Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Open Access Forum for 2021.
We're going to be discussing
Virginia Tech's new open access policy that
was passed earlier this year, back in the spring,
followed by a Q&A with the panelists,
and following that,
we're going to have brief introductions
to Open Data and Open Educational Resources.
You can see the hashtags over there on the lower
right if you are social media inclined,
and there's also a link to this presentation,
which does include a lot of links,
so if you'd like to follow along,
you can go to bit.ly/pfpopen2021.
My name is Philip Young and I am the repository manager
for VTechWorks based in the University Libraries,
and we're really grateful to be sharing this with
the Future of the Professoriate class led
by our new Dean of the Graduate School,
our Dean Surprenant, and so it's great to be
able to share this information with the class.
This presentation is being recorded and it will
be in VTechWorks in the next few days,
if you'd like to come back and revisit the presentation.
We do have Q&A and chat for the attendees.
The Q&A is for
questions you'd like the panelists to address,
so feel free at any time during
the presentation to enter questions in the Q&A box.
The chat is also available if you
have any technical issues or if you have
a comment or want to put a link in there, that's fine,
but please direct all the questions to the Q&A,
and we do have closed captioning enabled,
so you should be able to
access that at the bottom of your screen.
This is part of Open Access Week at Virginia Tech,
it's actually the second event because earlier
today we had a session on
Open Access and Evidence Synthesis,
and that was really interesting to
see this overlap between
Open Access and Evidence Synthesis,
particularly in regards to replicability of studies,
and so it's a good example of the way that Open Access
has these side benefits
that we normally don't think about,
text-mining being another one.
Tomorrow we have two sessions as
part of the Professional Development Network,
PDN, and graduate students
are welcome to join those sessions.
The first one at two o'clock is
about our subvention fund at the University Libraries,
my colleague Gail McMillan will be giving
a session about how subvention fund works,
last time I checked that was
close to being full or maybe full,
and so you may have to
get on a waiting list at that link,
and then following that at 3:00 PM,
I'll be presenting a presentation much like
this one that I usually give to the PDN network,
how to take advantage of the
university's new Open Access Policy,
and so that is
repeated throughout this semester
and throughout the academic year,
so if you can't make it tomorrow look on
the PDN schedule and hopefully you
can find a day and time, that works for you there.
Then Thursday, our final event
is the TOME stakeholder meeting.
TOME stands for Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem.
This is not strictly a VT event,
it involves several institutions,
and it is about Open Access books,
publishing scholarly Open Access books,
and so it's a way of
providing support and subsidy
for publishing Open Access books,
I believe we've had 10 authors here at Virginia Tech,
use the TOME method to publish an open access book,
most of those in the College of
Liberal Arts and Human Sciences,
but I believe there's
one or two in other colleges as well,
so open access books
are a big deal in the humanities of course,
but several disciplines might be interested.
In the first hour that will
probably be the most interesting part of that
because it'll be a round table with
authors who have published open access books,
and so you can get some reflections
and ideas about what was
involved in publishing open access
and the benefits of doing so.
Tonight, our agenda is first
to talk about Virginia Tech's new open access policy,
I'll be giving a presentation on that.
As I mentioned that,
as questions pop up during the presentation,
please enter them in the Q&A box.
Immediately following that presentation,
we'll have a Q&A with
our panelists to address those questions,
the questions from our attendees,
so we should have plenty of time after
the presentation to talk about the open-access policy.
Following that, we'll have
brief presentations on open data and
open education with time for questions after each one,
and there again is the link to
the slides if you'd like to follow along,
check out some of the links
and the hashtags if you want to,
to live tweet, or doing social media during the event.
Our speakers, I'll start out by
talking about the new open access policy,
and then my colleague Jonathan Petters,
will talk about open data,
and my colleague, Kayla McNabb,
will be talking about open educational resources.
Let's get started talking about
Virginia Tech's open access policy.
But first, I want to back up a couple of
steps and give a little bit of context,
and first talk about what is open access,
and this is the definition that I've
been using for many years from Peter Suber,
our guest panelists who is joining us tonight.
This appeared in his book Open Access from 2012.
"Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online,
free of charge,
and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions."
One thing I point out to people is
that this is a two-part definition,
and the first part,
most people understand pretty intuitively,
you can get to the full text of something,
you can maybe download it.
In any case you can get to
it and you don't run into a paywall.
The second part sometimes people forget,
especially when we're talking about
open access colloquially,
they forget that it really
should have an open license on it,
or it should be in the public domain,
and so technically that's
the definition that needs to have both.
Many journals will have
articles behind a paywall for a year,
or two, and then they'll open them up,
but they'll still be under copyright,
which means that you can't reuse them,
so on and so forth,
and so that might be open access,
but they're not free
of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
The way that these articles are free of
restrictions is the application
of a Creative Commons license,
and so you can follow that link or go to
creativecommons.org and see the six licenses
that Creative Commons offers.
You can see an example there,
this CC BY logo,
that's generally considered the most liberal license.
Basically you're giving permission
in advance to download,
to reuse, to handout in class, to text mine,
to do all the things that we've talked about so far,
and notice that attribution is required,
that's already a standard in scholarship,
and so if you use a material,
you have to attribute it.
