Welcome to Connecting the Opens:
Open Access, Open Educational Resources, and Open Data.
This is in part a class of
the graduate future professor class and
it's part celebration of Open Education Week,
which actually comes during Virginia Tech's spring break.
This is an early celebration
of the 2022 open education week.
If you're curious about
other events that are happening during this week,
there are many different things you can get involved in
online that are hosted
by people all around
the world in many different languages.
So if you're looking for things to do during
spring break this is a great place to take a look.
On our agenda today,
we're going to go through an overview of the Opens.
We're focusing on Open Access,
Open Educational Resources, and Open Data.
We have several panelists who will be joining
us from the faculty of Virginia Tech
and then we are going to ask a few of
our own questions and we
would like to hear your questions.
After each of the sessions,
the session on Open Access,
the session on OER,
in the session on Open Data,
we're going to take a couple of
quick questions related to that topic.
If you have questions you would like to put in
the chat throughout, please do.
What would be easiest as if you
direct them to the person who's speaking,
or the particular topic that is being discussed.
We have some frame questions,
guided discussion with the panelists
but if there are
things that you'd like to learn more about,
we would love to be relevant in that way.
As you know, there are many different kinds of open,
open source, open data,
open education, open access,
open citations, open research, and open science.
We would love to know a little bit about what you
are hoping to learn today about the different Opens.
If you would take a moment to go to
menti.com and enter the code
that you see on your screen,
or scan the QR code
and tell us a little bit about
what you're hoping to learn today.
We'll come back to these things in just a minute.
But we'll give you some time
to tell us a little bit about what
your hopes are for today
with regard to learning about Open Access,
OER, and Open Data.
We do have some goals for you.
We're trying to keep this not so complicated.
We recognize that you probably know
some things already about Open Access, Open Data,
OER but for those of you who are new to these topics,
we're going to try to make
sure that you can step away from this session being
able to explain the basics of these things,
you do some practice using the terminology,
and that you can apply these concepts to
your area of study and scholarship.
There are many applications
and we're eager to hear how you apply
these concepts to your field of study.
Our presenters and panelists
today are on the screen in no particular order.
You will meet all of us throughout the session.
We'll have each person introduce themselves.
My colleague, Philip Young is going
to start with an overview of Open Access.
I'm doing the overview of open education and
Jon Petters is talking about Open Data,
will then be joined by two panelists
from the School of Medicine who are going to
reflect back to us some of the things that
resonated with them and tell us
a little bit about their experiences as well,
and Dean Surprenant will
also be one of our panelists at that point.
Let's see what you said.
What do you hope to learn today?
Resources for literature reviews, Open Data,
learn about OER, Open Access.
What do you mean by open in this context?
Is it better, or worse, or irrelevant
or this is moving a little bit too fast?
If one posts in open access journals.
How are open access resources organized?
Open source publishing?
Let me pause this.
Would be interesting to learn more about
open source journal sites.
The questions graduate schools students have about open.
Pre-analysis planning.
There's a lot here about what you want to know.
Hopefully we can help you
to reach some of your goals for today.
Yeah, this is better.
We invite you to use the chat to talk with us.
This is exciting.
We have lots of different questions.
We can come back here and have you ask,
answer more questions about specific as we go on.
Thank you very much for telling us what's on your mind.
My colleague Philip Young,
who is the repository manager of
VTechWorks at the University Libraries,
is going to first give us an overview of Open Access.
Philip let me know when you want
the slides advanced and we'll go from there.
Thank you, Anita. As Anita said,
my name is Philip Young and I've been at the libraries
for about 13 years now in various roles.
For the last five years I've been
managing a repository called VTechWorks.
VTechWorks is the place for scholarship primarily.
It's also where the electronic theses
and dissertations are disseminated to the world.
You'll probably seen some
of the theses and dissertations on VTechWorks.
My email is there,
as well as a link to VTechWorks and our Open Access guide.
These links are also later
in the presentation and I'm told these
will be shared with everyone later, these slides. Next.
What is open access?
The definition that we've used for
a long time comes from Peter Suber,
who is an open access expert
and actually joined this class
last fall for a discussion
about our new open access policy,
which we'll discuss in a moment.
He said in his book,
"Open access literature is digital, online,
free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions."
Now, I usually break this up into two parts.
Most people understand the first part,
digital online and free of charge.
That means you can get to a website,
a news site, whatever.
You can read it, download it, and so on.
The second part is sometimes
forgotten about open access,
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
That means there should be some permissions given in
advance through a Creative Commons license.
I've got a link to
Creative Commons licenses there,
it's creativecommons.org.
The license that you see there,
the license logo is Creative Commons
Attribution License or CC BY license.
What this does is it gives others permissions
in advance to use
the article as long as they attribute you.
Attribution is already standard and scholarship,
and so this gives a false permission to
reuse images, tables,
so on post the article somewhere else,
as long as they attribute you, so give you credit.
Sometimes the second part can
be forgotten when we're talking about open access.
People will say, oh, I got to
the article and I download it.
So it's open access.
Technically, it involves both parts.
You can get to it and read it,
but it's also openly licensed.
Next. Why should we care about open access?
A lot of people lack access.
We don't always realize this when we're on campus.
Most major publishers have
the IP ranges of Virginia Tech because we pay
somewhere between nine and $10 million
to various publishers to get
access to peer-reviewed literature,
peer-reviewed journals in particular.
If you're on campus, you may
not notice paywalls nearly as
much as you would off-campus and you're not on the VPN.
This is a particular problem in
low and middle-income countries where
researchers frequently don't have
access to the peer-reviewed literature.
Much of our research is funded by
taxpayers through federal agencies;
NIH, NSF, and so on.
Government policymakers, non-governmental organizations
frequently don't have access
to the peer-reviewed literature.
There are also benefits for authors.
There have been many, many studies of
a citation advantage for open access articles.
Most of them showed in a citation advantage
for open access articles,
the most recent one showed
an 18 percent advantage across disciplines.
There's also an altmetric advantage.
Altmetrics gatherers links from outside of academia,
so from the web in general,
such as news sites,
social media, government policies sites.
It's collecting inbound links to research and showing
that broader impact of research
which institutions and funders
are increasingly interested in.
There have been studies showing
an altmetric advantage to open access research as well.
Of course, it makes sense that you'd want to
link to something that people can
actually get to instead of hitting a paywall.
Open access also facilitates
other uses such as text and data mining,
which is very big in some fields,
it's also used in
systematic reviews and things like that.
Reusing the article, as I mentioned,
if it has an open license on it,
that gives you permission in advance to reuse
parts of that article and build upon it.
Of course, it's just a basic scholarly value
that knowledge has to be available to be built upon.
If we're researching in the same field,
we need to know what each others are doing,
and it doesn't make any sense to have
friction in getting access to each other's articles.
Next. There's two ways
that you can provide open access to your research.
The first is by publishing an open access article.
I've got these colors there sometimes in
the open access literature you might see these colors,
gold OA or green OA.
Gold unfortunately has the affiliation
with having to pay,
and that's not always true.
Publishing an open access journal
can occur in a fully open access journal,
such as Public Library Of Science, PLOS 1.
Now, these sometimes have a fee.
Many of the best-known ones do have a fee,
but not all open access journals have a fee.
You can also publish in a hybrid journal.
A hybrid journal is basically a subscription journal that
offers authors the option to pay
a fee and make that article open access.
You might see a journal issue with 10 articles and
maybe two or three will be
open access and the rest will be behind a paywall.
There's always a fee for the hybrid journals.
The other way you can make your work
open access is by depositing a version of the article.
We'll talk about versions in just a minute.
The shorthand for it as green OA.
You do this in a repository.
This is always free.
This is a really good way to provide
open access to work when
you might not be able to afford
the open access charges or APCs,
are called article processing charges.
This is always free,
and you can deposit either a pre-print,
the submitted version which has not been peer-reviewed,
or the post-print or
accepted version which has been peer-reviewed.
Next. Here's a little bit more information
about the two ways to do this.
When you're publishing in an open access journal,
you want to make sure it's a legitimate one,
one that is well-known in your field,
indexed in multiple places.
The reason we use legitimate is that there are
some not legitimate journals out there.
This model of paying for open access
means that some people started journals,
charge the fee, and then they put
it online and never got peer-reviewed or anything else.
