[Edward Lener] Alright, let's go ahead and get started.
So I'm Edward Lener,
I'm Director of Collections
here at the University Libraries,
and I'm also chair
of our Open Knowledge Committee,
which includes a couple of
our speakers as well as
others in the room here tonight.
And we have other individuals
representing different areas of
the University Libraries as well.
So this is one of our events here locally
in support of
International Open Access Week,
and it's held annually to
encourage the open sharing of knowledge.
The overall theme of OA week for
2024 is Community over Commercialization,
and as you will learn tonight, community
is a big part of the Open Access movement.
In addition, I want to be sure
to highlight some of
the other events we have going on this week.
So one is our open access policy workshops.
And this will go into
greater depth about how
you can take advantage
of the University's open
access policy to make
your own work open access by
depositing in our institutional repository,
which is known as VTechWorks,
and this workshop is actually
taught monthly by Philip Young,
and he was instrumental in getting
this policy passed
through University governance.
The next one
of these will be on Wednesday at noon,
but you can see some of
the other times as well
if this week is not convenient for you.
So next is a session
by one of our speakers here
today about affordable
and free course materials,
and Anita Walz will be
leading that one tomorrow at
9:30 A.M, and she'll
be sharing a few more details
about that in a little while.
So for tonight's agenda
you can see we're going to have
several speakers and I'll
introduce them a minute.
So we're going to start by talking about
open access in a broad sense.
Then moving on to open educational resources,
open publishing and open data.
At the end of those presentations
we want to allow some time
for open questions and discussion,
and we're really hoping that everyone
chimes in with that portion.
I also want to mention before
introducing the speakers,
on each of the slides
you'll see that bit.ly link,
and that can get you to
the full slide deck both
now and in the future it should be active.
I've already introduced myself.
Our next speaker after
me will be Tyler Walters,
who's our Dean of Libraries,
and he will be talking
about what is open access.
Very simple, easy to
answer question.
[Tyler Walters] No problem, yeah.
[Edward Lener] Next, we have Anita Walz,
who will be talking some
about open educational resources
and touching on some of that.
And you can also
address your workshop coming up.
Next is Corinne Guimont,
who will be talking about open publishing.
And then, last but not least, we
have Brandie Pullen,
who will be talking about their
work with open data.
And then finally, we'll have - familiar to you -
Dean Surprenant, who will be
joining us for the discussion portion,
because she can address things sometimes from
a different perspective than
those of us here in the library.
So, I want to turn it over now and
Please take it away, Tyler.
[Tyler Walters] Great. Thank you. So what is open access?
So this is one of these topics that can take, you know,
five or ten minutes to talk
about or an hour plus, right?
There in between? Not so much.
So we'll keep it brief
or you open that Pandora's box
and there's an awful lot to talk about.
Why don't we begin? Jay, you can go ahead.
So kind of a simple description -
a couple of these here.
But, what is open access?
It's a principle that scholarly
information should be shared,
freely open and available,
typically on the internet
for use and dissemination, and that
the content is usable and
reusable with few to no restrictions.
The few restrictions typically would
mean what's called a CC BY license.
So we're acknowledging who
the author is of the original work.
So when did this all start?
Eh, late 90s, early 2000s.
And this slide shows
where people began to come together,
organized under the Max Planck Society,
which is based in Munich, Germany.
And there was a lot of
delegates, or a lot of US people there,
and it's 2003, and they came up with
the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to
Knowledge and the Sciences and Humanities.
So I'm not going to read all that to you.
You can take a look at that.
But it basically it
says, with a lot more words,
it says something similar.
It says that literature should be freely
available to the public
on the public Internet,
and then it has a long list of things
that you could do with that information.
And I think that's kind of significant.
Again, I'll let you take a look at it,
but there's a lot of things that
you can do with
scholarly information than more
than just reading it yourself, right?
Indexing, a lot of data mining,
et cetera these days.
So stakeholders -
who are these people?
Who are we talking about?
So, some of them are ourselves -
faculty at universities,
researchers writ large.
Researchers are the people who create, share,
help to review, edit, evaluate scholarship.
Of course, they're creating their own.
They're evaluating
typically others, colleagues,
their own work, prior to
publication. With open access -
I'll talk about that a little more,
but with open access,
the act of scholarly publishing
in a journal is pretty
much the same kind of process,
or it goes through a peer review.
Who else? Federal agencies and foundations?
Well, you know, they fund the research.
It's also important to point out,
well, where does that money come from?
Where do
those federal agencies get that money?
Well that's us, the taxpayers, right?
So when research is supported
through a federal agency,
supported by taxpayers,
we've already paid for that research, so
that's an important concept to keep in mind.
Universities and their libraries, of course.
We support the creation of scholarship,
and we make it accessible and
we preserve it for future use.
Publishers and scholarly societies.
Same thing.
They typically are the groups that help
to validate and disseminate, to get the work out.
Next slide. So I was kind of pointing at this already -
the dilemma. What is going on here?
In one slide
I've tried to compile this.
I was very curious,
I just looked up last week -
you know, how many federal agencies
give grants for research, basic and applied,
and what's the total amount of dollars,
say, in the previous fiscal year: 2023 to 2024?
You see, it's almost
$111 billion dollars
in basic and applied research.
And this is all taxpayer funded.
And again, what's the...
[Audience member] In the US, right?
[Tyler Walters] US, thank you. Yes, that's a very good point.
It's just the United States, that number,
so we're not talking
about all the other countries
out there that help and support research.
So a researchers first conducts their research,
they publish, they work with the publisher.
Typically when they do
that in a traditional sense
they sign over the rights
to their work. The copyrights
go to the publisher, so if
the publisher wants to reprint,
redistribute, do something else with
the text, they can do that.
Faculty, of course,
they don't just turn over their rights.
They end up working for free, sometimes.
They give peer review of articles,
They help with editing activities.
They help in that publication process,
for sure.
And then of course, after all of that,
publishers sell it back to us, universities,
at a pretty exorbitant price.
You'd be surprised how much we spend on, well,
our entire collections budget
is a little over
$12 million dollars at the library annually.
So it's a lot - it addresses
other things than just scholarly literature.
But it includes a lot,
and there's a lot of limitations on
that agreement when faculty
are signing over their rights to a publisher.
A lot of the agreements typically
limit what the faculty member, the author,
can do with his or her own works,
such as utilizing them in a classroom.
So, to get off the trouble,
some benefits to all of this, of course,
is, it's public access to new knowledge.
Anybody can get this information.
In fact, in US,
and probably beyond, a big group
of people who are very interested in
open access is the patients' rights movement.
They want medical information.
They want information from the
National Institutes of Health
and other agencies, other institutes,
to get to that information right away.
So, greater visibility for
the scholarship, if it's open.
There as a study done,
gosh, it's been a while now,
maybe 2015, 2016?
That showed that open articles,
open scholarly articles, were cited up to 19%
more than a typical article that would
be closed or, what we call behind a paywall,
and you have to pay the publisher to then
have access to the articles.
So there's potential, of course,
to increase reputation, increase visibility.
And because of that kind of broad global access,
there's always the possibility
of other researchers seeing the work
and thinking in terms of
interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work.
The foundation of that is
it's open to everybody.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about
how is this stuff made open?
So, first one I'm going to pick on,
and you're going to hear
more about these individually,
so I'm going to keep my comments very brief,
but we have digital online open repositories.
This is referred to as green access.
If you ever hear that phrase,
you'll know they're
talking about repositories.
So another phrase for
it might just be a digital library.
We have one.
We mentioned it already VTechWorks -
that's our institutional repository,
or I tend to call it a scholarship repository.