Giving it permissions in
advance really facilitates the use of research.
There's two paths to making a work open access.
The first, you're probably already familiar
with that's publishing in an open access journal.
Journals can be either fully
open access or hybrid open-access.
Hybrid open access journals are really
subscription journals which charge
an extra fee to make an article open.
Sometimes this method of open access is called Gold OA.
I'm not sure how these colors were assigned.
There's an unfortunate affiliation there with
the fact that you may have to pay to make it open.
But these should always be
under a Creative Commons license,
if they're in an open access journal or if
they're in a hybrid journal.
One of the best ways of finding
open access journals is using the Directory of
Open Access Journals, or DOAJ, that's at doaj.org.
You can do a lot of filtering there by discipline,
what license they use,
and whether they charge a fee or not.
That's a really helpful directory,
and it's also a directory that
we use for our subvention fund.
As I mentioned, some journals,
not all, but some journals
use article processing charges.
To fund a publication,
to fund an article being published in
an open access journal or a hybrid journal.
Generally, these charges are
covered by grants or they're
covered by a faculty's overhead
or startup funds or something like that.
Here at Virginia Tech, we actually
have a fund in the libraries that's
supposed to be a safety net if you don't have a grant.
It does not fund hybrid journals,
but it does fund fully open access journals.
That is open to everyone on campus.
Faculty, graduate students, undergraduate staff,
everyone has access to
that fund and can apply for funding.
The second way, which we're going to focus on
tonight, is archiving a version of your article.
By archiving a version, I mean,
not archiving the journals final PDF
because if you signed a copyright transfer agreement
and that's under copyright of the journal,
it is not legal to upload that to
your personal web page or a repository somewhere else.
These versions are uploaded
to open access repositories. That can be
a disciplinary repository like BioRxiv
or they can be institutional repositories
like VTechWorks.
In the open access literature,
this is often referred to as Green OA.
We're talking about three basic versions
of open access articles,
or of articles in general.
We've already talked about the published version,
which is the nice formatted PDF
that the journal produces.
The other two versions are the submitted version,
often called the preprint.
You may be familiar with preprints because
they really took off since the coronavirus.
One of their primary attractions
is that you can get research out there really fast.
There's lots of preprints on bioRxiv,
medRxiv, about the coronavirus and the pandemic.
Again, the advantage is that
you can get that research out there fast.
You can get feedback from colleagues.
But the disadvantage is that they have not
been through the peer review process.
They're not peer reviewed.
The accepted version is
the version that we're going to be focusing on tonight.
It has been peer reviewed,
it's just not in the fancy final formatting
that the journal is going to post on their website.
These are sometimes called
post-prints to differentiate from preprints.
They should be essentially
identical to
the final published version in terms of content.
The same words, the same tables,
the same illustrations, everything.
This is a way that you can make your work
accessible or give access to your work,
when you have to publish in a subscription journal.
Sometimes as authors, we
don't have a lot of control over that.
We might be a co-author
and the lead author is determined to
publish in a subscription journal, that's fine.
Then you just look at what's
submitted versions you can post.
This generally, at least up to now at Virginia Tech,
has always required journal permission.
On their website or in your copyright transfer agreement,
it will tell you somewhere in
the fine print what version you can post online,
when you can post it.
Journals typically have embargos of 12 months or
more before you can make that
available and where you can post it.
Many journals will have the word noncommercial in
their sites like ResearchGate of proprietary sites,
and many publishers are concerned that
a lot of research is being posted to ResearchGate.
They'll often include the word non-commercial to
exclude ResearchGate and Academia.edu.
I mentioned, until now,
that has been the case.
These journal permissions, there's some evidence that
they've been getting a little bit
more restrictive over time.
That's the case unless
your institution has an open access policy.
I don't know how many institutions
in the United States have a policy
now it's probably more than 70 across the nation.
We are the first institution in Virginia to have one,
so no other university in
Virginia has a campus open-access policy.
Let me backup a little bit
and talk about how this came about.
We are part of a working group
that was created by the commission on
research all the way back in 2016,
and we were charged with drafting
a faculty open access policy.
This was following a presentation
about open access that included
information about faculty
open access policies at other universities.
We formed a working group.
You can see there,
Kevin McGuire's with us, is a
faculty member in Forest Resources
and Environmental Conservation.
Ginny Pannabecker, my colleague in the Libraries.
Cayelan Carey, unfortunately couldn't be with us
tonight in Biological Sciences.
Tom Sanchez is with us in
Urban Affairs and Planning, and me.
We have been working for
the last several years to educate faculty,
do outreach, solicit feedback.
We've done a lot of work in governance.
Several presentations to Faculty Senate, Commission
on Faculty Affairs for several years.
The Professional Development Network sessions,
more than 20 of those.
We really spent several years doing
an outreach to faculty and
getting feedback from them about the policy.
Why do we want a policy?
Well, basically most research articles
coming out of Virginia Tech are
not available to the public right now.
When articles are not available to the public,
we need to think about who's being excluded.
This excludes our alumni.
