University had some great ideas on working with faculty, understanding
their hesitations, concerns and misunderstandings about open access, showing
them the impact of open access in their field. We talked about the fact that
open access differs across disciplines, but in general the impact is positive,
as OA leads to more readers and more potential citers of one’s work. They also
made the distinction very clear between gold and green open access - gold OA is
given by the publisher, who may charge an author a fee, while green OA is given
post publication by the copyright holder. The presenters felt that green OA was
the better way to go, as long as you can get your hands on the post prints, but
that is easier, if it becomes part of the publishing flow. They took us through
a four step process that they use when talking with departments: 1) Research the
OA advantage in the field, 2) Get a list of high impact journals in the field,
3) Run the journals through Sherpa Romeo (usually a high percentage allow post-prints
or publisher PDFs), and 4) Present these findings to faculty with graphs and
pie charts and citations to articles proving your point. Wayne State also uses
the „do it for me” argument, where faculty love to hear that you will do something
for them. They encourage faculty to add an author addendum to the agreements
they sign with publishers, allowing for the right to deposit their article in
the IR.
I was interested
in hearing Kim Myers from The College at Brockport (SUNY), as I had seen her
impressive annual report and project management workflow at a previous training
session. She is not a librarian, but comes from business, so has more of a „return
on investment” approach to her IR. She talked about the importance of a communication plan that is a project
management document, looks at the different stakeholders and what needs to be
communicated to each group. Kim talked of various tools such as software to
create infographics, which can communicate numbers effectively; using emails to
communicate with authors about their posted works; and using annual reports as
a tool. She mentioned various ways to tell if the IR has had an impact and to
show that it helps to enchance the reputation of the college, attracts students
and funding, etc. She has been able to engage 65% of the library staff in the
repository.
I had the
opportunity to ask Dave Stout from bepress about the relationship between
Digital Commons and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses before I had to lead the
round table discussion about ETDs.
ProQuest used to market Digital Commons and as an added benefit, they offered
schools a way of importing ETDs from ProQuest to their DC repository. The
schools that came on board during this era have that feature grandfathered in.
Now you have to purchase the backfiles from ProQuest (I heard a huge range of
prices) and then do some coding to bring the metadata and files into your own
DC repository. Iowa State University offered to help with the coding. At the
round table discussion we shared ideas, practices and frustrations. Some no
longer submit to ProQuest and just have their ETDs in the IR. Others are
already using the ProQuest ETD Administrator, where students submit directly to
ProQuest. Not everyone has a centralized grad college that acts as a gateway
for their ETDs, and some have to beg each department for the work of their
students. I believe everyone I talked to had moved away from print copies, some
even liquidating their print copies. One comment heard was that they were
unhappy with the quality of the digitized copies received from ProQuest of
older materials, which were probably digitized versions of the microfilms.
The last session
of the user group meeting was especially valuable to me, as it was about
providing data management planning
services, presented by Sarah Shreeves from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. With all the funding agencies now asking for data management
plans, as they want to see data reused, verified, replicated for a broader
impact. Almost all of the sites and tools shown by Sarah were unfamiliar to me.
Here are a few:
- Databib http://databib.org/ - a bibliography of research data repositories
- DMP Tool https://dmp.cdlib.org/ - guidance and resources for creating data management plans
- figshare http://figshare.com/ - free site for uploading data sets
Sarah was
encouraging all of us liaisons to become familiar with the data management
world, so we can properly advise our faculty. We need to be aware of options
available on campus, security issues, open access, DOIs and to be involved with
the conversation on campus that includes OVPR, the Graduate College, and
departments. We need to help people to cite data sources properly.