It's full of
students theses and dissertations,
articles and papers from
faculty and students.
Yeah, anything that's
scholarly in that sense,
this kind of repository can hold it.
Now, you kind of wonder,
well, how do the publishers feel about that?
Well, for years now publishers have actually
had what they call a self-archiving policy.
You can find it inside
the journal with all the other things
that they print about.
They'll mention usually
a self-archiving policy.
They allow authors to
deposit what's
called the "author accepted manuscript."
So this is not the
finished version, where the publisher
is laying out and
typesetting and
printing and using certain fonts,
and the like. It's the Microsoft Word document
or PDF document that
gets signed off on by the publisher.
So the author can take that and
place it in an open repository.
Again, green access.
And our repository here has
been around for quite some time now - 2012.
So it's 12-years-old,
and just this past year,
we passed 1 million items
in there. And I think there is
about 11 million page views
last year in the repository.
So it's a very well used repository.
People all over the world are looking
for research
being done here at Virginia Tech.
So another mode of access
is the open journal.
This is referred to as gold access.
So this too is a lot
like a traditional journal
in terms of process,
in terms of peer review,
but their business model
is typically different.
It's not charging all of us for
a license fee or a subscription
to have access to the journal.
There's various ways to do it,
but a pretty popular one these days is
what they call author paid charges or APCs,
where once the article is accepted
the author pays a certain amount of money,
and these range. It could be $1,000,
it could be 3 or $4,000.
Maybe there's more? There's higher than that?
But that range is
what you see an awful lot of.
Sometimes journals don't do that.
They might be sponsored by a foundation.
I know of a couple of those.
Those are lucky people.
For sure. They get to do that.
Again, I would emphasize that these,
despite a difference in business model,
these are articles for
a journal that are still-
they go off for peer review,
they have comments,
the editor works with the author on these
and then publishes it in their journal,
which is typically online
and, again, open content.
And a lot of disciplines have this.
I would say most of this started in physics,
and some of the life sciences,
but it has spread.
It's pretty much every field
has at least some
of this kind of publishing going on.
Open research data, we're
going to hear more about that this evening.
We do have a data repository,
that too you'll hear more about
so I'm not going to steal thunder here,
but modes of access
is what happens with the data.
Now, frequently, there's a need to see
researchers' data that undergirds
the findings that they're
publishing in their articles.
And there has been quite the movement to make
those data sets openly available as well.
So researchers can do research
again the same way
or to compare and look at findings.
It's really critical to be able to,
I think, have access to the data
and that's a pretty common desire these days.
So less about research, more about education,
which you're going to hear from my neighbor,
to my right. Open educational resources.
These are open, well,
open educational materials.
They can be open textbooks.
That's a pretty typical item
that we're talking about,
but it can be any kind of material, academic,
scholarly material utilized in
the classroom for educational purposes.
And it's the same kind of premise
that it's created in one way,
funded in one way as opposed to selling
a book to you, the reader, and
paying for it. It's free to readers
in that regard. So that's
my very quick overview of open access.
I hope I've set up a few people
to talk some more. I do
have in this slide and the slide afterwards,
I gave you the links to
some of the items that I was referring to,
so you're welcome to get
the presentation and look at those links.
Thank you.
[Anita Walz] Thank you.
My name is Anita Walz,
and I'm the Assistant Director
for Open Education and
a Scholarly Communication
librarian here at the library.
And, just want to remind you,
please add comments to the chat.
If you have particular questions,
we'd really love to
have things to talk about,
and you can talk amongst
yourselves as well as in chat.
So you are probably going
to be involved with teaching,
research, or service in
your future academic career.
And these are not the right slides.
Yeah. You know, I have them pulled up,
so let me just- if it's okay if I share?
[Someone else] Yes. [Anita Walz] That would be preferable. Great.
We are having very slow slides.
Okay great. Okay. All right.
So I direct the Open Education Initiative.
You can read more about it here.
I'd love to hear from those of you
who are in person or online.
I have a few questions for you.
So please raise your hand
if you are considering teaching.
Okay. And some of
you- are you already teaching?
You're already teaching. Great.
Please raise your hand if you are-
if you have heard of Open Educational Resources.
Few hands. Okay. And yes,
please feel free to raise
your hands virtually. I have the chat open.
I would love to see what's going on. So-
And then please raise your hand if
you have heard of creative commons licenses.
You familiar with CC licenses at all? Great.
Okay, that really helps me understand
where you're coming from and
what is relevant to today.
So before we talk about OER,
I want to tell you a little
bit about open education.
This is the umbrella movement under
which open educational resources sit.
It is a complex and quickly changing area,
but it's both a movement and
a philosophy and a set of practices.
It's often applied as a tool or a lever
to expand access both
to education and to learning materials,
to achieve more
affordable education for students,
to bolster an institutions reputation,
to promote equity inclusion,
as an outlet for author
professional development and creativity,
and then a venue for
disciplinary contributions.
So that's sort of how people tend to use it.
But it also has
some characteristics that are very
different than a lot of things in higher ed.
In particular, the research environment.
So it's student centric.
It's cross cutting. It is K12.
It's community colleges. It's R1s.
It's non profits, for profits.
It's all of those things.
There are lots of
different people involved in this.
Primary motivation
for open education is sharing.
Sharing of information, sharing of resources,
and it's very values oriented.
Quite honestly, it's one of
the most welcoming communities
that I have ever been part of,
and part of that is because
inclusion and enabling possibilities
is in the DNA of this movement.
Um, so this movement
leverages open licenses, open access,
open pedagogy, publishing,
all the lots of opens in education.
And does a lot of
really creative things to see- what can we do?
How can we benefit our institutions?
How can we benefit our students?
How can we benefit our faculty?
So if that is of
interest to you and you're a grad student,
and you maybe also like penguins,
the GO-GN Global OER
graduate network is a great place
to get plugged in
and to learn more about this.
It's a network of grad students all over
the world who are really
interested in these kinds of concepts.
If you're more on the research side,
there are two great places to go and dig
for the research AAC&U
has a new OER research database,
and then the Open Education
Research Group Review Project
is another really great place
to find - what kind of research are people doing
around this work? Around these practices?
So just a note.
So, some of you said, "Yes,
I know what open educational resources are."
They are a lot of things.
They can be books. They can
be something like an online calculator.
They can be virtual reality.
They can be a musical score or a video series.
They could be a set of test banks.
Really, the format does not matter.
It's how something is available and licensed.
So they are free to anyone.
Usually on the Internet as Tyler mentioned,
and permission is given to customize them.
Often through something like
a creative commons license.
This description is-
definition is adapted from
the Hewlett Foundation and
is the one that's used in
Virginia Tech's guidelines for
open textbooks and open
educational resources.
So, okay.
Creative commons licenses.
Some of you said, "Yes, I know what those are."
And a lot of you probably have seen these
but not known what they are,
because they're a lot of places.
So, creative commons licenses allow
anyone to- when derivatives are allowed,
they allow anyone to adapt a work,
and they allow anyone also
to redistribute that same work.
This is not the case when there are-
derivatives are restricted.
So, if you want to make
a new version of something,
some of the creative commons licenses say,
"Uh-uh, you can't do that."
Others of them say, "Yeah great."
The purpose of that is largely because
localizing resources makes them more
understandable and accessible to
students in different contexts.
You are in the desert and
all your pictures in your book
are desert pictures.
Somebody who lives in the mountains
might be like, "This isn't for me."
So localizing is something that a lot of
people really like to do with
open educational resources.
Why is this important to you?
Why do I think it's important to you?