Undergraduates and graduate students
who graduate and lose
that Virginia Tech affiliation no longer
have access to the articles that we pay for.
Virginia Tech Libraries spend somewhere
around $9 -10 million a year
for access to peer reviewed journal articles.
That's a big loss when you lose
your affiliation with the university.
Many government policymakers don't
have access to peer reviewed research.
Most scholars in the developing world and low and
middle-income countries do not have
access to the peer reviewed research,
because the institutions in those countries cannot
afford to subscribe to those journals and databases.
Then it happens to us too that we hit paywalls.
This is sort of a point of
friction where we can't
get access to each other's research.
Why should we spend time
dealing with that friction when we
can just be exchanging research a bit more smoothly.
Another strong argument for open access
is that a great deal of it is taxpayer
funded, much of it through
federal grants from NIH and NSF,
Department of Energy, and so on.
Or at public universities like Virginia Tech.
We are funded in part by the taxpayers of Virginia.
The argument goes is that if taxpayers funded it,
then they should not just know the research happened,
but also have access to the research results.
There's also self-interest at work here.
Open access does benefit authors,
at least that's what the literature shows.
There have been more than 70 studies on
the open access citation advantage.
Not all of those studies showed an advantage,
but most of them did.
The most recent study from 2018 showed
an 18 percent average advantage and citations
for open access works across disciplines.
There was quite a bit of variation in disciplines.
But overall there is an 18 percent average advantage.
The policy working group felt like
this could be an advantage because in
the Beyond Boundaries documents
that was noted that Virginia Tech researchers are
not as highly cited as some of
the researchers at comparable institutions.
We felt this could be a benefit to
the university to gain a citation advantage there.
Both funders and institutions have become
increasingly interested in broader impact.
If we think of citations as sort of
within, sort of indicator that's within academia,
altmetrics is an indicator coming from outside academia.
What altmetrics are,
is that it measures links to
research objects coming from anywhere on the web.
These can include media sites
like the New York Times, CNN, so on.
It can include policy documents.
Policy write-ups, EPA or other government agencies,
and it includes social media as well,
Facebook, Twitter and so on.
You can get these links.
There have been several studies showing
the comparative advantage for open access works.
To some extent, this makes
intuitive sense because people can follow
the link and then read
the entire work instead of hitting a paywall.
We also have 25 peers assigned by
the Council for Higher Education in Virginia.
About half of those peers
have faculty open access policies.
To some extent, we've been a bit
hamstrung compared to those peers because
they've had a greater ability to share their research.
With this new faculty open access policy,
we sort of level the playing field and we have
a greater ability to share
our research than we did just six months ago.
Of course, access to research is
just a core scholarly value.
If we're researching in the same discipline,
then we need access to each other's works.
Hopefully that should be facilitated,
instead of running into paywalls
and having difficulty finding access to articles.
The language for the policy became
part of an existing university policy,
back in March, Policy 13000,
which is the policy on intellectual property.
This addition to the policy was
approved by the Board of Visitors back in March.
The policy as a whole is about seven or eight pages long.
This is the paragraph that was
added to the bottom of page 4.
What it says is that,
"authors at Virginia Tech grant the university
a non-exclusive license to copyright in
articles in order that they can
be open access in the university repository."
Then our intellectual property people
inserted a sentence.
What this means,
"Provisions of the numbered paragraphs
above" means that it does not necessarily
apply to proprietary research or defense-funded research.
We had no intention of making people,
or forcing people to make things open
that were not open by the terms of the grant.
The author can waive the license
for a particular article.
In other words, if you don't want to do it,
you can waive license or you can
delay access for a specified period of time.
Those are the embargos that I was talking about earlier.
You can embargo your article for six months,
12 months for any reason.
The university's prohibited from selling the articles.
Authors deposit an electronic copy of
their accepted manuscripts within
one month of the date of publication.
I'll talk a little bit more about
that time choice on the next slide.
One nice thing about this policy
is that the nonexclusive license is
returned to authors after deposit in the repository.
If authors want to share
that manuscript on a disciplinary repository
or personal web-page where
they previously were not able to do so,
they can do so now.
That's a nice aspect of the policy.
This policy really expands our rights,
using US copyright law
regardless of later copyright transfer.
What this means is that you
can sign a copyright transfer agreement with
a subscription publisher and still have
the ability to make your accepted manuscript available.
There are very few journals
that may require you as part of the terms,
to waive any policy that you're subject to.
But this is a very few journals right now,
and so you may not run into any.
But just to make you aware it's possible that that could
be in the terms of a copyright transfer agreement.
One question that we've gotten
quite a bit from researchers is,
this is great, I can go back and upload all my articles.
But this policy is not retroactive,
and so it only took effect March 22nd,
and so it's in effect for
any article accepted after that date.
Before that date, you're still reliant on
the journal's permissions to share your work.
But this policy greatly simplifies things
because now it's an alternative path
to immediate open access.
You don't have to worry about
each journal's individual policy,
there's just one policy for everyone at Virginia Tech.
Often if you may
be inclined to look for OA journals in your discipline,
but many disciplines lack them.
One that I can think of right now is business.