You have to be careful to make sure
that open access' terminals are indexed.
The best place to do this for us anyway is
the Directory of Open Access Journals, that doaj.org.
They have a pretty strict vetting process
for all the journals that apply to the index there.
It actually can take a few months for
a new journal to get indexed in the directory.
This is where I would search first,
particularly if you haven't heard of a journal.
Someone says, why not publish in this journal?
Well, look it up and make sure that
it's a legitimate journal.
Through the library, we also have access
to Ulrich's periodical directory,
and so you can look that up through the library catalog,
limit to a peer-reviewed journals,
and then select open access,
and then that will have a list of open access journals.
There's also a website called Think Check Submit,
which will provide you
some criteria to look
at when you're looking at
a journal which you haven't heard of.
You can also always ask us in the libraries as well.
As far as the open access fees,
and again, not all open access journals have a fee.
Some are supported in other ways.
But for the journals that do have fees,
in most cases it's grants that cover
those open access charges or APCs.
For example, an NIH grant, NSF grant,
most of the large federal government grants
can be used to cover those fees.
At Virginia Tech, we also have
an open access fund for
folks who don't have a grant to cover the fees,
and so anyone at Virginia Tech can apply to that fund.
Graduate students are certainly welcome to apply there.
There are also lots of discounts that
the library has gained through
our relationships with various publishers,
and particularly for researchers
from low and middle-income countries,
there are waivers that many open access journals.
As I mentioned, you can also
deposit a version of the article.
One of the main questions you should ask is,
do I have a legal right to do this?
Recently, Virginia Tech past and open access policy,
which means the answer to this question is yes.
For accepted versions of articles,
you can post that immediately in V Tech works.
That's been a huge revolution here at Virginia Tech.
Otherwise you would have to depend
on the journals policies.
There's a lot of variation among journals about
what they allow to be posted on their sites,
and when you can post.
Many of them have embargoes of 12 months or more.
This information should also be
in your publication contract,
your copyright transfer agreement.
The what, when, and where you can post.
If you leave Virginia Tech and you're at
an institution where it
doesn't have an open access policy,
you'll need to follow the journal policies.
There's also a site called Sherpa Romeo
which aggregates journal policies,
and so that becomes a quick way to look
at what you can post and what you can't,
and you can always negotiate this or add an addendum to
your copyright transfer agreement. Next.
It becomes really important if you want to archive
your work or deposited
a version of it to save these versions.
The submitted version, as I mentioned,
is often called the pre-print
and the accepted version which comes after peer review,
so it's still the author's version,
but it's been through the peer-review process,
you've made all the changes
during the peer-review process.
That is sometimes called
the post-print to differentiate from the pre-print.
Pre-prints have really taken off,
if you haven't heard of them before,
you've probably heard of them during
the coronavirus pandemic,
because researchers wanted to
get their research out there fast.
The peer-review process can take months and
sometimes more than a year, and obviously,
we can't wait that long for
coronavirus-related information.
So lots of pre-prints were put on
pre-print servers like Bio Archive, MET Archive.
So it's really important to
keep in mind that those have not been
peer-reviewed yet and so that's been
a big part of those pre-print servers that has
been informing journalists and
the public that those are not peer reviewed papers yet.
One thing you want to do
is check your journal policies first,
so if you have target journals,
two or three journals that you're hoping to publish in,
you might want to make sure that they permit pre-prints.
There are still some journals out there who say,
we're not going to publish anything
that's already been on the web
somewhere and so that's just one caveat out there.
But more and more journals are
allowing pre-prints out there.
They have several advantages.
They're open access, of course,
and they're much faster to
get research results out there,
as I mentioned, it can take a long time
for the peer review process to happen.
You can also get feedback on pre-prints.
Sometimes I see folks asking for feedback on
pre-prints and then they can take
that feedback into account when they submit to a journal.
On many servers you can replace
that pre-print with the accepted version
later, the post-print.
In a few fields,
journals are actually recruiting
these pre-prints because there's
a lot of great pre-prints out there,
journals want them to submit to
their journal and so in a few fields,
I believe it's in genetics,
they actually have editors who survey
pre-prints in that field and invite submissions.
It doesn't mean it's going to be accepted,
but they are inviting submissions to their journal.
Next. About the open access policy,
this is something that was passed
last March here at Virginia Tech,
it went through governance and
was approved by the board of
visitors in March of 2021.
It applies to everyone at Virginia Tech,
so we all can use it.
It applies to the accepted version
of a scholarly article,
not the published version,
so this is your word manuscript
that you've converted to PDF, for example.
You can deposit it right away the
day it's accepted if you'd like and
we've suggested depositing no
later than one month after publication simply to get
an open version out there because
some people are going to hit a pay-wall if
it's in a subscription journal
and through some of
the tools that I'm going to talk about at the end,
they can find the open version in VTechWorks.
You can deposit it later than
one month if needed and no embargo is needed at all,
so you can deposit it right away.
The works appear in VTechWorks.
There's three options for getting them into VTechWorks,
you can use the elements system or EFARs.
Faculty and graduate students have access to this system.
We also have two other methods, a deposit form,
a Google form where you can just put in basic metadata,
the title journal, DUI and deposit that way.
You can also send that information in an email to
VTechWorks and we will get
the article into the repository.
Next. In addition to VTechWorks,
you can also put works directly into
VTechWorks by registering and then emailing
us about which collection you want to submit to.
It's more than just articles you can submit;
presentations, posters, other works.
Anything scholarly can be put in there, reports.
As I mentioned, there are a lot of disciplinary
repositories out there,
sometimes they're called pre-print servers.
Archive is the oldest from the early to mid-90s
for physics, astronomy, computer science.
[NOISE] There's also a bio archive
which has become very popular in the life sciences and
where many of the COVID pre-prints
appeared and so there's
one now for almost every discipline.
There are also some general pre-print servers like
the Open Science Framework and preprints.org.
You can also put articles on
your website or you
can add them to commercial repositories.
You probably heard of ResearchGate and academia.edu.
These are commercial repositories,
a lot of platforms online,
we're not sure exactly how they're going to make money,
they're probably going to do it through
your data and advertising.
If you're relying on journal policies,
you really need to watch for the non-commercial language
because many journals have inserted
this non-commercial language
in there and that is directly
aimed at ResearchGate and academia.edu.
Next. The library is entirely behind
open access and we tried to create as many services
and support for open access as we can.
You can see the top link there is our open-access guide.
We also have on that guide a lot of information about
open-access books and open-access book chapters,
so you may be interested in looking at that,
particularly if you're in the humanities.
Our link to the open access policy guide is just below.
We also have an email address
if you have any questions about
using the policy to
post a version of your article online,
the accepted version of your article.
I mentioned this subvention fund earlier,
that will help our folks who don't have a grant,
if you want to cover an article processing charge
in an open-access journal.
That link is there and that is open to everyone at
Virginia Tech, so that's available.
Our repository is VTechWorks and our email is there.
We're certainly happy to help anyone who
has questions about posting articles online.
Then I have a few lakes here about
finding open access articles,
most of you are probably already
familiar with Google Scholar.
VTechWorks is indexed by Google Scholar.
Generally, it takes somewhere
between three and five days for
an article to be indexed in Google Scholar.
This is a good way where you can find
those repository open versions.
So that's a really valuable tool to have.
There's also a browser extension called Unpaywall,
that's available at unpaywall.org.
That browser extension is for Firefox and Chrome,
it puts a little green tab
in your browser window when it finds an open version.
For example, you hit a paywall on
a journal site and you see that green tab,
you can click on the tab and
retrieve an open version of that article.
That's a pretty great tool to have in your browser.
Then OAHelper is very similar,
although it also has an app for iPhones and iPads.
With that, I will be
glad to answer any questions that you might have.
There is one question in the Chat.
The student's asking, can posting your article in
an open-access site for Virginia Tech
violate publishing requirements by journals?
Would you like to take that question?
Sure. The main way that you can
violate journal policies is by posting
the published version and we've seen this
quite a bit in VTechWorks and we
usually have to email the author and
ask for the accepted manuscript.
That's the main way.
The big advantage of having
the open access policy now is that you are
depositing your accepted manuscript
under a non-exclusive license given to the university.