So you're going to
have a lot of important decisions
in your future about research,
teaching, service.
How do you do these things?
So specific to teaching,
maybe you say, "Hey,
this looks like a ton of work to
create something like this," and it is.
Corinne will probably talk more about that.
But you can find resources that are
already made that you can use at no cost,
that you can share with everyone, anywhere.
So there's a body of work
that's available for you.
It doesn't have everything.
Which is part of why we've
been involved in creating.
But if you are interested,
and at some point, you'd say,
"Hey, I think I want to do this,"
know that there are very significant impacts.
So what you do matters.
I want to give you two examples.
One is- and this book is
also floating around
somewhere out on the tables.
This is one book that came out in 2020.
This is a pandemic book.
But it's called Strategic Management.
It's adapted by a Virginia Tech professor
from a book that used to be very out of date.
It has been wildly popular with
over half a million downloads of the PDF.
That doesn't include any of
the online HTML usage.
It's adopted at over 150
institutions around the world.
We know this because we have a form.
We tell people, "Please
tell us if you're using this."
So more institutions than that use it.
And then at Virginia Tech,
if we're as conservative as possible,
it saves students at least
$180,000 of not having
to buy course material.
If we're being less conservative and
assuming that all students
would buy a new book,
which we know they don't,
it would be saving students over
half a million dollars for the life
that it has had from 2020.
So, the works are also original.
So this is a book by
an Emeritus professor now
from Fish and Wildlife,
and he wrote this over a four year period.
There isn't another book like it.
There's not a book on fish conservation
for the intro college level.
And people are really,
really excited about this.
There is a wonderful review that
talks about how the book
is very student centric,
and it's really lovely testament to
this work and to the effort that
the professor and the team
put together. Put into it.
So this is adopted, that we know of,
at just over 41 institutions worldwide.
And the 10,000 PDF
downloads don't include, again,
the online or HTML access.
But I will send this
around. It's really beautiful.
Our graphic designer did
a really nice job with it.
And this one is peer reviewed.
The Strategic Management book
is not peer reviewed.
So there's a combination
of works that we were involved with.
So other impacts at Virginia Tech,
we're likely to hit the
$4,000,000 mark this semester.
We just passed [unintelligible]
and I don't have data yet.
But we're really close to saving students
$4,000,000 since inception of the project,
which is really, really exciting.
We know money is not everything.
We really- we see
that oftentimes the effectiveness
of an institution that says,
"Hey, let's share," can really
lend itself to a
better perception by the public,
by taxpayers, by other institutional peers.
Students and parents, of course, love it.
So this is- these are good examples
for some of our partners in
the library consortium to
bring to the state legislature to say,
"Hey, our money funded this."
"Look what we can do." Though that has gotten
bills passed and gotten
budgets allocated to those kinds of programs.
So. these have a lot of
different impacts. But I want to say
the most interesting one
is one you maybe wouldn't
think of, unless you are a student.
That when students respond to surveys,
they will often comment
about the affective impact on them.
"My professor cares about me."
Oh. "That makes me want to learn."
So you know, there's
kind of this implied contract
between you and your professor.
Like, they work,
they help you with stuff,
and then you engage and you have
this kind of exchange.
So we see that exchange more with this,
where students say, "Oh,
my professor cares about me."
Okay. Um I'm talking way too much.
Let me skip that.
I want to mention that there are
some implications of cost
for students that have academic impacts.
Students who can't afford a book or
course resource, don't perform
it as well. Pretty obvious.
And then there's new data,
this came out last week,
the VT Student Food
Access and Wellbeing Survey.
We actually have worse
food insecurity in
comparison to the last time
the survey was run in 2019 at Virginia Tech.
So, wherever you end up,
whatever institution you end up in,
be it an R1, be it something different,
get to know what your students need.
And this is an opportunity for you
to engage them in
a really different kind of way.
So- leave you with the last question,
"What can I do to make what I do more open?"
Just want to encourage you in that direction.
Would you like to continue the slideshow?
[Corinne Guimont] Sure. [Anita Walz] Okay. [Corinne Guimont] Thank you.
Hi, everybody. So I'm Corinne Guimont,
I am the Associate Director of
Publishing in Digital Scholarship,
and I oversee Virginia Tech publishing,
which is the library's Open Access,
digital verse, publishing imprint.
We'll get to that a little bit,
but first let's chat a little about
why should you publish
open access? Why should you consider it?
I guess- so I caught myself doing
this last week and I know
other people have done this as well.
I was emailing back and forth with a professor
about project management and digital scholarship.
He shared about five articles with me to
take a look at, to just review,
doing a quick environment scan.
Three of them were open access.
One I had access to through the library.
Another I didn't have access to.
Guess which article I skipped.
And I know we've all done that before, right,
especially if you're just
doing a quick environmental scan.
You want to see what's out
there, get an idea.
You might go back to that article if
you see it cited in a lot of places,
you might request it through Interlibrary Loan,
but I did initially skip
that and I caught myself doing that,
and I thought, "That is exactly why
I published open access. Right there."
Because from that author's perspective,
what happened was, they lost a reader.
I'm less likely to cite that material.
I'm less likely to
share that material with other people.
So suddenly, that material
isn't as visible or
impactful. So from publishing Open Access,
as we've kind of discussed,
and we'll continue to discuss,
can really benefit readers
by reducing barriers to access.
You're creating more opportunities for
people all over the world
to access that material.
But it's also increasing
the visibility and the impact of
your work as the author, and
being able to share that more.
Was it 19% more citations
for for articles published Open Access?
So just something to mull on there.
And think about that next time you
skip an article because you're like, "Oh,
I don't want to pay 40 bucks for
this article," or, "Is it really worth it?"
Or, "Maybe I'll come
back to it if I see it cited
in a few more places."
Because I know I've done that several times.
Then also, the possibility,
we've talked a lot about Creative Commons,
the possibility of retaining
the copyright of your work.
So as you publish
open access, a lot of the times,
those, not all, open access publishers,
but many, most, do
apply creative commons licenses.
Those allow you to retain
the copyright of your work,
meaning you can reuse your work however.
So for example,
with Virginia Tech Publishing,
our authors sign an agreement
that gives us permission to
post that work online.
They still retain copyright of their work,
and they're able to do whatever they need to.
So we did have a book published in
2018, Standpoints, out of
a graduate level course in sociology,
and one of the authors of
the book chapters wanted
to reuse their material
for their dissertation,
and they reached out for permission,
thinking that we had permission when we
published it and I said,
"No, no, that's yours.
You can reuse it however you want."
So think about it from that perspective.
Especially as grad students,
if you're able to publish open access,
you can reuse that material as you
go in to publish your thesis
or dissertation or even
if you go on to publish a book,
in X role as a book chapter
or an article or however.
Then there's the more concrete
of why we should publish open access.
There's the institutional policies.
Virginia Tech does have an open access policy.
We mentioned it a few times already.
So checking that, if they're at
Virginia Tech or any other institution,
if there's a policy like that.
And then the funder mandates.
So a lot of- more and more frequently,
a lot of the federal funding agencies are
requiring people to publish
the outcomes of their work open access.
So checking with the grant, if you do receive a grant,
checking what those mandates
are is really important too.
A little bit about how
to publish open access.
And I'm going to say the process
for publishing open access
is really similar to the process
for not publishing open access.
It's a little bit more different on
the publisher's end in terms of how do
we- Open Access isn't free to everybody.
Publishers still need jobs.
People still need to
be paid for the work that they're doing.
So there is that business model aspect.
But from the author's perspective,
it's really the same.
You're still going through
the peer review process,
you're still going through the copy editing,
the layout, the type setting,
all of those processes.