In business, they often have journal lists
which researchers are expected to publish in,
and none of those journals are open access.
Many of them have hybrid options,
but there are no open access journals.
For people in business, management,
and that sort of thing,
it can be quite difficult to publish open access.
As I mentioned earlier,
there are journals with fees,
and not all journals have fees,
but the ones that do can be
a barrier and they can go up pretty high.
When you start getting into the Nature Publishing Group,
and journals like that,
you're talking about $4,000 or $5,000 for
an open access publishing fee, which is quite high.
That's a barrier, not just to researchers here in the US,
but it's a huge barrier internationally.
They don't even consider that sort of thing.
There are some journals with no
article sharing policy whatsoever.
I've spoken to a faculty member
in mechanical engineering,
who was talking about a journal that he published in.
I researched it, and there's no pre-print policy,
there's no accepted manuscript policy,
there's no policy whatsoever.
Once you sign that copyright transfer agreement,
that article is going to be locked up for
years with no opportunity to make the research available.
As I mentioned, many publishers
are instituting lengthy embargoes.
For example, Elsevier, almost all of
the Elsevier's journals have
an embargo on them of at least 12 months,
and those can go up to 48 months.
Your accepted manuscript,
if we depended on journal policies,
could be embargoed for up to four years,
48 months without any access available to them.
We've also been asked whether
this policy is required, and it is not.
One of the things that we've done is turn
on a open access module in Elements,
which is the faculty reporting system,
although graduate students also have access to it.
When we did that, there was
a hard-coded notice that came up that
says our policy requires
works to be deposited and that's not the case.
We're working to change that.
But if you do see that notice,
it is not required.
It's meant to be an open door
for greater sharing for our researchers.
Reviewing some of the who, what, when, where,
and how, it does apply to everyone at Virginia Tech.
Graduate students definitely included here.
It applies to only the accepted version
of a scholarly article,
not the final published PDF by the journal.
But this is the version
that has been through peer review.
You've made changes to
that manuscript as a result of the peer review process,
it should be, in terms of content,
the equivalent of the published version.
I mentioned earlier, that the time
period that we talked about,
they have acceptance through one month after publication.
One of the reasons we did that is that Elements
draws in publication metadata
from about 20 or 25 sources.
But once an item is published,
it draws in metadata from Crossref,
Web of Science, all of these sources,
and that publication metadata is in your record.
That makes it a lot easier
to deposit your accepted manuscript,
and so we wanted to leave some time after publication,
this makes it a lot easier,
you just select the article in Elements.
I'm going to show a little bit of this in a few slides.
Then it's basically just having a version
of your article on your desktop that you upload,
and then click "Deposit", and you're done.
You can also deposit the day it's
accepted if you like, that's perfectly acceptable.
It just means you'll have to enter
a little metadata about the title of the journal,
so on and so forth, the DOI.
We wanted to make a wide window
here for people to deposit.
Another good reason to deposit
close to the publication date
is that many researchers get Table of Contents alerts,
or alerts from Google Scholar.
If researchers follow that link
to the published version and it's paywalled,
they may use Google Scholar or Unpaywall,
or some other method to find an open version.
You want that to be available
at the time that people are looking for it.
It's good to deposit as close to the time of
publication or before as possible.
The articles are hosted in VTechWorks,
and we'll talk a little bit more about VTechWorks.
It's indexed by Google Scholar and all search engines,
and we get a lot of usage, between
3000 and 4000 downloads per day in VTechWorks.
That's also of course, where theses and
dissertations end up as well,
and so we get a lot of usage for those as well.
We have three options for
getting the articles to VTechWorks.
The first, as we've been talking about, is Elements,
which was formerly known as
the EFARs system, Faculty Activity Reports.
I'll be going through that a little bit.
One of the problems is that
the policy is open to everyone on campus,
but only faculty and graduate students
have access to Elements.
We wanted to make some alternatives available.
One is a Google form,
that's just the policy deposit form,
asks for two or three basic items of metadata,
and then you upload the file and you're done.
Anyone can use that form,
if you'd rather use
that form or the e-mail to VTechWorks,
any faculty member, grad student is welcome to
use that instead of Elements if you'd prefer.
E-mailing VTechWorks can just be
including a few lines of metadata,
title, journal, DOI,
and then uploading the file and emailing it to us.
Most of the information,
or really all of the information
about the policy is on a guide,
and the URL is at the top of the screen there.
The guide has a tab called How to Deposit,
which walks you through all three methods,
screen by screen,
and so if you have any difficulties with depositing,
that's the tab to go to.
There's also an extensive FAQ there.
All the questions that we've received from faculty
over the past few years are in there.
We also have some advice for preparing a version
because this is often something like a Word document.
You may want to add some text
saying "this is the accepted manuscript of",
and then adding the citation.
You may want to do an accessibility check,
to make sure that the document is accessible,
and so we have some advice there.
The waiver advice is also there,
and some information about VTechWorks,
and the history of the policy is on the guide too.
This is really the go-to place for
any questions that you have about our new policy.
When you go to Elements,
you'll see a homepage that looks just like this.
You can either go to
the link at the top, that's circled.