You're not depositing it under the journal's policies,
so in a way we're bypassing journal policies.
There are probably close to 100 universities in
the United States that have similar policies and so we're
really happy that we've joined
those universities and can upload
those accepted manuscripts without
worrying about journal policies.
Journals have not contacted us
or we don't get sent
any take-down notices or anything like that,
so it hasn't been a problem.
As long as you're depositing the correct version,
then you don't have anything to worry about.
Any other questions?
There is another question.
A few of my articles are now open access,
ie they are out of the embargo period.
Now, can I still deposit them in the tech works?
Yes, absolutely. As I mentioned,
as long as they're not the published version
and there the accepted manuscript,
there should be no problem at all.
Then we also collect open access published articles.
It's good to have them in multiple places.
The websites do go down and also people
searching in the Virginia Tech website will
find Virginia Tech research that way.
We're very well indexed by
the VT website as well as the library catalog,
search engines, Google Scholar,
and paywall so our index is in a lot of different places.
Then if it's somebody took works,
people should be able to find it.
Great. Those are our two questions.
If you have other questions that you
want to ask and you want to ask
anonymously you can use the mentee.com slide too
the what questions do you still
have to enter questions or you can use the chat.
We're going to continue with the next presentation.
Thank you, Philip, so much for that and we'll be hearing
more from Philip during the panel discussion as well.
I'm going to talk a bit about
Open Educational Resources and I would
love to see a show of
hands if you have heard of these before.
If you wouldn't mind raising your hand in the responses
just because it's helpful for me to
know how familiar people are with these things.
I'm seeing a few hands, that's good.
Open Educational Resources we tend to talk
about being similar to Open Access.
It's not about research,
but they are about teaching.
Open Educational Resources are different than open
access with regard to often their purpose.
They can include scholarly works,
but they usually include
works that are specifically made for teaching.
A second differentiating point is how
they're situated in the digital and analog environments.
Open Access tends to be completely digital.
Open Educational Resources are mostly digital,
but there are some print versions of digital objects.
Then to complicate matters further,
Open Educational Resources have licenses that can vary.
They typically require that an item
that is published be adaptable, be customizable.
They will have a license that
would allow customization as opposed to
a license that does not allow
customization or being fully in copyright.
Maybe free online, maybe not.
We'll come back to some of these distinctions these are
interesting to know about,
but this is a level of detail that you will not remember.
Just as basic definition of Open Educational Resources.
I'm going to give you a second to read
this and then we will move on to lots of examples.
OER are freely and publicly available,
they have either a license or are in
the public domain and the license allows their free use,
reuse, modification, and sharing with other people.
This is different than works that are in
copyright and have no open license on them.
They have a flexibility that is
very valuable for instruction
because everyone teaches a little bit differently and
everyone's groups of students are
a little bit different and have different needs.
They can also include many different kinds of materials.
Everything from [NOISE] Canvas modules to textbooks,
to videos, to exams, software, other tools.
They're primarily marked by these three licenses,
or by actually there's one more,
or they are in the public domain.
The Creative Commons licenses that
allow adaptation are typically considered to be open.
The license that does not allow derivatives,
the ND license typically
is not considered to be open enough.
Materials with this license are
still very useful and valuable,
but they cannot be customized
in the same way as other materials can be.
Things that are most open,
are the ones at
the top and the least open towards the bottom.
Open Educational Resources might be digital,
they might be print,
they might be books, they might be
something that you find online.
The purposes and the formats
vary as broadly as you
can think of educational materials.
There are a lot of different things you can do with OER.
If you are a course TA and you're
looking to become a professor in the future,
I hope that you will take advantage of some of
the available open textbooks and other
Open Educational Resources written by
faculty from all around the world.
Some of these are located in
the place called the Open Textbook Library,
which has almost 1,000 open textbooks in
it and is a really great resource for finding books.
But there are a lot of other resources
namely things that you might use for
teaching that you would have to actually create.
This is a video series we worked on with
the College of Veterinary Medicine
to do a standard animal exam.
It's released under an open license
which allows other people
to adopt it and customize it to fit their needs.
If they have a different sequence
of giving a dog an exam,
they could change the video around if they wanted to.
It offers a lot of flexibility.
We've had some people create learning
resources such as a virtual reality dog, horse,
and cow through a partnership
between the Veterinary Med College,
the ICAT, and the university libraries.
This is a helpful tool
for being able to see inside an animal without having
an actual animal available to you to open up or
one that is in
a different posture than you would normally examine,
such as a cadaver animal.
These are all recent or forthcoming publications.
A number of people who have
created collections of materials that are very
specific for specific courses
that are specific to a methodology.
For example, the storytelling on screen
is a guidebook and the collection
of video examples that
describe a particular theater methodology.
Teaching in the university
will be released in the coming weeks.
This is a collection of graduate student-created works.
Cals has a program
called the Graduate Teaching Scholars,
and many of their students and
recent graduates authored chapters
in this book about learning how to teach,
and it's very exciting.
Two of our panelists will probably
talk about the cell biology, genetics,
and biochemistry books for
pre-clinical students and
the neuroscience book for pre-clinical students.
Then we have authors who do a lot of writing
in engineering topics that have a lot of math in them.
There are different things that you can create and
different things that people here
at Virginia Tech are creating.
One of the values of creating and sharing
these works under an open license and
releasing them to the public is that something
that was released about one year ago,
has had a very large number of downloads.
This particular book,
Intro to Biosystems Engineering,
was featured last year
in the presentation for this course,
and it has just over 34,000 downloads in about 12 months.
It is also being translated,
I believe, into Farsi.
We're not translating it,
but the open license allows someone else to translate it
and to show the value of this work.
Then we've had experiences
where professors have come to us and said,
I like this open textbook but it doesn't quite fit.
We've worked with them to adopt
works into something that does work for them,
and we use a lot of different platforms.
This is the Press Books platform,
and we use that to create HTML,
PDFs, ePubs, and print versions,
or PDFs for print versions.
This is the third edition,
we're working on the fourth edition.
Since 2016, we have had over 2.5
million downloads from this adapted work.
We are able to offer
a print-on-demand version for eight dollars.
This is over 300-page book,
and we're really excited that it's used in
the required Intro to
Business Foundations of Business course at
Virginia Tech as well as 50 other schools.
I think the number is higher than that,
but it's at least that.
Why does this matter?
If you have been in the bookstore,
and not to belittle the bookstore,
but if you have tried to purchase course materials,
you know that they are very expensive.
If one of your professors was maybe in
school a few years earlier,
books were a lot cheaper then and the rate of inflation,
which is this flat line right here,
the college textbooks have exceeded the rate of
inflation by several 100 percent.
We are seeing right now a lot of flattening out.
We're not seeing a reduction
in the cost of college textbooks,
but we are seeing that
because of probably a lot of reasons,
students not buying,
students renting, OER,
some other models we're seeing a little bit of
flattening in the college textbook prices,
but we're not seeing a sharp downward trend
remotely for books that
students can actually buy and keep.
What are some of the trends that
publishers are pushing on?
One is to instantiate these direct billing programs.
These are primarily undergraduate materials,
but it's a program where the publisher
would bill the student
directly without much of a very clear opt-out.
The student would have to pay the fee,
get to rent the material,
and not have the option to buy a used copy,
buy a print copy.
We are discouraging this option
because it reduces student choice.
We feel like it aims to establish
a monopoly in departments or in campus.
It does raise questions
around privacy and the use of student data.
We're concerned about these trends.
We know that five publishing companies
have about 80 percent of the textbook market share.
We know that they're moving to
online-only options so students have
less ability to keep
a print version to share it with a friend.
We know that publishers are
really seeing lots of new additions.
This is very true,
especially in the undergraduate programs
or large enrollment courses.
We know that a lot of companies
are repositioning themselves,
either as software or data companies.
That makes us ask a lot of questions
about privacy and what
exactly are these companies
selling and how are they using the data
that we are generating as readers.
Philip, thank you for the links.
Some other reasons why
these are problems is that oftentimes
authors and course materials selectors don't have
the information or the incentives or
the options to do
something that's a little bit different.
If an author does not know that they
could maybe author a book
and then say when it's out of print,
I want you to make it automatically open access under
this license or they might say,
I don't want to work with the commercial publisher.