So if you're thinking
about publishing open access,
the best thing you can do is talk to
your publisher, or potential publishers,
to see what options they have out there.
A lot of them might have
an option to publish open access
or a hybrid model.
They might allow you to share
that free print version
of your article in a repository.
Look at what those options are.
If you're thinking about
publishing in an Open Access journal,
there is the
Directory of Open Access Journals,
DOAJ.org. I checked this today-
There's over 21,000 journals
listed in this list.
So there's tons and tons in there.
Over 13,000 of those journals
are diamond open access,
meaning they have
no article processing charge,
no APC at all.
So if you're concerned about APCs,
there are lots and lots of
journals out there that don't require an APC.
If you do have an APC, there's ways
that you can kind of plan for that ahead.
Quick note on APC.
I've heard APCs all over the place.
The highest number I've heard
for an APC was $20,000.
Just going to get on a little soapbox
for a second and say- you don't
pay $20,000 to typeset an article.
It does not cost that much.
And if you're thinking about
Open Access book publishing,
there are lots of options out there.
There are
publishers with OA options.
There are publishers,
sometimes, will not charge anything,
the more diamond open access model.
There are also places that do what's called
BPCs - book processing charges. I've seen those.
I saw- I was talking to somebody today
in visual arts about a book
that's, like, $4,000 BPC.
So some of these are really reasonable costs,
and we can plan ahead for them.
It makes it possible.
Some of I've seen as much as $20,000.
$20,000 for a full book is not unreasonable.
Just for the record.
There are subventions out there like
TOME. At Virginia Tech
we have TOME:
Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem.
This came out of a five year program
through the Association of Research Libraries,
so a lot of other institutions have a similar program.
So whether you're at
Virginia Tech or another institution,
think about programs,
look for opportunities like that.
And then, as we've already mentioned,
you can share a version
in your repository.
This is oftentimes the
not-published or not-final version,
so it might not be typeset,
it might not have that final proofread
or copy edited on it,
but there's still the- the research is
still there and that's still making it
available to other people.
Here we have VTechWorks.
There are also a lot of
different discipline specific repositories.
So I personally have
shared some stuff in
something called Humanities Commons,
and that's very much
a discipline-specific repository
for humanities commons.
And check your discipline.
Think about where
you're also finding research.
If they're looking for repositories,
where are you pulling materials
from for your discipline?
And is it possible for you to
share your material there as well?
The other thing to know about repositories,
a lot of times these have the
download data for you,
and that's something you can
add a line in your CV.
"My article has been downloaded
1,000 times." That's showing
the impact of your work.
So, being able to
show that impact of your work
to potential employers,
to promotion, to tenure,
anything like that is
really beneficial. So thinking
about ways that you can kind of use
that stuff to your advantage as well.
So some general tips and tricks.
Talk to your publisher.
I'm just going to promote that as much as possible.
A lot of them have options.
You might not know about
all the options until you talk to them.
So just ask them what
their options are. Plan ahead
and budget for APCs and BPCs and grants.
You can talk to your department.
Oftentimes departments will have options,
Including different subventions.
I'm also going to throw out- some of
the granting agencies also have
small grants for publishing.
So, I work a lot with
humanities faculty and we received
a grant last spring from
the National Endowment for Humanities
that was like,
just $5,000 to help make
a monograph open access.
So that was an option
because the author had originally
received granting funds from
NEH to do their research.
We were able to kind of tag on and
add a little bit of extra funds to help
cover the cost to make that open access.
So think about that too.
And again, talk to your publisher.
If you know that you're
publishing a book and that
there's potential funds that
they can look for,
maybe suggest and work with them
to see if that's a possibility.
And then look for those diamond open access options.
Those options that don't include APCs or BPCs.
See what's out there.
Check the Directory of Open Access Journals.
There's also a Directory of Open Access Books
that typically list books,
but you can also look at, maybe, who's
publishing these open access books.
Get an idea out of there.
And I believe we have a lot of
information on our Open Access LibGuide
through the Library as well, in terms
of different options that are available.
Just a quick note about
Virginia Tech Publishing.
So we are all diamond open access.
We have about 13 active student-
or 13 active journals,
four of which are student journals.
We've published about 34 books and reports,
a dozen or so digital scholarship projects,
more multimedia based projects,
then a dozen or so media projects.
And we've worked a ton with Anita over the years to publish
about - counted them up today on our website -
25 open educational resources.
If you're interested in seeing more,
check that out.
And again, we have this here.
Other institutions have something similar.
So always check and see what's
available at your institution,
whether you stay at Virginia Tech
or move on to someplace else.
I will leave that, and hand it over to Open Data.
[Brandie Pullen] Hello, I'm Brandie Pullen.
and I'm the resident librarian
working in data curation,
and I'm going to talk to you
today about open data.
So here is a common scenario.
You found a published article
super relevant to your current research topic,
and you want to dig into
how they got their results.
However, important details for
understanding this process are
not found in the article,
and who knows if the corresponding author
will respond to a request for them?
How many of you have
actually tried to reach out
to an author and actually got a response?
Oh, wow. Okay. That's more than I expected.
But yeah. What if that wasn't
a common scenario?
So reasons to share your data,
pulled from the UK Data Archive.
There's quite a few. They include:
maximizing transparency and accountability,
enabling scrutiny of research findings,
increasing the impact and visibility of research,
promotes innovation and
potential new data uses,
leads to new collaborations between
data users and creators,
encourages improvement
and validation of research methods,
reduces costs of duplicating data collection,
and provides important resources
for education and training.
Another reason to share your data is that
your grant or journal
could require it.
So, some journals require you to publish
your data if your manuscript
is accepted for publication,
and you may have to share
your data if your work is grant funded.
Places like the NIH, NSF,
USDA are requiring you to
address the sharing of data in
your grant proposal itself.
And then once-
they expect you to follow it
through and actually publish your data.
So, some barriers to data sharing.
There are- It can be technical.
If you publish through us,
we take away the technical aspect.
We're here to help you with that.
It can be an investment.
Sometimes publishing your data costs money.
If you try to publish somewhere like
Dryad, they can charge you money.
But our data repository is free to use.
There are some legal and
ethical implications.
So if you're doing work on
an endangered species or
if you have human participants data,
maybe your data shouldn't be shared.
And there's also
cultural barriers to data sharing,
lack of academic incent- incentives, sorry,
and your published data
doesn't go towards promotion
and tenure and things like that,
but it's still really important.
What does all of this mean? Aim for
fair data, data that's findable,
accessible, interoperable,
and reusable, and trustworthy repositories.
Trustworthy repositories value, transparency,
reproducibility,
user focus, sustainability, and technology.
These pictures are a little blurry.
I'm sorry. They are all the Internet has.
And we are here to help.
There is a class offered in the spring,
GRAD 5024,
It's a one credit pass/fail class
on best data management practices.
It's going to be taught
asynchronously online this year.
And the Virginia Tech
Data Repository is a service to
help you publish your data with support
from library faculty and staff.
So we're here to help you publish your data,
be it for a requirement,
or you just want to start practicing
good data management, whatever you want.
And- you graduated. What happens to your data?
So one last thing.
For most funded research,
Virginia Tech does own your research data
and your advisor is
responsible for stewarding it.
You should make a usable copy of
your outputs available for your advisor,
following good data management practices.
Inventory what you will, or have created,
and talk with your advisor about access to
the data you will create
well before you graduate.
This is one of those things where you
get to the end
of your time here and you think,
"Oh, I'm going to continue
this research on to
get my PhD," or something like that.
And sometimes you can't do that.