These are the works that are not deposited,
or you can go to your full publications lists
which is in the lower left,
"Scholarly and creative works."
When you do that, you'll see
a list of publications like this.
What you'll see is,
that in this open access module,
we now have the ability to
label articles that are eligible for the policy.
You can see the light blue badge there, "IN OA policy."
The system knows that if
an article was published after March,
and it's a journal article or a conference proceeding,
it is eligible for the policy.
That's one easy way to go through your list and
see which ones that you can submit under the policy,
and then you would simply click
the deposit button on the right.
When you do that, you come to this screen on the right.
You would simply click the browse button and find
the article on your desktop and upload it,
and in the drop-down below,
you would select "accepted version."
This metadata will transfer through to
VTechWorks and then you click "Use this file."
You have a couple of more options
after you click use this file,
you can select an embargo,
and you can also select a Creative Commons license.
Once those two items are selected,
then you click submit,
and the article goes to VTechWorks
and it's actually there probably within a minute.
It's quite fast.
This is what an article would
look like in the VTechWorks.
As you can see, the file description
of accepted version is there,
telling everyone which version of your article it is.
We also have download count there.
Now, we have persistent links similar to DOIs.
As I mentioned, we have lots of usage
and thousands of downloads per day.
If it is there, people are looking for,
they will find it through Google Scholar or on the web,
any web search engine,
or tools like Unpaywall.
This is an example
of the first page in an accepted manuscript.
You can see it's not as pretty and
formatted as a journal article.
The important thing at the top,
is that it gives us citation.
It says what it is. It says this is a post-print.
That's the accepted manuscript of this article.
Here, the author's given the full citation,
they even already have a DOI for it,
you have your DOI there.
If we follow the DOI,
we can go to the journal page.
This is a recommended practice for
archiving accepted manuscripts on the web.
We have lots of resources,
as I mentioned, the OA policy guide,
the link at the top of the page is
really the main place
to go for all information related to the policy.
We do have a couple of email addresses
if you have questions that
aren't addressed in the FAQ or elsewhere on the guide.
If you email openaccess@vt.edu,
that email goes to all five of us on
the open access policy working group,
and one of us will respond to your question.
If you have questions about the how-to,
the deposit questions and Elements,
or the Google form, or emailing,
then you can send that question to
vtechworks@vt.edu.
We have more links here, a link to VTechWorks itself.
VTechWorks has its own guide.
We have a general guide to open access,
which covers books, publishing in journals,
and that sort of thing.
That's a great place to look as well.
You can also find a link to
Peter's book on open access on that guide,
and then we also have the subvention fund guide.
That's our fund to help authors at
Virginia Tech when there is
an article processing charge at a journal.
That wraps up the presentation and I
know I've gone pretty fast through that.
I hope some questions have appeared in the Q&A.
I want to introduce our guests, our panelists,
and as I introduce you,
if you would turn on your mics and say hello,
I want to introduce Peter Suber.
We're really grateful to have Peter
here from Harvard University,
where he is Director of
the Office of Scholarly Communication
and also Director of the Harvard Open Access Project.
He is the author of many works on
open access including the book that I
mentioned earlier, published in 2012.
I think it's not an exaggeration to say that he is one of
the world's foremost experts
in open access. Welcome Peter.
Thank you. Good to be here.
Next, Kevin McGuire,
who I introduced earlier as part
of the policy working group,
is a faculty member in Forest Resources and
Environmental Conservation. Hi Kevin.
How are you doing. Good to be here.
Next, Tom Sanchez,
is a faculty member in
Urban Affairs and Planning in
our Northern Virginia campus. Hi Tom.
Hi Philip. Enjoyed the presentation a lot.
Great. Thank you. My colleague
in the library is Ginny Pannabecker,
is Director of Research,
Collaboration, and Engagement
in the university libraries. Hi Ginny.
Hi everyone. Glad you could join us tonight.
I've introduced myself.
I'm the repository manager
and a member of the Open Access Policy Group,
and we're delighted to be a part of this class,
the Future of the Professoriate, and welcome
our new dean, has only been dean,
I think since last month,
the beginning of September, Aimee Surprenant.
Thank you so much for
sharing this presentation with your class.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
I think we're ready to launch into the questions.
I have a few of my own,
but I'll hold off on those for the panelists.
I think Ginny has been monitoring
Q&A for us and so what do you have for us.
I have two questions to start out with.
The first is, do you recommend consulting with someone in
VT libraries about
the publisher of subscription articles,
terms, and conditions before
submitting the final version to the publisher?
My question is specifically related
to the publishers conditions related to
green OA if I wish to submit
a pre-print of my work to VTechWorks
after it is published.
What do our panelists think about that one?
I can address that. This answer
also applies to the second question,
which is about submitting to a publisher like Elsevier
that puts embargos on repository access.
Remember that the VTech policy,
asks faculty to grant
non-exclusive rights to the institution,
and then the institution grants
the same rights back to the faculty member.
We call this a rights retention policy.
It means that the institution has
the rights necessary to make
the work open in a repository,
and by the way, so does the author.
You don't need to get permission from the publisher.