Maybe I will work with a group like
the Open Education Initiative through
the university libraries to publish the work
or work with Virginia Tech
publishing to publish the work.
We know that readers really favorite lowest cost,
and we know,
anecdotally anyway, that it's pretty common for
people to look for the course materials online,
which has a lot of ethical issues,
but we understand why people do it.
We do not encourage it,
but we know that publishers respond to that too.
What's the impact of students
not being able to afford the materials?
Definitely not purchasing so you
can't keep something that you don't have.
Lower grades, sometimes course failure.
These data are from a very large Florida survey.
We are just getting Virginia data.
There's an event during
Open Education Week that
we'll talk about the Virginia data,
and using this and other specific questions
that are benchmark to some of the prior surveys.
[NOISE] I borrowed this slide from my colleague Kayla,
and there are a few different places
to locate open educational resources.
One of the main places to look is OER Commons.
We do have a local learning object repository
that's primarily for library instruction.
You probably have heard of MIT OpenCourseWare and
then two others that
we talked about a little bit earlier,
[NOISE] OpenStax and the Open Textbook Library.
I want to encourage you also to think about
how open education and OER
can recenter education on students,
so you make it less about the learning resource,
less about the professor,
less about the cost of learning,
but more about the students because
you can make or adapt materials with students,
not just for students as consumers.
There's a lot of benefit
to embracing these practices that I think
serves as a corrective for some of the things that
happen in higher education
that we're really not happy about.
Giving others credit is really important.
Sharing, using open licenses,
integrating new ideas about teaching and learning,
giving feedback, receiving feedback.
These are some of the values
that are embedded in this work.
I will let you take a look at these later,
but these are two different projects where students
have made significant contributions
to sharing or to
adaptation and sharing in open resources.
You have two questions and if you don't
have any right now,
please add some to the chat.
Does anybody wants to ask anything?
You could just probably raise your hand as well.
"For MIT OpenCourseWare, can you
access the instructor materials rules,
the class materials?" I don't know.
I know in MIT OpenCourseWare,
I know that there are things that you cannot access.
They don't tend to be assessment materials.
If they do offer assessment materials,
then they're not restricted
to just faculty or grad students
so your undergrads could get
into them too if that's your question,
are there things that are only for
assessment that instructors could get into.
The other thing that you might mean is
instructor materials like slides and
examples and teaching ideas,
not just curriculum resources.
Yes, some of those are also there.
I think we'll move on to Jonathan Petters and
let him talk with you a bit about open data.
Jonathan, if you would go ahead and unmute.
I am unmuted.
Great.
Am I driving these slides,
should I share my screen whatever you want?
Let's have you share your screen.
Okay, I shall share my screen. Slide showing up?
Yes.
Good. Okay. Great. Thank you, Kim.
[NOISE] Let me share my video as well. Start video.
Hi, everybody. John Petters
and we'll talk a little bit
about something a little different,
providing open access to data,
not educational resources,
not publications and manuscripts.
I won't talk a lot about business and
cost models in this discussion
because they don't exist yet.
Don't worry, the publishing
enterprise is trying to find ways to
make money off this like they do off other things.
But it hasn't happened yet.
We're not going to talk a lot about
cost and business models,
it's going to be more introductory about
the concepts behind open data
and some of the challenges we face in making this happen.
Following a little bit of what Philip was
discussing regarding Scholar Communications,
take a quick little historical perspective on things.
For a long time, Western world,
350, 400 years now,
primary ways research results
have been shared is in books and
journals and fast-forward to the future 21st century.
How are we sharing most of
our research results in journals and in books.
That changed a whole lot
these days in how we're doing things primarily.
But there is this new wild thing called the Internet.
Maybe you've heard about it.
It's a great. It share pretty cute puppy pictures.
But it also means we can share a lot of
other things than just text in print.
We can share a whole bunch of
other things associated with our research.
We can share software.
We can share the data underlying our results,
we can share particles.
We can preregister our trials
of research before we even do them.
There's a whole bunch of other stuff we can
share now, very easily,
where previously it was much more challenging to share,
share a piece of data or you'll
get gigabyte or a megabyte of data before the Internet.
But now for anybody who
has an Internet connection, this can be done.
We can do this and it's much easier.
This is not the same thing.
One generation ago, 90s, 80s,
the idea of sharing such things so easily
was not realized, but now we can.
We can share other research outputs.
What does this allow if we
can share the research outlets like data,
I'm going to focus primarily on research data.
But you can think about these other things when I
say data software protocols.
Well, like if it's a facilitate new research pathways,
if we provide the data
underlying a bunch of research publications,
that data can be aggregated together
from this study and from that study and they
can put them together and we can do
a new study involving all of
these data products all at the same time.
Do a meta-analysis, for example,
or just combining data
from one discipline to another discipline.
Creola for new research.
Share your work. We're doing research.
If you've ever really tried to
replicate a research paper,
probably you didn't have enough details
to do it just from the narrative.
If there's lot more stuff that's going on,
that's not in the publication
itself and it's much easier to figure out
what a researcher has done if you can see the data
underlying the research and
the techniques and all that other stuff.
This goes hand-in-hand with transparency.
So we can see what other people are doing,
but also be in a position to
reproduce or replicate what they're doing.
[NOISE] Depending on what discipline you work in,
this could be something you might have heard of.
The concept of a reproducibility crisis.
As a crisis sometimes it's a strong word,
but there are sometimes disturbing stories that come out.
This one comes out from a well-known story so they called
the Amgen study from 2016 where
this biotech research company tried to reproduce
50 or so studies
that were peer-reviewed published studies,
it can only reproduce three out of 50.
That's disturbing.
We'd like to think that research we're building
our work on is progressing.
We build on top of it and we keep on progressing.
Well, if we can't reproduce the work previously,
it poses a problem for us as researchers.
The data being made available,
gives us a better opportunity to
reproduce the work of previous folks.
Those are all the happy fun things,
happy fun reasons why we should do this,
but also funders and journals more and
more are requiring this to happen.
Journals are requiring a data
associated with the manuscripts being made available.
Funders are saying, especially the federal funders,
government funders, while the taxpayers paid for this,
they should be able to see it.
More and more you're going to see requirements
the data is made accessible,
including from the research you're doing here at
Virginia Tech. That's all well and good.
We have many good reasons to share data.
Well, there's a lot of modern issues to get us there.
One is technical. How do we share data?
There are technical questions around doing this.
How do we build the infrastructure
necessary to make this easy?
What's a dataset?
Is a fun question we can think about.
What constitutes a dataset is one good question.
Well, we don't have all the technical issues resolved.
It's not necessarily simple,
storing up some files on a website and calling it a day.
There are a lot of other things we do when we share
data and provide long-term access to it.
Not entirely insurmountable, there's enough resources.
That's another issue. We also have legal issues.
Sharing human subject data publicly and
openly is a very challenging thing to do,
is against the law.
We can't share personally identifiable information
without the consent of the research subjects.
If I put up data like that
in our repository hit Virginia Tech,
I'm just helping the researchers break the law.
That's a breach of confidentiality, that's bad.
How do we share this kind of data?
Well, there are things you can do,
but we have to be more
bright again than just storing files on the internet.
De-identifying data is one way to do it.
There are many techniques we can use to remove some of
the identifying information from
human subjects data so that we
can put it up available online.
But they're making sure to do this and do this right
so people's identities are
not compromised is a challenge.
There are other legal options.
Data use agreements are one way to
share sensitive data of any kind,
whether it's human subjects or not.
But now we have to bring the lawyers in to help
us figure out how to do this appropriately.
More onerous and sometimes challenging.
Technical barriers, legal barriers,
also cultural barriers.
We haven't been sharing data.
Sharing data is not part of
the research academic practices,
so that's one challenge.
We also have this other challenge
of what research is being done.
I use the terms Big Science and Long tail here.
Big Science is data science and research that's centered
around large instruments or
the communities are allowed to come together and are
working on one big experiment.
You see this in particle physics,
you'll see this in astronomy,
environmental science to some degree.
Those folks are working together and
they have to share the data with
this large community anyways.
There's already a feeling for how to
do this and how to make it happen
because they've been doing it already,
whereas a mechanical engineering group maybe,
or political scientists working by themselves or in
a small lab long-tail research
haven't been doing this and
having been sharing their data.