So just be sure that you're speaking with
your advisor and you know what's going
to happen to your data once you graduate.
That's the end of the slide show.
[Edward Lener] Okay everybody.
Keeping on time too, which is great.
So that leaves us plenty of time
for questions and discussion.
What, maybe want to start there?
[Presenters] There are no questions in the chat right now. [Edward Lener] Alright, well. Start in the room here.
We do have a few prompts
if we don't get any questions.
Let's see what we get. Yes.
[Audience] I was kind of wondering what the author- Oh, see now I've already-
the- when you pay for the open access?
This is purely just something
that my faculty,
my, you know, advisors always say, is that you
shouldn't be paying for publications.
How does that translate?
You know, what are you supposed to be doing? [laughs]
Is it typically like
your department that pays?
I mean, I know you talked about these grants,
but is that the norm for these?
Is it really out of the person's pocket?
[Anita Walz] Can I answer that?
So you actually don't have to pay
if you want to post
your preprint because of
the University's open access policy.
That is a
a policy that's very similar to what
Harvard has, that allows
any Virginia Tech affiliate,
students, faculty,
staff, visiting professors,
research professors,
anybody in that collection,
to post their pre-print in VTechWorka.
So technically, you don't have to
pay to do open access. [Audience member] Yeah, here.
I guess I meant- just like being general.
[Anita Walz] Who typically pays?
What we're seeing are people being
encouraged to write APCs
into their grant money.
I have really mixed feelings
about that because we're
both paying the publishers
to get access as a library,
and then the authors are paying
the publishers to do open access.
And so there's a lot of- There's a lot of
double dipping that can
go on in this kind of situation.
This is not an ideal situation
that we are in right now.
I would say for you here, as a student,
you should not pay out of your own pocket.
We did have a fund at one point
for paying those kinds of fees,
but the amount of demand for what
we call the Subvention Fund
really just completely outran it.
We ran out of money within
the first- two months?
[Tyler Walters] Mm hm. Yeah. Yeah, end of August.
[Anita Walz] Yeah. So that is not an option any more.
Partly because we could
fill it up and keep filling it up,
and it would just be this drain.
Does that help? A little bit?
[Audience member] Yeah, it does.
[Aimée Surprenant] So faculty would normally pay it out of a grant?
If they didn't have a grant,
then they wouldn't send it to a journal
that charged- pays charges.
Again, it's not ideal.
It's not, I mean,
this idea of open access journals
that charge is really
relatively new. 20 years or so?
So it was- absolutely
used to not be an option at all.
And then as some of you in your
discussions noted,
there are some scholarly publishers
that don't charge- that do open access
but don't charge page charges.
And those are usually subsidized by
whatever their foundation
is and things like that.
So you have to make
a lot of choices when you publish,
and this is just one of them.
[Corinne Guimont] One other thing I'll just add on
is just consider,
like, how much is the APC too?
Is it a ridiculous amount?
If we're looking at like $1000.
That's pretty reasonable in
terms of making sure that this is done right.
Yes, don't pay for it out of your own pocket,
look for other options still,
but thinking about,
"What is the publisher getting out of it?"
Are they getting a $20,000 APC?
Because that's just insanity.
To be frank. Because that's-
they're getting way more out of it than that.
But a thousand dollars?
And sometimes they're looking at
small society publishers that
are using that to keep their society going.
And that society might be benefiting
you as a researcher as well.
So I was just at
a conference a couple of weeks ago,
and I met several people from
different scientific societies
and stuff that were charging
$1,000 to $1,500 APCs
for some articles because that's what kept
their jobs going,
and what allowed them to work.
So I think also, kind of, like when you're
thinking about those decisions
that authors have to make,
and the decisions that
you need to make thinking about,
"Okay, is this a reasonable fee or not?"
And it's a call the
author ultimately makes, I think.
[Edward Lener] Another thing I'll add is we have more
memberships, and what we
call Read & Publish agreements,
where that's already been
built in from the start.
So it'll vary publisher by publisher,
and sometimes title by title
within a publisher,
but there are many journals that
you can publish in at a
reduced or sometimes no cost,
as a result of these agreements.
[Aimée Surprenant] And sometimes the publisher
will negotiate that with you themselves.
So if you sent in an article
that gets accepted and you say,
"Look, I'm a poor grad student,
I can't do this."
Sometimes they'll publish it for free.
Not often, but sometimes.
[Corinne Guimont] And sometimes if you catch
a newer journal or something,
they'll have a, "Hey, we're trying to
publish the first many-
we're trying to get a name out there.
We're waiving APCs for X many people,"
but a lot of them do have programs to help
grad students and early career professionals.
Always talk to your publisher.
[Anita Walz] There's a question in the chat.
"I was interested to know
where you all think the direction is going.
Do you see major journals, i.e. Cell,
Nature, shifting into even more open access,
or kind of staying where they are at?"
[Corinne Guimont] I was just at a Society for Scholars
New Directions conference
a couple of weeks ago.
Yes, they're shifting toward Open Access.
[Tyler Walters] Is it Nature that's charging the $20,000? [unintelligible]
[Corinne Guimont] I was actually teaching a yoga class,
talking to people and someone
anecdotally telling me,
"Oh, I'm trying to publish
this article Open Access
right now and it's $20,000."
I was like, "Wait, say that again."
But yeah, it's probably
Nature or Elsevier or something.
But this conference says
that a lot of we're talking about,
how do we financially do this open access?
How do we move in this direction?
How do we do that?
So, I do think that that's happening.
Whether or not the APCs of BPCs are
going to be reasonable is a whole other story,
but I do think a lot
of them are looking at how
do we do the open access work more often.
[Tyler Walters] I think the author page charges
are becoming controversial.
And I think the main reason for that is
the commercial scholarly publishers
have picked up on this,
and there are plenty of them,
and they'll tell an author, "Well,
for this fee, if you pay us this extra fee,
we'll make your article open for you."
A group like Elsevier Publishers,
they are the largest STEM publisher,
Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine,
publisher in the world,
they will tell you that they are the largest
open access publisher in the world.
Yeah, there's a lot of debate about that.
If you can find
their articles amongst the journals
that they put online,
it's not easy to-
it's ironic- it's not easy to find.
But I think because commercial publishers
have picked up on this method,
there's a lot of Open journal publishers
now that are moving on.
They're trying to think of
other ways to do this,
because it's really- it's getting out of hand.
The page charge rates go up every year.
Just like subscriptions
and licenses were going up
crazy amounts every year.
So now these APCs are starting
to do that with those kinds of publishers.
[Audience member] To that point about trying to
find other business models,
I was just curious if there are,
kind of like, innovative ways that diamond
journals that maybe don't have
a foundation or don't have a source
of funding, that are doing
cool things to try to keep themselves going.
[Aimée Surprenant] And there are small efforts that way
in various societies and various scholarly societies.
I know that the European universities
are a lot more militant about
paying for journals that-
like Elsevier and the like- than American libraries.
And so I think there have
been small attempts to have, like,
you know, someone hosts a server
and everyone can just
file their stuff on there.
But there's always
this tension with peer review and,
you know, the impact of the journal.
And so, you know, as a researcher,
that's another thing you got to think about.
Is how much- what's the impact of
this journal on my field?
Does my field really look at
impact as an important metric, which most do,
not all, but most. And so some of
these more innovative ways
of doing publishing are
not terribly-
they don't have that metric, right?
And so- and then-
there was a bunch of stuff published
during the pandemic on some of
those free sites that wasn't peer reviewed,
and so how do you kind of manage that?
And it's actually not an easy thing. So, yeah.