That means you don't have to care what
the publisher's restrictions are on green open access,
and that includes embargos.
You already have permission to ignore
those restrictions and to ignore those embargos.
I should add, some universities that have our kind of
policy nevertheless respect publisher
embargos, but you don't have to.
The whole point of adopting a rights retention policy is to
avoid having to go to
publishers for permission about those things.
Thank you. Our second question,
like you mentioned,
was, if the publisher is like Elsevier,
that has a restriction on
how many months after acceptance you should
wait before submitting to the institutional repository?
How would you recommend authors
submit to VTechWorks as it will be
long after the month after
publication allowance for using the OA policy.
I think you already addressed it.
Exactly. You can just ignore that.
Many publishers ask you to respect it embargo,
and sometimes they pretended they can
require you to respect the embargo.
But if you are subject to a rights retention policy,
that is to give yourself and the institution have
the rights to make the work
open without regard to those restrictions,
then you can ignore those publisher demands.
I'm seeing something is in the Q&A as well.
[LAUGHTER] The next question we have is,
it possible to deposit the accepted manuscript even
after it's been more than a month
since it has been published by the Journal?
Yes. I just checked and I just was
about to upload an old one that I found today,
so there you go. No problem.
The non-exclusive license doesn't expire.
We put that one month after
publication time period in there to be sort of a nudge.
As I mentioned, we wanted to have some time after
publication due to the ease of submitting in Elements,
because the metadata would already be
there can be a lot easier.
Also to nudge people to deposit as close to
the publication date as
possible for the reasons I mentioned earlier,
which is that, once an item is published,
people are getting Table of
Contents alerts and Google Alerts,
and if they can't get to the published version,
they may very well search for
any open version and
it'll be there for them in VTechWorks.
Thank you all so much. We have another question.
In which field,
and by field I mean Biology, Engineering, English,
philosophy do you see
more open source publishing
and why those fields and not the others?
Or maybe there is a type
of faculties/age group that
leans towards open source publishing?
I can address that, but I also want
to make room for other panelists.
Go right ahead, Peter.
First, we should distinguish, as Philip did,
open access publishing or gold open access
from open access repositories or green open access.
It actually turns out that
different disciplines respond differently to
those two methods of delivering
open access and open access publishing through journals.
The leading field seems to be medicine.
There are a couple of reasons for that.
As Philip mentioned, many open access journals, not all,
not even most actually charge
fees to the author to make the work open.
That model works best in fields that are well funded.
Medicine is extremely well funded.
The model works very badly in fields
that are not well funded like the humanities,
but even in fields that are say,
conceptually right next door to medicine,
like field biology, that are not well funded at all.
But medicine is well funded and almost all funders of
medical research are willing to pay
those fees at fee-based open access journals.
They also are willing to
require the work to be made green open access.
Very often the same work is both green and gold.
On the green side or the repository side,
Physics is by far the field with
the greatest track record in making works open.
There are several reasons for that.
One is that the most
used open access repository for physics,
the arXiv, now at Cornell, was founded in 1991,
which is ancient history in internet time.
It had a long time to become
second nature to physicists and physicists who
are growing up in the field
just are accustomed to finding
everything new in the Cornell arXiv.
When they come to publish, they automatically
expect to deposit their own works
there. That's a very good thing.
There are now disciplinary repositories
in most other disciplines and
there's about 5000 plus institutional repositories.
Now, if you would rather publish in
your institutional repository than a disciplinary one.
But physics is way ahead of
the others in getting their work in.
In general, we can say the sciences are ahead of
the humanities in both kinds of open access.
There are several reasons for that.
But one underlying reason is that
humanities research is much less
well-funded than science research.
Another is that humanists
were slow to pay attention to open access.
It's hard to figure out why, that's another long story.
I'm in the humanities myself,
so I'm not insulting
people without at least including myself.
But in the sciences,
there were initial objections and
reservations about open access,
but they were overcome gradually as
working examples proved how well it worked.
That is how beneficial it was, to research.
In the humanities,
there are the same kinds [NOISE] of
initial objections, reservations, misunderstandings,
but they're being slower to overcome,
taking longer to overcome because there
were fewer working examples to answer those doubts.
But as the growth of
working examples answers those doubts,
then we feed good understanding,
which becomes a benign circle,
and good understanding feeds more working examples.
Working examples feed more understanding.
But I would say the humanities,
who are generally behind the curve
there and they still suffer
from reservations, misunderstandings and unfamiliarity.
Whereas the scientists have
overcome that problem long ago.
I might add on the preprint server side,
many disciplines are now catching on to that.
For instance, many of the journals I submit to you.
When I submit, they ask if I want to
deposit my article on a preprint server.
You can just click a button and as you
submit to the journal for peer review,
it goes off to the preprint server.
That's becoming fairly common as well.
One thing that scientists do that as far as I know,
no field of humanities does,
is to accept deposits directly out of a repository.
If you send a preprint to
a preprint repository in medicine, biology, or physics,
many journals in those fields will
take your deposit as a submission for publication.
Again, with your consent, they
don't do it behind your back.