Not really sure why would they want
to is very different thing.
A lot of research is done in
the long tail of research and scholarship.
This is also alluded too.
It's also disciplinary differences.
Some fields, sharing data is
something that has been done for awhile and the other
one's not even remain considered at all.
An example that's not big science
is some genomics research
because some of the push from the Human Genome Project,
if you remember that or have heard of that
from around 2000,
really pushed genomic folks to think
more about sharing their data and now they do.
There's more wider sharing even in
the long tail of research. Dollars.
In order to make open research data a reality,
it's going to cost somebody some money.
That's always hard to come by.
You have to have a lot of
positive reasons why you might want to do
this. What do we do?
If we want to try and get data openly available,
two good acronyms you can learn so you think
about data and research data being made available,
FAIR data and TRUSTworthy repositories.
Fair is an acronym that stands
for findable, accessible, interoperable,
and reusable, so trying to make
the data openly accessible.
In this case, we're talking about open data.
I can say that FAIR data is not necessarily open data.
But in this case, we're talking about
open data, that's what we mean.
Making sure it has the appropriate documentation
so that others can reuse that data.
Put into formats.
Interoperable, you can think about formats that are
open and easily brought together,
harmonized with other data in similar format.
Something like an open format like CSV or
tabular data, non-proprietary formats.
Findable, you can find it online somehow.
[NOISE] I won't go
into all these parts of the trustworthy repository,
but the point here is that we have to have
places for the data to be
put and the data to be made accessible.
The general term we use for that
in research data sharing is called a repository.
We have to have repository infrastructure
that allows this to happen.
We need repositories that are
transparent about how they do
their things, that they're sustainable,
that they last longer than the grant,
that they have the appropriate technology,
that they're looking at user communities.
We need more and more of these things.
We run our repository here on campus as well.
Another good type line we can use for
research data is we want things to
be as open as possible and as closed as necessary.
Not all of research here is going to be made openly
accessible for national security or sensitivity reasons,
but where it can be made available,
we should aim to make it available
and create the infrastructure
necessary to make it available.
[NOISE] I like this triangle.
This is from our colleagues at the UVA,
Brian Nosek in Center for Open Science,
about how to incentivize change,
going from the bottom to the top,
making it possible with infrastructure,
making it easy with good user interfaces and experience,
making it a normative thing,
making it something that communities typically do,
providing incentives to make it rewarding.
Eventually, once you've
gotten ground based off this thing,
then you make it required for
the people who don't really want to do it,
and they're never going to want
do it. Tell them they have to.
At this point for data here at Virginia Tech,
we're working some and all of these different pieces.
We're working on developing infrastructure,
we're working on making it easy,
and talking to people like you about
why we should do this and what the rewards are.
Policies are also being developed as we speak.
It's a complicated place to work in research data.
There are many different important players.
There are businesses and
non-profits looking to push for research data.
This is an international group, global group,
Research Data Alliance that's important in this work.
I mentioned our colleagues up at UVA,
the Center for Open Science,
which Philip mentioned,
the Open Science Framework is one of
their applications that they develop.
These are both groups trying to advocate
for more open research,
advocacy groups in DC
advocating for policy changes around this.
Also, the federal funders have
a bunch of data sharing requirements
that they make available.
The SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing
and Research Coalition provides
access to a whole nice application that shows you
all the research data sharing requirements
by US federal funder.
Publishers like PLOS has had
a public access to data or requirements since 2014,
I believe, so it's been a while.
Of course, finally is the libraries,
where I work in data services.
We also provide services,
and we provide guidance to researchers on how
to deal with this new world of
open data and we hope pushing for research data sharing.
We're happy to help. There are our counterparts at
other research institutions and research libraries.
[NOISE] I saw a question in the menti,
but I quickly added a slide in
for how do I find open data?
This open data thing is a new thing, how do I go find it?
The other question you could ask is,
well, how do I publish my data?
I've got three websites here
and these are links as well,
and they're in the slides now, Google
has a dataset search.
They use a particular metadata schema.
You can go find datasets
associated with different subjects.
They just developed this a couple of years ago.
If you know anything about how Google works,
I think of them as they're like a careless child
going through a forest and just ripping leaves off trees.
Sometimes they make something with
and sometimes they just throw it away.
We don't know how long Google
Dataset Search will be around,
but it's a really cool tool
right now. It can help find data.
Re3data, the registry of research data repositories,
it's a place you can search
for repositories that might
be applicable to your research,
searching for your discipline,
searching for keywords in your research.
You might come up with repositories
that are relevant to the research you do.
You can either find data
in those repositories that might be
relevant to your work or you might
also find places you can publish your data.
After you've completed your degree
and you're trying to make some of your data available,
if you choose to do so,
you might be able to find a place to put your data.
They have about 2,000 repositories
indexed or so around the world.
It's worth checking out re3data.
Lastly, we run a repository
here at Virginia Tech called,
and Philip is adding the links.
Thank you, Philip. The Virginia Tech Data Repository.
We can help you get your data associated with your
graduate studies up and available, publicly accessible.
We've done it for many graduate students
as long as our repository has
existed. That's not what I wanted to do.
I clicked the link instead of just going forward.
Really that's all I had to say.
I'm happy to answer questions. I see one.
But if you have questions on sharing data
openly and any questions on research data,
we have a large stuff on data services,
Virginia Tech Data Services and libraries to help
with all different research data questions,
finding data, analyzing data,
processing data, visualizing data,
and sharing and publishing data,
one I'm in charge of,
and that's how to get to us.
We have the link for the website
and that's our email address,
dataservices@vt.edu. I'll stop there.
Thank you, Jon. You do have one question already.
There's a question. Do open access and
open data overlap any way?
Yes.
We're talking about open-access with respect
to publications, so manuscripts.
That's what we're specifically talking about.
That's the fun thing when you say the word open access.
Open access to what?
Generally, we use the term for respect to publications
and manuscripts. The answer is yes.
When I would say something that we've liked to see
if we have manuscripts come out and are published,
we'd like to see that the manuscripts are
connected to openly available other research products,
so that when a publication comes out,
you have a link to the data from the publication,
a link to the research protocol,
a link to the software, all
from the publication and vice versa.
I have datasets upon our repository,
they linked to the associated
publications should they exist.
Having links to all these different research products
is going to help
our researchers find all the different parts.
The other thing I'll say and I'll
try and be short on it,
there is an important difference in
that the legal framework
around data-sharing and rights
around data in the US is really weak.
That's very different than printed and written works.
Whereas copyright has been around for
a long time and everybody understands a copyright.
Everyone has an idea of how copyright's supposed to work.
Sounds like everybody understand copyright work.
Maybe I need us. I don't know.
But the law around these things are very different,
there's an important distinction,
which is why I love the reason I don't talk too much
about legal around data.
But they do overlap, and they
overlap with educational resources and [inaudible]
Seem there's another question.
Does Virginia Tech do DOIs for theses
and or archive data so that they can be found forever?
That's really a question for both Jon and Philip.
Jon, I'm going to take your screen-sharing.
I'll stop sharing.
Momentarily. That's better.
I can start answering.
Yeah, go ahead and give your response to this question.
Sure. I will answer primarily for archive data,
we have two separate repositories here.
We've got a data repository and we've
got an institutional data repository,
an institutional repository in
which Virginia Tech Data Repository and VTechWorks.
Within the data repository,
we provide DOIs for all published datasets.
When we publish them, we
make sure the requirements are met.
We publish datasets, we provide DOIs with them,
which are Digital Object Identifier,
that's what DOI means, so
that they can be found forever.
Forever is a long time.
I wouldn't want to say forever,
but the intention is that we are
in charge of these object identifiers,
so we can make sure that they always point at
the appropriate resource as things are going.
We have to manage those DOIs to make sure that
they point to those things as time goes on.
However, I'm glad you brought that up though,
because a big important thing that repositories do and
feel the same thing is to make sure that
these things are findable at the links,
these DOIs links that are provided.
If you know anything about surfing on the Internet,
does anybody say surfing the Internet
anymore? I'm so old.
Anyway, if you try and go find things online,
very often you come up with broken legs.
This thing was here, but there's
nothing here now, I don't know what's going on.
With DOIs, we can help mitigate that problem.