Good question.
[Edward Lener] That was a great point too about
the differences globally, because in Europe
there's often national-level support and things
that is not always apparent elsewhere.
[Audience member] I'm just wondering about impact factor and OER.
I'm sorry, open access journals.
Are there some well-known
open access journals
that also have a high impact factor,
or does it just vary by
field that you're trying to
publish in and- [Corinne Guimont] I'm not sure.
[Anita Walz] It funny, because it changes, right? And so-
[Tyler Walters] For library science-
it's gotten pretty high.
I couldn't tell you what
the number is off top of my head.
But I think what's
important is what you asked
about impact factor,
and that too is getting very controversial.
There's a lot of research
that's showing that it really doesn't tell
us about the impact or
the usage of scholarship.
So metrics and measurement
is a whole another aspect
to this stuff about being open.
And I think everybody who writes and
publishes wants
their work to mean something to somebody else,
other than just to ourselves.
So this is a whole another component
to this topic of open access.
[Anita Walz]I think that's a really good point.
So the impact factor
measures the journal, not your article.
It's about all the articles in the journal.
It's not just your article.
So if your article is
really exemplary and the rest are meh,
you know, that's the kind of
impact factor you get and vice versa.
So it doesn't-
it tells you about the journal.
Not your specific work.
[Corinne Guimont] I think there are ways to think
about maybe the journal
itself doesn't have that impact factor,
but maybe there's ways that you can
demonstrate the impact of your work.
You can look at, a lot of the journals will
share the acceptance rate of articles.
So sharing within your materials,
what's the acceptance rate
of this journal article to
show how often are works accepted,
how important is it
that my piece was accepted.
Again, a lot of these journals,
all of our journals,
for example, have the download
numbers on each and every article.
So any author can look at
their article from our website and see,
"Okay, this has been downloaded X many times,"
and that also gives an idea.
And again, once you know how many times
it's been downloaded and viewed,
that can help you make that case.
So you might not have that well-known
impact factor number,
but I think there's still a case
for you as a researcher to make to
whomever about
the impact your work is having.
[Anita Walz] One of you asked about-
are there different business models?
And something that we've
seen in the last eight years or so,
are editorial boards of journals,
revolting and saying,
we want to take our journals somewhere else.
And those will often
end up being funded by something like
Open Library of Humanities,
or, I'm looking at
another one that didn't do that
but has a nonprofit- some kind of body that
it's attached to that
helps them with infrastructure,
that helps them with economies of scale.
I don't know exactly what they do.
But that's a way
that academics have found to reduce the APC
to zero and eliminate subscription fees,
is to have a sponsor that
is the home for that journal,
and bears a lot of
that cost as part of what they're about.
I don't know if you want to
talk about the journals here.
[Corinne Guimont] Yeah. So all of our journals,
we're backed by a foundation
known as the University here.
So all of our journals are covered by that.
We do have one journal
that's currently charging APCs,
that's a very small amount
and they do a lot of
waivers for authors looking to do that.
I would say, I know we've
just recently brought one
over from a university in Australia,
but I believe it was
open access there as well.
So that's how it works there.
There are a lot of university libraries with
the journals program that
offer diamond open access journals out there.
So kind of paying attention to those.
Again, the Directory of
Open Access Journals today said over 13,000.
I literally checked this at like
four clock today, 13,000 journals,
diamond open access, no APCs.
So there are journals out there
publishing peer reviewed works
without an APC.
I will say, I think in
terms of the business models,
like I was at a humanities
conference back in August
and talking to somebody
from Canada who was trying to run a
journal, and he was piecing
together grants every couple of years.
So people do try to do that.
And I'll say it's very hard on
the journal editors
from everything I've heard, is that
they're constantly trying to piece together grants.
It's hard to keep regular editors
employed, regular people going.
So they are out there, and
if there's a way to support those-
absolutely.
People are trying to do that kind of stuff.
[Tyler Walters] Yeah, another business model,
as we already mentioned- Ed had mentioned,
to just keep that in mind what
we call read and published licenses.
So libraries have been paying
publishers forever, right?
For the right for our users to read.
So we've kind of smartened up
in recent years and said, "Well,
if we're going to pay it for people to
read, you should take that money,
and if anybody from
our University publishes with you,
they shouldn't be paying for it.
It's already paid for by us."
So that's a growing model.
I don't think any one of these
is going to be the end all and be all,
but I think you're going to see a lot
of diversity in that.
And I think that's really, very good.
The read and published license
came out-
University of California started it,
and it was allowed a boom in the field.
Because their ten campuses
basically told Elsevier publishers.
"No." And they dropped
their journal package for
about a year and a half.
That's- yeah. It's disturbing.
[Edward Lener] And the read and published can vary
a little by publisher,
but usually it's centered around
who is the corresponding author
on the paper. So if you're
collaborating with several other authors,
and some across institutions,
it's whoever is identified as
the corresponding author
for that affiliation.
[Aimée Surprenant] So can we talk about predatory publishers?
What advice do you have? [Edward Lener] Stay away.
[Corinne Guimont] How many of you have gotten e-mails already,
"Published with this journal"?
Yeah. I've gotten some.
"Published with this social science journal."
Why do you guys e-mailing me?
I'm a librarian with a human-
like an English degree? Why? Why?
So always ask questions.
Ask questions of yourself:
"Is this within my field, even?"
[Tyler Walters] Even Google
the name of the journal, and the publisher.
You'd be surprised. They are a problem.
There's plenty of them that change
one word in the title of the journal,
so even the best of faculty members
thinks that's their journal
that they want to publish in.
And they find out it's
somebody else. Sometimes those work.
They publish, sometimes they don't.
It's been a difficulty, certainly, for
the open access movement because there's
just been this underbelly,
just kind of ripping off people
and charging and not necessarily publishing.
Basically they're fake journals.
[Edward Lener] Some of the things to look for
are really quick turnaround time.
Also if it's not in your area of expertise.
Some of those types of things.
But yes, the titles can often be very similar,
which makes it more confusing
than than it should be.
And I've gotten ones
where there's an element of truth to
it because they're citing,
"Based on your paper XYZ,
we want to encourage you to publish in our journal."
So they picked up
on a piece of actual information,
but then they're trying to use that
to leverage for their advantage.
[Tyler Walters] There's now a professional society
for open access publishers,
and that really came about because of
the predatory journals. To really
start to codify what are best practices,
what are transparent and honest practices.
And so it's easier to tell the difference.
[Edward Lener] And one thing that we do as a library is we
support things like the DOAJ and that
professional society that Tyler just mentioned,
with, basically, contributions
each year to help with their management costs
and thing. Because it does cost money to
do those types of activities as well.
But it's sort of investing in
the infrastructure side of it
to make open access work and
be possible and help do some of that evaluation
and sort out the good ones from the bad ones.
[Aimée Surprenant] And there's a continuum, right?
That's the hard bit is that.
And some seem to evolve over time.
So I have taken
the paper that I published in
Frontiers in Psychology off of my CV
because it is no longer
a reputable journal in psychology.
It was 20 years ago when
I published there, but it's no longer.
And some of the MDPI journals
are going back and forth
about whether that's
editory or reputable or not. I don't know.
And that's a pretty
big group of journals, right?
A lot of our students put
those journals in their reflections.
So, how do you manage that?
I guess what you do is you talk
with other people in your field
to see how reputable it is.
[Corinne Guimont] I was just going to say, talk to
your advisor, talk to your professors,
talk to your colleagues, your peers- [Aimée Surprenant] Your society.
[Corinne Guimont] Reach out to the library, too.
You can reach out to your liaisons,
you can reach out to me.
