For the Public Good: Research Impact and the Promise of Open Access

As a land-grant institution, Virginia Tech is committed to research that meaningfully engages with the vital concerns of our day such as feeding, building, and empowering a healthy world. How does Virginia Tech’s commitment to engagement fit with the Open Access vision for unrestricted online access to scholarly research? Have OA journals, public repositories, and federal mandates simply made a researcher’s life more complicated or could OA be the key to unlocking research impact on a global scale? And what are the implications for tenure and promotion?

Join us for a public forum devoted to these questions and more on Monday, October 24, at 6:30 pm in Torgersen 1100. We expect a lively discussion featuring panelists from the Virginia Tech community and ample opportunity for audience Q&A.

Montasir (“Monty”) Abbas is Associate Professor in the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Coordinator of the Transportation, Infrastructure and Systems Engineering Program. His interests are in real-time traffic control, traffic flow theory, driver behavior, ITS, transportation modeling and safety, artificial intelligence and systems optimization. Abbas currently serves as President of VT’s Faculty Senate.

Karen DePauw is Vice President and Dean for Graduate Education at Virginia Tech. An internationally recognized scholar in the fields of adapted physical activity, disability sport and disability studies, she holds academic appointments in the Departments of Sociology and Human Nutrition, Foods & Exercise. As an academic administrator, she has held key leadership roles in graduate education including serving as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council of Graduate Schools (2010) and Chair of the GRE Board (2013-2014).

Brian Hole is founder and CEO of Ubiquity Press, a researcher-focused publishing company that specializes in open access academic journals and open data. Prior to that, he managed the British Library’s LIFE3 project on costing digital preservation, and the DryadUK project, which developed a sustainable framework for integrating Open Data archiving into scientific publisher work flows. When not engaged in his publishing work, Hole is working on a part-time PhD at University College London, focusing on public archaeology in India, specifically at issues of community engagement and utilization of cultural heritage.

Peter Potter is Director, Publishing Strategy, at Virginia Tech. In this role he is charged with assessing the research and scholarly environments at VT in order to guide the University Libraries’ long-term planning in the area of publishing services. A historian by training (B.A. Virginia Tech; M.A. University of Virginia), Potter has devoting his professional career to scholarly publishing, most recently serving as editor in chief at Cornell University Press.

Siddhartha Roy is doctoral student and graduate researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. He works with Dr. Marc Edwards researching failure mechanisms in potable water infrastructure and is a member of the Virginia Tech Research Team that has been working to resolve the water quality issues in Flint, Michigan.

Mohammed Seyam is a doctoral student in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He earned an undergraduate degree in information systems from Mansoura University and a master’s degree in information systems from Cairo University, both in Egypt. Among his many activities on campus he served as the graduate student representative on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors during the 2015-16 academic year. A vocal advocate of OA, he traveled to Washington to take part in OpenCon 2014, a conference for researchers on open access, open data, and open educational resources."