I'll let Phil talk about DCs.
For DCs and dissertations,
we do not use DOIs,
but we use a system called the handle system.
These are persistent links very much like DOIs.
In fact, DOIs are implementation of the handle system.
They are very persistent links.
If you use the handle as a reference to
your DCs or dissertation,
that link should always work.
But as Jon was just saying,
linking to things on the Internet is a big deal.
I just saw someone on Twitter today said there are
two kinds of links and
links that are broken and links that are going to break.
Hopefully that does not happen to DOIs and handles,
we're certainly working hard
to make sure that doesn't happen.
But on a slightly different topic,
if you are linking to anything that does not have
a DOI, a handle,
it's a good idea to use the way back machine
or Perma.cc or something like that,
to archive that link,
because if you are
linking to a website or something like that,
the rate of link breakage is very high.
We're basically accumulating data or
evidence in our research and pointing people to,
this is where I get this, this is where I get that.
When those links break, it's a big deal.
In the legal community in particular has taken up
Perma.cc to archive all their links
that go into websites and things like that.
I'll put a link about Perma.cc and we do
offer that as a service and
the libraries to make sure that links don't break.
Great, thank you both.
I am seeing nothing in the questions,
you still have area.
I am wondering. I'm assuming that students still have
questions about the topics we are discussing.
If you do have questions,
please either put them in the chat.
Good, there are more in the chat.
Great. Let's take a couple more and then
let's jump on into
talking with our panelists about their experiences.
The purpose of this conversation is really
to make this information
available to students who are
planning to become professors.
We want this to be relevant to you.
Let us know what your questions are.
Jon had a little bit of disconnection there for a moment.
Phil, can you answer the question.
Someone was just going to ask about
the way back machine if
it's a best practice to cite
web pages using the way back link.
I think it's a good practice
to use any one of those services.
Way back is probably the best known.
Perma.cc as I mentioned,
is taking off in academia,
particularly in the legal community.
If you go to a law journal,
you'll see a lot of links to websites and they'll have
the full website link followed
by Archive at this Perma.cc links.
They're just recognizing that a lot of links get broken.
There's been a research
that a lot of links
and Supreme Court decisions were broken.
That was really a huge shock to legal community,
and so they took up Perma.cc,
which is hosted by Harvard,
created at Harvard Law Library.
We decided to also host Perma.cc and so we can sign
folks up and you can get a permanent link.
It archives the webpage and you get
a permanent link to that archived version.
Another issue, there's really two issues,
one is that links completely break,
you get a 404, the other issues
that a lot of websites change.
What you see today may not be what you see next week.
If you're using links as
evidence of something in a paper,
it's really important to archive those.
Great. Then there's a question.
I think this is for Jon,
is there going to be mandatory to
guarantee open data to publish in a journal?
Do you want to address that, Jon?
Is it going to be mandatory?
It depends on the journal. It's as
to what they're going to do.
What I would recommend is when you're looking
at submitting a manuscript to a journal,
you should look at what they're
requiring and what they might say around data.
You can generally go through the authors
guidelines and look up data
sharing or data availability
or something like that, research data.
[inaudible] A lot of times when I go into,
[inaudible] just look up the word
data and see what comes up.
You'll generally see what guidance they have to give.
Sometimes they say they're encouraging data-sharing,
they are requiring it,
they're saying more about what
specifically they are requiring, what kinds of data.
Sometimes they don't say anything.
There are many journals that are not requiring this.
It depends on the community,
depends on the discipline.
I would say in general,
the trend is towards more of this data-sharing
and more sharing the data underlying journal articles.
But it is heavily depending on the discipline.
Thank you. Let's turn things over
to have our very patient panelists introduce themselves.
Let's see, you should be able to see my screen.
We have a couple of people that you have not met yet.
You have met the dean,
but let's have you introduce yourself [LAUGHTER]
for those who have not had the pleasure of meeting you.
We would love to know what
your academic background is as well.
Sure. Thank you very much and apologies for being late.
My name is Aimee Surprenant,
I'm Dean of the Graduate School.
I'm also a professor in psychology.
My area of research is human memory and perception.
I got my PhD in '92,
so almost 30 years as a professor,
publishing all different things and
I have plenty to talk about in terms of open science,
particularly with my experience with psychology.
Excellent. We will pick up back on that.
Let's see, Renee would you like to introduce yourself?
Sure. Hi, Renee LeClair,
I'm Associate Professor at the School of Medicine.
My background is in biochemistry in
both basic science as well as now Educational Sciences.
But my interesting foray into OER was really in
generating resources appropriate for medical education.
I'm happy to answer any questions with that.
Andrew? Oh, you're on mute.
Of course, right, it's only been two years.
[LAUGHTER] My name is Andrew Binks.
I'm an Associate Professor at
the School of Medicine here at Virginia Tech,
and I'm a pulmonary physiologist.
My basic science research is on
the neural mechanisms of shortness of breath.
But now I'm really transitioning
into research, into medical education.
As like Renee, I've been very interested in
publishing open resource textbooks as well.
Great. I know a couple of
others of you have advanced degrees,
John, do you want to tell us
all a little bit about your background?
Yeah. Sure. Before I got into this work,
I did a doctorate in meteorology,
computational modeling of
class systems, and reading transfer.
But I got better. I did
a postdoc and then I moved into this work. Yeah.
Great. Just the full disclosure,
I do not have a PhD but I
have a Master's in Library and Information
Science and previously did work in economics.
Philip, if you want to jump in real quick and give
a short disciplinary background, that would be great.
Sure. Like Anita, I also
have a Master's in Information Science.
Great. Our first question is,
what opens have you been involved in
and what was the impact?
Did this help you to reach particular goals,
either personal goals or departmental goals?
I will call on
the first person who looks like they're ready to talk.
[LAUGHTER] how about Aimee?
Sure. I've been involved in open publications,
so I have a number
of publications and open access journals.
I have to say that the experience has been very mixed.
Some of them have
been wonderful and very much like the experience that I
would have with the regular journal
and some have just been off
that we went round and round with reviewers.
Some of the reviewers dropped out.
Some of the reviewers came in,
and we just ended up getting up in the end because
the editor was not helping at all with the conversation.
I've had both experiences.
I've had ones where I had to pay
way too much money to get a paper
published and probably wouldn't do that again.
The other thing that I want to note,
and I don't know if this is just psychology specific,
but the replication crisis business
in psychology has been very concerning actually.
I went to a conference and I
dug up these notes that I took in a conference
because there was a senior researcher talking about
the replication crisis and saying
that there are all these papers that weren't replicable.
The words that he used were bogus, p-hacking,
shaming, massaging data,
cheating, shitty, questionable, nasty.
It was all very much inferring that the people
whose papers were not replicated were really bad people.
Now, one of the studies that wasn't replicated was mine.
It was a study that we did as
a control just so that we could
show that we got the same result that everyone else did.
There were probably about 50 papers
that had that same result.
They tried replication,
they didn't get the same result.
Are we the ones who are
shitty or was there something wrong with the replication?
Well, we can't talk about it.
There's something in psychology called bropen science,
where there are people who pile on people
whose data or whose studies aren't replicated.
I will put [LAUGHTER] the link
in the chat to the bropen science.
It's not all men,
but it is a piling on nasty thing
without any understanding of
the circumstances or thinking about ways in which
we can work together to figure out
why something hasn't replicated.
I have to say that I'm jaded a
little bit on that topic as well.
Open data, on the other hand,
are fabulous and great.
I really encourage graduate students
to take a look and see
what data is out there
that they can analyze in a different way.
It's really exciting to be able to go
back and re-analyze data that
has been already analyzed
to look at it in a different way.
There's an infinite amount
of research that's already been
collected and we can really take advantage
of that so you don't have to
collect all of your own data.
I think collecting data is great.
But I also think that looking at
open data is a great thing as well.
I hope that wasn't too negative.
No, [LAUGHTER] we want to hear what's real.
There's a question, there's a perception,
at least used to be that publishing and open
data journal might not be good for the academic career.
It's less prestigious or maybe I'll just read this.
It is less prestigious compared to
publishing of traditional journals.
What do the panelists think about this?
Is it risky to publish in
an open data journal for one's academic future?
What do you guys think?
Guys and gals.
Yeah, I was going to say, Andrew.