I'll look into a journal for you.
If you're really not sure, check around,
ask questions, see if
you know anybody who's published there.
Maybe even look through
some of the articles that have
posted and see if you recognize any names.
[Edward Lener] I have seen it kind of go both ways.
Some kind of go downhill and others clean
up their act and become more reputable. [Aimée Surprenant] Absolutely.
Thanks, Anita for that link.
That's an interesting-
For the editorial board.
I thought it was linguistics.
I was going to say linguistics, but- Yeah.
[Anita Walz] For those of you in the room,
I just put in the chat.
There's a link to
a keynote that the editor that went from
one journal to- and pulled,
with his board, pulled
the body of work-
or their future journal to another place.
Really interesting. So it's
pretty inspiring. Makes you want to go
out there and flip journals.
Would be really cool.
[Audience member] I'm curious about creative commons
and the process of, like,
if I created some kind of
educational material
that I wanted to publish,
but I wanted to have some kind of protection,
do you just put
creative commons on it, or is
there a process you go through?
[Anita Walz] So your work, by virtue of it
being your original work
is automatically under copyright.
So that is the most protection you could get
other than putting it in
your bottom drawer and telling no one it's there.
So if you're looking for more protection,
what I would do is register it with
the US copyright office
to say, "Hey, this is mine."
Creative commons, if you
put a CC license on it,
it kind of moves it
from all rights reserved
to some rights reserved.
So it doesn't give you more protection.
It gives you more,
theoretically, more communication
with a potential reader who could say,
"Oh, this is what I can do with this,
this is what I can't do with it."
All that said, there
are going to be rogue users.
And there's nothing that- I mean, yes,
you could hire an attorney and do take
down notices and scrub the web and I'll,
you know, search the web for your work.
But there are going to be people who
use things in ways that are not approved.
So I think your question it could be-
I would encourage you to think
about,
"What is the potential impact of my work,
if I were more open and
how open am I comfortable being."
So something can be
still under copyright and be free on the web.
It's just that someone can't-
You can't copy it and put it in a-
you know, you're not supposed
to e-mail it to somebody.
You could point to the link,
but there isn't a mechanism
other than pointing
back to where you found
that in-copyright work that
doesn't have a CC license
that is a legal way to share.
So what I often tell people is,
"Do you get more from restricting access or-
"And then what do other people get?"
"Do they get more if you share?"
"And what exactly are you giving up?"
So I think there's a place for
all the range of
licenses and not licenses on things.
[Aimée Surprenant] Is there, like,
a form to fill out with the library?
I'll say, you know, "I'm registering
this as," you know,
some creative commons?
[Anita Walz] So, two response that one.
There's a form if you want to register
your copyright with the US copyright office.
Costs like $35. It takes a long time.
But then if someone infringes your rights,
you're welcome to sue them.
That's the criteria.
You have to have it registered.
Creative commons licenses-
It's like a sticker.
You can put it on your work and say,
"Okay, this is my original work."
"I have noted all of the pieces
that don't belong to me that
maybe I used under fair use or
that I had permission to use.
I called this out, so it's really clear,
what's under an open license and what's not."
And you can either use
the words- I would do both.
I would put the icon on, and I would
also add the words.
"This is license under
a creative commons attribution
blah blah blah license"
so that it's machinery readable
and then it can be found. Yeah.
[Edward Lener] And that slide we had about
creative commons listed
several different choices.
So even within that,
there is kind of a spectrum
that you can choose from.
[Corinne Guimont] And there is on the creative commons website
a little quiz thing
that you can do that helps you say,
"I want to do this, or I
want to do that research."
It'll help you kind of pick your license
from that point of view. So if you're saying,
"I'm okay with it being used
commercially or I'm not
okay with it being used."
"I'm okay with this or not," and It'll
kind of help you pick
your license from that step.
Sometimes it's fun even if I already know
my license I'll go [unintelligible].
[Aimée Surprenant] Will it show you what
the little logo thing is
that you want, and then you just copy that?
[Corinne Guimont] It gives you all the language.
They can literally just copy over,
pop into your publication,
your slides, your photo, anything like that.
[Presenter] All their stuff includes a link back to
the creative comments page so
that somebody that doesn't
know what that means,
if you've put the right the
URL that they give you,
it'll take them to the page so they
can read exactly what the details are.
Some people can read the little icon.
I cannot.
I don't know what the little icon means,
but it gives you- It take you-
anybody that looks at it can go
right to the page and see the details.
[Anita Walz] That's a great question.
People ask that all the time.
"Where's the form," right?
So because there's no form,
that means there's no list of
everything that has a CC license on it,
which is a whole other problem
slash feature slash bug.
[Edward Lener] Other questions?
Move maybe through a couple of the-
[Presenter] We can look. We've covered quite a few of them.
We talked about the OA on the rise.
I don't know if we need anymore.
We did talk a little bit about that.
[Tyler Walters] We talked about funder mandates.
I mentioned-
[Corinne Guimont] We kind of briefly mentioned funder mandates.
So, what was it? Two or three years ago?
The Nelson? [Tyler Walters] Two years ago now.
[Corinne Guimont] It's the age of my child. Yeah.
The Nelson Memo
came out that kind of mandated that people
producing publications and research from
federally funded grants does require-
and Anita's
pulling it up for the chat-
Does require that material
is published, public access.
[Aimée Surprenant] But you can accomplish
that by doing it in the repository, right?
Rather than- Yeah. Yeah.
[Corinne Guimont] Exactly. That's kind of the difference
between public access and open access.
I public access means that
it's openly available in the public.
Open Access is a little bit-
Open access includes public access.
But yes, so that's the main thing there. I don't know if others have other things to add.
[Tyler Walters] So that memo comes from the White House.
It's the Office of Science and Technology Policy,
they call it- can't remember- Nelson? Alondra Nelson.
She was like deputy- deputy director?
I think there was
another director at the time.
Summer 2023 It came out.
So it is going to-
has really mandated that all federal agencies
that provide grant money to
researchers that you must make
available your article and
your data upon publication of the article.
So right now, policy for some of
the larger federal agencies
is there's an embargo period.
A year? I forget.
[Corinne Guimont] Two or three years?
[Tyler Walters] Yeah, I think it's a year.
I don't think about that.
We've all been working for no embargoes.
But anyway, this is supposed to
take place by the end of 2025.
There are major agencies:
Department of Agriculture,
National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health.
They've already been adjusting their-
what they call public access policies
to incorporate this.
So we'll see.
Are publishers happy about this? No way.
There's been a lot of a lot of pushback,
but that memo and that
approach didn't come lightly.
I spent a lot of time
talking to publishers, to researchers,
scientists, to university people,
all those people involved,
all the actors in this environment.
Prior to that memo coming out.
[Corinne Guimont] I will just add that
if you are dealing with- like Brandie mentioned,
if you're dealing with
sensitive data or something,
there are some loopholes that you
don't have to share if there
is sensitive data in there.
But generally sharing your data,
or anonymized versions of
your data, is
kind of the best practice with that as well.
[Brandie Pullen] So also, in your grant writing
you'll have something called
a data management plan.
That will be how you
outline what you do with all of your data.
And a lot of times,
if you are doing human-participant research
you also have to write it into
your consent form language.
What you will be doing with the data.
And if it is shared or not.
We're seeing a lot of issues
with projects that took place in 2018, 2019,
where they didn't have this language
and now they're trying to
publish in journals and
journals are saying,
"Well, put your data in an open repository for us,"
but their consent language isn't good
enough to allow their data to be published.
So we're seeing a lot of conflict there.