Whereas a typical journal,
you'd have to send in a separate submission and comply
with all the usual submission procedures and criteria.
Thank you all so much
and always feel free to interrupt me
before I share another question
if you have more to add or
to go ahead and go back to one of the earlier questions.
Those also show in the Q&A and they're answered.
Our next question is, "Peter,
what's your experience with
publishers making authors think that they have to
ask for a waiver of the
university OA policy and embargo their article?"
It's interesting. [NOISE] A couple of years ago,
a handful of publishers required this.
They told authors, if you want to publish an our journal,
you must get a waiver.
That's in the publishing contract
that they sent to the author.
It's important to add,
I run the kind of office that Philip works in and
my office doesn't read
the contracts that faculty signed with publishers.
We couldn't even if we wanted to.
We don't know when faculty are bound by that provision.
It's up to faculty to decide what to do about it.
Sometimes they come and ask us,
and we say, "Well, that's the contract.
If you want to publish with the journal,
you should comply and that means you should get a waiver.
If you want to get a waiver, here's
how, it's very easy to do."
But I'm quite sure that many of our authors signed
the contract without getting waivers and nothing happens.
That is, the authors are not
sued and they're not threatened by the lawsuits.
University is not sued
and it's not threatened with lawsuits.
The publishers never send a takedown to our repository.
It seems to be a formality that
means nothing to the publishers,
even if once upon a time they thought it was a good idea.
Last question at the moment,
everyone feel free to keep adding them in.
Does the VT open access policy
only apply to journal articles,
or can I also apply it to scholarly book chapters?
Well, I think I can take that one.
We were blessed in starting
out looking at open access policies by the fact
that Harvard had done such a great job documenting
their policy and putting
together best practices for policies.
We adopted the language
that was in the model open access policy,
which refers to "scholarly articles".
That is defined by the faculty member
what a scholarly article is.
You may remember when I was talking about Elements,
we included conference proceedings because
so many folks in engineering and
computer science and fields like that
actually present papers at
conferences and they're called conference proceedings.
Those could easily be called scholarly articles,
so we wanted to include those.
But I don't know of
any policy that includes book chapters.
Peter, do you know of anything like that?
Yes. [NOISE] The same question came up here,
also from faculty members,
it's a good question because book chapters
in anthologies are exactly the same as journal articles.
Sometimes they are journal articles that are
being republished in book form.
Authors who want to make their articles open,
also want to make those book chapters open.
Our policy covers articles,
so does it also cover book chapters.
We have a faculty advisory committee here to advise us on
questions like that that are not explicit in the policy.
I asked them this question and
they were interestingly conflicted.
They said, "On the one hand,
when faculty voted for this policy,
they didn't know they were voting on book chapters."
So, don't extend the policy to book chapters
automatically, that would take them by surprise.
On the other hand,
a book chapter at least in an anthology,
is essentially the same as a journal article.
If a faculty member deposits...
Oops we lost you Peter.
Sorry, my hand gesture hit my mute button.
If a faculty member
deposits a book chapter as
if it were covered by the policy,
then we should accept it as
if it were covered by the policy,
and that's our current practice.
Interestingly as a panelist,
I can't put a question in the Q&A.
I was wondering if I could be allowed to ask a question,
but I don't know if it's necessarily relevant
to this exact discussion,
but depositing things in repositories or preprints,
and the dangers that
students might run into if they do that and then
they try and publish it and the publisher does
a plagiarism check, something like that.
I do get questions from students about whether they
should embargo their thesis in
the library because they want to publish it later.
Philip I'd interested in your thoughts on that.
Well, I know that my colleague,
Gail McMillan has done quite a bit of research on
publisher policies for that and found that in many cases,
it's not an obstacle for example,
for turning a thesis
or dissertation into a book for example.
With the rise of preprints in so many places,
I'm guessing that articles are
increasingly getting rid of
that rule because so many things
are already out there on the web,
but I might be interested in
hearing from Peter or anyone else on that subject.
Sure. [NOISE] I think we should
distinguish the case of books from the case of articles.
In the case of books, many authors of PhD dissertations,
want to publish it later is a book.
They think that if they make
the dissertation open access,
they'll have trouble finding a publisher.
Sometimes their faculty advisors encourage
them to think they'll have trouble finding a publisher.
The students and their faculty advisors
tend to think this is a common problem.
Gill McMillan's research is
wonderful. It's an antidote to this.
It shows that it's rarely a problem.
It's not never a problem,
but it's a problem that only
a small minority of publishers.
A lot of publishers including Harvard University Press,
have said in public,
"It's no obstacle to submitting
your book manuscript here.
In fact, we often find good book manuscripts
because they are open access dissertations."
Gail's research shows that the majority
of book publishers are willing
to consider open access dissertations as submissions.
Actually one reason they're willing is
that no publisher publishes a dissertation as a book,
it undergoes significant revision before it's a book,
and the open access dissertation does
nothing to undercut the sales.
Now on articles, it was formerly a common rule,
at least in the field of medicine,
called the Ingelfinger rule,
after an editor of the New England Journal
of Medicine named Hans Ingelfinger.
The rule was, we will not consider any article for
publication that has already been made public somehow.