I think the first citation in open education,
I think we've had a really positive experience
that you can speak to for that.
Well, we bought our open access for
our recent paper on the change
in medical education with COVID,
and it was a hot topic so we decided to pay
for the open access just to get the exposure.
Really it's not whether it was open
access or not in terms of prestigious.
The first thing that you're going to look
at is the impact factor of
the journal and that's the primary issue.
The research we do in medical education,
there is not a lot of grant money
kicking around for med-add research though.
The scrambling around even for,
I think it was $3,000 to publish it,
and when you don't have $3,000 you've got to scramble.
It's really is not whether it's open access or
not it's just the impact factor is your primary concern.
One thing I'll note just surrounding
the last couple of questions,
kind of mentioned that we're having the data.
Regardless of whether or not
the journal is open access or
not but if you include the data,
you associate the data associated with the article,
you make that data also available,
they tend to get more cited articles.
The article itself is cited more.
Presumably, you can talk
to those people about why they cited it more,
but presumably, it was easier
for the research to be followed.
That can improve the citations of
the articles that are made available,
whether or not they're made available openly or not and
that's can be a good thing for research careers.
[OVERLAPPING]
Yeah, I agree with Andrew that it's more the journal
than the open access or not. Sorry.
The only anything that we did notice,
anything that's open access,
you expose yourself to
predatory journals coming in
to look for a follow-up article.
Well, even predatory conferences
even tasking you to go and speak at
a conference and you can go to
this prestigious conference and speak to
this prestigious audience if you pay $15,000.
That happens a lot more with
open access because of course,
those predatory mechanisms just
get access to your journal just as everybody else does.
Anybody want to respond to that?
I'm curious, Philip, what do you think?
Sure. I think that's why it's important
to look at indexes and that sort of thing.
Journals that you've heard of,
talking to colleagues in your field,
talking to your advisor,
things like that to make sure that
its legitimate journal is pretty important.
I'd also reiterate again,
regarding the open access charges
that depositing
an accepted manuscript is completely free.
Anytime you're coming up against the big fee,
you have a free option to
take where your accepted manuscript should be essentially
identical in terms of content to
the published journal article and
people will be able to find it via
Google scholar and Paywall and so on.
There's always that option if the money is not there.
Again, there are many journals
that are supported in other ways.
I don't want to give the impression
that open access always means paying a fee.
That's not the case.
In fact, a majority of journals in the directory to
open access journals do not have a fee.
There's also a filter in
doaj.org where you can select for journals,
with and without fees.
That's a useful tool there.
There are two other questions.
One is for Dean Aimee.
"It's interesting to hear about
the nastiness of broken science.
Do you think replicability should still be a goal for
research or is there some other value
or way of thinking about this might be more helpful?"
I don't think it's neither or.
Replication is absolutely important and it should be
something that happens as a matter of course,
and unfortunately, it doesn't start to
get those replication published.
But I think doing
that where you have a replication and then
some other studies that add something new
to the field is one way to go.
But absolutely, I think replication is really important.
It's just you shouldn't take
a single non-replication as
saying that the whole idea is wrong.
You do find through my experience
that people don't build theories,
at least in psychology over a single result and
that's a good thing and that
we allow the evidence to
accumulate before we change a theory.
Is there some value or
other way of thinking about
this that would be more helpful?
I think that thinking
about this as a community and there have been
some really cool examples
of two labs that are fighting over some results.
We get it and we don't.
Actually, getting to collaborate and they do
a pre-registration of their studies and
the two labs work
together on it and the
ethic, I forgot what they call it.
But they're normally fighting
with one another, but now they're working together.
I think that's sort of community is
a really great way of moving forward.
Coopetition.
Yeah or adversarial something or other. Yeah.
That's very exciting to hear
that kind of collaboration going on.
Again, I have had an experience where we were
getting a result at Purdue University where I was,
and the people at
Cardiff University in Wales
were not getting the same result.
Well, if you look at
the subject pools at Purdue University,
human subjects, it's an open university.
Pretty much anyone who graduates from
high school in Indiana gets into Purdue.
Cardiff is one of the best universities
in the world in psychology.
You pretty much have to have a Ph.D.
To get into the undergrad.
I mean, it's way up there.
It's incredibly competitive and
so if you look at the differences in the subject pools,
you can see that you might end up
with differences in the results.
So working together, we figured
out that it was a subject pool difference.
That's great, thank you. One more question
before we jump over
to Andrew and Renee and
introductions there or questions there.
There's a question and then to [inaudible].
"Is there a difference between
publishing in an open data journal
and not an open data journal in
terms of prestige of the published work?"
My intuition is no,
but that's not my area.
[LAUGHTER]
Open journals tend to be a little newer.
Although 10, 15 years is not that new anymore
[LAUGHTER] and so sometimes
if you have a journal that's been around for 100 years,
you might end up with slightly more
but I think that the answer that the impact factors are
probably and how people in the field
see the journal is probably
more important than open versus not open.
I agree with that. One of the major decisions
[NOISE] that you make when trying to
find the journal for a paper is you know your audience,
you have your own journals in your own field.
That sets up the dysmenorrhea,
social shortness of breathlessness researches.
I've already small fields and we'll stick
to the same clump of journals.
I guess that's another point to
make that's got nothing to do with open access or not,
but it's targeting your paper at the proper journal.
That's something that just
oftentimes takes a lot of experience
and really some questions for other people in your field.
Again, in my field we've got
those top journals, Psych Review,
which I've never published in because it's too up there,
and then we have something for a really great,
fabulous result that changes theory.
Then something for really nice solid work
that is just helping
to push the field along a little bit.
You target your article or you
send it to the one that you think is most appropriate.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Moving on to Andrew and Renee in either order,
what opens have you been involved in
and doing things more openly,
either in scholarship and research
or in teaching help you to reach particular goals?
Either a personal goals, department goals,
professional goals, student related goals.
You decide amongst yourself. Who wants to go first?
Renee why don't you go ahead?
My foray into open education was really, I will say,
somewhat selfish in that,
in medical education,
time is always of the essence.
Identifying materials, resources for
our learners is most of what we do.
Traditional science textbooks just aren't
an appropriate resource for our students.
That was my motivation to really write
a resource for my students that
was going to be something that they could,
it was a quick reference guide.
They could get up to speed on a straightforward topic.
I teach most of the foundational
sciences for our medical students,
so really looking at it from that perspective.
Then when I started writing this resource,
really becoming cognizant of
the costs that this was saving our students.
For an eight-week course,
we were asking students to purchase anywhere
between $1,200-3,000 worth of
textbooks for a very short amount of content time,
so one or two sections
out of a textbook and then keep going.
That's really why I started
developing the textbook that we just published
their VxWorks with some significant health from
Anita and the rest of the library team, I will say so.
I'll just jump this question.
We were supported by VIVA,
so virtual libraries of Virginia,
both Andrew and I for this project and it was
a substantial help to
get that grant to allow us to publish these books.
Our lofty goal was to publish a book for every course.
We have eight basic science courses
at the medical school.
Right now we have two of those courses
covered through one of these grants but Andrew.
Yes. So one of the nice,
selfishly we needed to do something.
Medical education has been changing.
It was rather specific infile instead of courses on
physiology than one on
biochemistry than one on histology,
medical education has changed to an integrated approach,
just like the human body's
integrated and all those systems work together.
That's how we're trying to teach medicine mow.
But the textbooks have stayed in those silos and we
expected the students to buy
a great big thick physiology book,
another one on histology,
another one on biochemistry.
I was trying to negate some of that.
We've made not textbook's really flexible.
You can take a chunk of Renee's
and put it next to a chunk of mine,
and now we've got the material for
a class so that students can come in,
prepared and do those clinical cases that
we've got ready to go for them.
It's been really useful.
Doing this without the help of the library would have,
let's say, be challenging,
but it would essentially say would've been impossible.
That was the word.
I'll admit to it.
It would have been completely impossible.
I would have given up a long time ago.
With just some of
the information that you've had earlier
on in this presentation,
we needed to get up to speed and to
have an eternal team turn around and say,
no, you can just take that.
It's open source, we just need to cite it and etc,
and have all that advice and that help has
been invaluable. It's been critical.