[Aimée Surprenant] And there's actually a big
hoopla in Canada because
their ethics requirements require
people to be able
to say that they want their data withheld.
So, "I'll participate, but I don't want
my data in the analysis."
That's weird, but fine.
But there's another one
that says, "I'll participate.
You can use my data, but you
can't put it in a repository."
And then, C, "I'll participate.
You can use my data and you can
put in a repository."
Is that B one that causes researchers
craziness because they either
have to just throw out the data,
which isn't necessarily
good, ethically speaking.
Or they include it in their data analysis,
but then when they put it in a repository,
their data that they used
to analyze the data for
the paper is going to be different
from what's in the data repository.
So there's a lot of
hard things that you have to
kind of work through when
you're doing something like that.
When you're using human subjects data,
you have to think
through those things and yes,
the IRBs are now requiring you to have
some language in your consent form
about how the data will be shared.
And so, I think
it's a little clearer here in the US,
because if you are
doing the consent form and you say, "No,
I don't want the data shared,"
then you're just told, "Okay, well,
you can't participate,"
rather than collecting the data
and then either throwing out
it which causes all kinds of power problems.
[Corinne Guimont] Project management might- [Aimée Surprenant] Nasty statistics things. So.
But the other part
about sharing data is that in some fields,
it's not clear exactly what
data should be shared, right?
So do you share the aggregate data?
Can we share- You know,
line by line? What is data?
I mean, if you're doing Geosciences,
your rocks are sort of data, right?
So do you have to archive
those, and how do you do that?
What if you have 80 billion-
There's someone in our class who's
collecting so much data, video data,
that it couldn't possibly be archived
in your repository because
it would just use up too much space, right?
So how do you manage those sorts of things?
Is also another really interesting question
that we need to figure out.
[Presenter] Yeah.
[Corinne Guimont] I'm involved in a project right now that
has tons and tons of images scanned.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. Images and- [Corinne Guimont] It's sucking up
a lot of the data repository. Or, it will.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. [Corinne Guimont] Once it goes though, it'll suck up a lot
of that space, and
thinking about that as a thing.
And again, talking to the librarians,
talking to the data- [unintelligible]
[to Brandie] I talk to you about it too.
[Aimée Surprenant] But if you have thousands of hours of video,
that's gunna-
[Corinne Guimont] Yes. [Crosstalk] [Aimée Surprenant] But thank
you for doing the data management course.
You know, something that I don't think-
Well, I certainly had no
project management training at all.
And I have had that many times in
my life when I went back to
my Excel spreadsheet and said,
Is one female or male?
I only have ones and zeros,
and I'm not sure exactly
which way I coded this one.
So yes, making sure that your data
are something that even you can read years later,
much less a stranger, is really important. So that's-
[Edward Lener] That's a great point, though, because we've had
researchers say that sometime
their own data, even though they have it,
they're not sure how to interpret it
because they've forgotten. Because it's been
six months, or six years and then, you know-
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah.
[Edward Lener] Going back to it. So the better practices
in terms of file naming,
having clearer fields, and
all those types of things,
make it easier all around to go over it.
[Tyler Walters] It's a lot of work that goes into making
a research dataset usable by other people.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. It's a-
an enormous amount of work. [Tyler Walters] Well, it is.
I had a faculty member once,
she's telling me- She said, "Well Tyler,
I can hand you a thumb drive with
my dataset on it so that's
a binary file and you can
go pop it in a repository.
Doesn't mean it's usable to anybody."
Yeah. That's right.
But if you're dealing with,
I'll give a quick example,
if you're dealing with
meteorological data, you know,
you need to know- you're taking
temperature and community readings.
You're in the mountains.
So what's the elevation on
this mountain in Peru that you're on?
What time of day is it? What is
existing temperature
and what's the elevation?
There's just a lot of information
that applies to most any field.
There's just a lot of metadata,
we would call it, to document
the data itself for future use,
really. Current use, as well.
[Anita Walz] You should take that for your manuscripts
as well because I think
I have folders full of
"final draft." "final final draft."
"This is it." "This is the last one."
Oh shoot, which one is the last one?
[Aimée Surprenant] Well, other questions?
[Anita Walz] We are all available for future questions.
If there are things that you- that are burning
issues for you, or
that you didn't talk
about, or learn more about...
[Aimée Surprenant] I just want to talk about one more thing.
If you don't mind. And this
is something that came up in my field,
Psychology, it's called "Bro-pen science."
So like anything, there are people
who take a movement
and go way too far with it.
And these are folks who try to harangue
other people who aren't using open science,
and then also try to find gotchas where
the data aren't exactly
replicable or something like that.
And there have been people who have been
sort of driven
out of the field because of things like this,
and a mistake was made
or some other thing
that was unintentional happened.
And so I think
this immediate assumption or jumping to
the conclusion that if something isn't
replicable, or if there's something wrong with
the data that it's immediately,
you know, a terrible thing,
and everyone should be put in
jail, is something that I've seen really-
[Tyler Walters] End their careers. [Aimée Surprenant] End their careers.
There are careers who have been ruined that way.
So anyway. So- [Corinne Guimont] I haven't heard that term before. Bro-pen Science.
[Aimée Surprenant] Well, it's usually these bros, right.
that get together and then mob something else.
Yeah.
[Edward Lener] And with data repeatability,
I was- until recently I was
our chemistry librarian, and one of
the databases we have that I would show in
class has chemical property data.
And you would look it
up for something like a boiling point.
One might say 272 and would say 273. One is 274 0.1,
you know, so pointing out to students
that in the real world and lab, things-
there's going to be
some variation just naturally.
And then occasionally, there would
be values that were totally different.
That was because temperature, pressure,
some other condition was outside
the normal, so- [Aimée Surprenant] Right. Absolutely.
[Edward Lener] [unintelligible] total variation.
But even within the constraints,
there was not- [Aimée Surprenant] There's variability.
[Edward Lener] You know, to three significant digits,
or something, with consistency.
So that's just often part
of the scientific process.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. And early in my career,
we had a bunch
of experiments that were showing one thing.
And there was a group in Wales,
actually at the University of
Cardiff, that was
running the similar sorts of
experiments and finding
something completely different.
And so rather than
point to one another and say, you know,
"You're cheating" or "You're lying" or whatever,
we ran their experiment and got our results.
They ran our experiment
and got their results.
[Presenter] Interesting. [Aimée Surprenant] And we ended up attributing it-
I was at Purdue at the time, and
Purdue undergraduate psychology
is open to anyone.
And there are no prerequisites,
and it's a normal distribution of
abilities at Purdue in Intro Psych,
which is where all of the
subjects were taken from.
Cardiff? Extremely,
extremely difficult to get into.
As an undergraduate institution,
psychology is one of
the top ones that everyone wants to.
So their distribution was,
the top end of the distribution.
So in the end, it's just really-
had nothing to do with
replicating and not replicating,
I had to do with our sampling.
It's completely different.
And so we worked it out,
rather than, you know,
fighting over who's cheating.
That.
[Corinne Guimont] There's an interesting book that I can't- It's about generous thinking.
It's all about providing
that critical feedback without attacking.
[Aimée Surprenant] Right. Disagreeing about something
and then trying to figure out,
and that's for me
part of the scientific process.
It's like my first response
is, "Huh. How come, they're not getting it?"
"What's the difference?" And we worked it out.
But if we had attacked one another,
it never would have
been figured out at all. So, anyway.
Questions? Comments?
[Edward Lener] It feels like a positive note to end on.
[Edward Lener[ Thank you everyone for coming. [Aimée Surprenant] Okay. Thank you, everyone.