I think as future educators or whatever
your career goals are as knowing that there are
repositories of materials that you can use,
that you can leverage,
so it's not reinventing the wheel,
it's just knowing where to find the information
and how to leverage it within
your classrooms so that you can spend time
doing other more creative space type things.
That's been really impactful for my personal career.
I have a question about that.
Do you feel like you have to constantly
be editing it and updating it?
Is it a never-ending project?
That's what my worry would be.
I will say I started this project,
I almost seven or eight years ago.
Up until then I was always like
editing and being reactionary on.
The last couple of years since working with Anita,
it's like the material is the same.
The time to be reactionary and
creative is actually in the classroom.
If I want to change the paradigm,
I can do it then but the glycolysis doesn't change,
so I don't have to do that.
That has been really liberating.
I mean, I think especially for
textbooks now it's like what's the highest,
what's the most important correlate?
For me as an educator,
that correlate should be what I'm doing in the classroom,
not what I'm asking them to come in for it.
That's the beauty of medical education.
I've relinquished that responsibility, it's been nice.
I can't answer the question of
whether or not the perpetual editing
[LAUGHTER] is something that
a lot of people are dealing with.
What I am hearing from a lot of professors
is that there is base material,
there's core material to
a discipline that does not change.
Identifying what that is and then identifying what
other literature someone wants to bring
in from scientific journals.
What other case examples they
want to bring in that are more current is
a really robust way to develop your course.
I think most people who teach with an eye
toward incorporating the newest research do that anyway.
Having the body of work that you can rely on and add
your own stuff too is really valuable.
We have a couple other questions.
I'm curious about this.
From an equity perspective do
the opens improve anything
regarding learning and scholarship?
Do they make things worse?
I think there some a mixed feelings in this area.
I'm curious to hear what you-all would think.
I think it just fundamentally,
having the information open,
whether it be educational or whether it be scientific,
it can never be a bad thing as the critical point
is what the quality of that information is.
Our books have all been peer-reviewed.
A couple of them are still in that process,
but still they're peer reviewed.
But the accessibility is that there's a major difference.
I think for me, this is an improvement.
But we were very conscious about designing our textbooks,
so they weren't just applicable to our curriculum,
but could be used by medical students
or even other health professions.
So that it was much more accessible.
There's a burst of medical schools here in the US,
as well as other countries,
some of which are resource-limited
and to help those students even
just not just pay for a book but have
access to it was something that we bough in mind.
I wish this is
something I wish I had done early in my career
because now I'm getting people
reaching out and saying I'd like to
adopt your book or this is what I do.
I've reached out to other people in
the OER field and said I really like your materials.
Would you mind sharing?
There's that fluid dynamic conversation.
There's sparking ideas for
other research projects or collaborations or support or
mentorship or all kinds of things
that would have been really helpful earlier.
They are great now, but
as a starting educator to have that group of
people that are teaching similar courses
across the university is just even
looking at their course designs,
their materials, it's really helpful,
so I would encourage it.
I want to jump in here that
it's not just textbooks that are being shared now,
it is things like syllabuses and the like.
That is pretty awesome because if you want to have
a syllabus that has black authors,
women authors, authors from LGBTQ plus areas,
etc, those resources are out there.
You just send out a Twitter query,
I'm teaching a course in this. Can you help?
People will just sharing like crazy,
It's quite pretty awesome actually.
I imagine that the library would be open to,
syllabus things as well
if you have a pretty cool syllabus
that you want to share with the world.
We do have some syllabi in VTech works.
I don't know how many, but I
think we have had several people share things that way.
There are few collections of open syllabi that I
can find the links for those.
Phillip did you want to say something?
I noticed you're unmuted.
Yeah, I just want to quickly add I agree
with what everyone said so far.
I think from an equity perspective,
open as a huge advance.
There was an article that just came out in the past week
showing that the journals
that are charging these article processing charges
in a way or putting up
a barrier on the other side of the coin.
Twenty years ago, we had
an environment where scholars from
low and middle-income countries had no access to or
very little access to the reading the works.
Now that's slowly going away and
the barrier is to publishing
the works because of these APCs and journals.
There was just an article that came out in
the past week showing that
fewer researchers
from low and middle-income countries are
publishing and open access
journals because of these fees.
For that reason, in scholarly communication,
it's becoming the focus to move
to journals that neither charge
to read or charge to publish.
That is going to take subsidies.
Many libraries already support journals.
In fact, at Virginia Tech Publishing,
we already host a number of
journals and funders are
increasingly hosting platforms as well.
My hope is that we're in
an interim phase of open access and that in the future,
we will move more and
more towards an environment where it's free to
read and free to publish through subsidies from
academic libraries around the world
and from funders around the world.
I'll say around making data and code more
available as I think I really liked Andrew's comment.
First, with self-assessment available,
it's a base level that's making
it easier for everybody to do their work.
Equality is really important.
That was a concern where we're trying
to start having emerging,
people sharing data and code,
it's going to be equality,
this is a concern right now.
Let's assume it is all equality.
Once we get to that point,
it's going to be
a bit great benefit I think especially for
graduate students because
registrants bar often they're like,
hey, there was this previous student who did
so and so with some of our dataset.
Why don't you just take their data
and you'll work with that.
For most of us, it's a very painful process to work with
somebody else's data or
code because there's no incentive to do it well.
It's just a means to an end.
If we've come to a first-class research project,
that'll improve things for everybody,
and it'll improve efficiency.
However, I will give a negative here, potentially.
Once you have a bunch of datasets
available and a bunch of code available,
researchers and research institutions that have
more resources will be able to better make use of that.
They'll have the resources to aggregate that stuff up
and do research that maybe
once researchers who have
less resources could not be able to do.
That might be a potential negative
on the equity from my lousy, rich,
good producing research universities to do more
with stuff that's certainly
available than other researchers.
Thank you. Let's make this our last question.
"What guidance would you share with
future professors who might
want to make their scholarship or teaching more open?"
Another way to say this is what do you wish you knew
when you were in your grad program early in your career.
Be really nice to the librarians.
[LAUGHTER].
Absolutely. Librarians are your secret weapon.
They know everything and
if they don't know what they can find it out.
Yes. I agree.
Ask lots of questions.
They are very cool people.
I guess the other part
it's when students sometimes
tell you stuff that they like and they don't like,
and it's hard to figure out what's the correct answer is.
Just keep trying new things.
The first time I tried
an open access textbook, the students hated it.
They were just like I want to buy
a book and have it in my backpack.
Now that was 10 years ago and I think that's changed.
But I've thought I
was doing such a great thing and being so great,
not forcing them to buy a book and they were
just very unhappy with me.
Try something, if it doesn't
work, try something different.
[OVERLAPPING] Go ahead.
We have a similar. One of
the parts of the evolution
of our textbooks was to write iBooks,
thinking that we were working
with very technology savvy generation.
This is four years ago.
All we saw in the classroom was the printed out books.
They printed them out and put them in binders.
Know what your audience wants.
Even I ask them before one of the most important part
of the processes in this evolution of our books
was to do a focus group with
the students and take
the first chapter of the first book
and say, what do you think of this?
It's not just what your learner wants,
it's what they really need.
Those things sometimes don't add up.
Be very educationally based with it too.
Final thing I got. The other thing I would really
encourage you to think about is to not silo your work.
That you're teaching,
you spend so much time on,
leverage it as scholarship.
When you start doing that,
your scholarship and your teaching and
your whatever your research is,
they will blend and will make your lives
and your careers much more fulfilling and enriching.
If you place that high level of value in
what you do in the classroom on everything
you're generating there and disseminate it and own it
and be really proud of that. I would encourage that.
Great. Students, you have the last word.
If there's anything that you want to say in the chat,
I'll give you a minute to say it or in Mentee.
But we really appreciate your time.
We look forward to a time when
we can do this in person again.
Thank you very much to each of our panelists.
You do have links to the slides.
We do have the chat.
I'll put together a list of links
and send them to you through Johnny.
Thank you, Kayla for the tech support.
Thank you, Johnny and Amy for the invitation,
and Philip and Jonathan
and Andrew and Renee and Amy
for being here and talking with us.
We really enjoyed talking with you.
Thanks so much and have a good evening.
Thanks, Anita.
Thank you.
Have a good evening.
Bye. Thanks.
Thank you.