The theory was, it was made public before it
was published in a peer review journal.
They wanted to discourage the sharing of
non peer-reviewed medical research.
The theory was that's dangerous.
[NOISE] Of course, it also conveniently supported
the monopoly or the exclusivity
and the profit margin of the journal.
More journals have dropped at all.
I showed you before they dropped it.
The rule spread beyond medicine.
If it is arguably dangerous
to share non peer-reviewed medical research.
It's the same thing true in
philosophy which is my field or
in [NOISE] field biology or
in mathematics, obviously not.
As journals adopted this rule outside medicine,
it was clearly had a different rationale and it
was more about exclusivity and monopoly,
and it was about public safety.
But then people saw
the obstacle that it formed to sharing research,
and more and more journals began to drop it.
I think that's true even in medicine.
To go back to one of the earlier questions,
should you check the journal
policy before you submit there?
One thing to check is
whether they still follow the Ingelfinger rule.
Because if they do, then you don't want to share
the pre-print version if you later want to publish it.
On the other hand, most journals that do follow
the Ingelfinger rule don't
say they follow it on their website.
You're out of luck even if you
do want to look up their practices.
Yeah, I found that when I went to investigate
the query that I had to actually email journals to say,
"Do you consider a thesis that's deposited into
a publicly available library?
Do you consider that prior publication?"
As you say, most of them said no,
but I didn't have one that said yes.
It was a medical journal.
Even before the days of open access,
most doctoral students submitted
their dissertation to University Microfilms in Ann Arbor,
and that should have counted as prior
publication if access through a repository does.
I think every single publisher
thought there was completely fine,
and they never allowed that to block submission or
consideration as a book. But they're changing the rules.
They're trying to cope with
the transformation of publishing in the digital age.
But again, Gail shows by direct surveys of
publishers that the majority of them are perfectly
willing to consider dissertation as submissions.
I think we need to start wrapping up.
I want to ask one final question in this segment of
the presentation to Dean Surprenant
about her experience with open access.
Her research area is psychology,
and coming from Memorial University in Canada,
whether there are any significant differences between
the open access environment in
Canada as opposed to the United States.
Thanks for that. I'll answer the second part first.
About five years ago,
the federal funding agencies in
Canada have instituted a policy that requires
that papers that were supported by their grants
be deposited in an open repository
within a year after their publication.
There's a couple of things that that did.
First off, it's
the pre-processing version like
you were talking about, Philip,
where it's the last version that you sent off,
not the publisher's version,
but also what that did was it restricted
us who are funded by
federal grants from publishing in certain journals.
The ones that were the most restrictive in
terms of not even allowing
that final version from being put in a public repository.
The other thing it did is it pushed university libraries
to have a place for people to put
these sorts of publications as well.
It was, I think, a good thing
on a lot of different levels.
In terms of psychology,
it's been up and down,
and part of that is because of the fees,
and most of our grants are not
anywhere near enough to be able
to afford $3,000 or $5,000 for a journal article.
But the journals that do either
open access or hybrid do seem to
recognize that and have sales or allow
you your first publication for free or things like that.
It's evolving, and I think
that more and more open access
is something that people are looking for.
But then finally, some of
the main famous open access journals
in psychology have gotten
not the greatest reputation over the past few years.
They started out pretty well, but now,
when people have had experiences with
the peer review system in some of those journals,
they become less trusted, I think.
I think that the pendulum is swinging back and forth,
and I'm not sure where it will land.
Great, thank you so much,
and I think we're going to need to wrap up
this segment of the presentation.
Philip.
Yes. Go ahead.
Just real quick. Can I sneak in a quick question?
Sure.
One of the answers that Peter was
giving reminded me or made me
think of this as far as the traditions of
different disciplines and how
they got started with open access and all.
To me this represents a culture change
for some disciplines to be
thinking about this with preprints and all that.
Usually in my field, hey,
you want to get that article published as quick as
possible and move on to the next one,
and spend as little time
on all the other details and making it visible.
But are there any examples of disciplines that
are doing a good job at this and have,
I don't know, maybe folks in the libraries
have seen this from particular groups.
I don't know whether it's incentives or whether it's
just I don't know what
it takes to get faculty to be thinking about
these new ways to get the publications out there.
I'm not sure. One interesting thing is the way
bioRxiv took off a few years ago,
and of course,
that was good news when
the coronavirus came along
because people were already used to preprinting.
As Peter mentioned, folks in physics,
and mathematics,
computer science had been doing it since 1991.
But I'd be interested to
hear Peter's response to that question.
Yep. Philip is right about the Cornell arXiv.
It covers more than physics,
mathematics, computer science,
computational biology, a few other fields,
but not all fields. Not even most fields.
But because it's so old and so well established,
and so we'll respected,
it is inseparable from
a cultural change in those disciplines.
You're perfectly right to see cultural change here.
It's always been legal to make work open
if you do it the right way, if you're careful,
the economics are not really a problem,
and the technology hasn't been
a problem for decades and decades.
The real obstacle is cultural,
and in some disciplines,
there has been, call it beneficial cultural change.
Now, the Cornell arXiv is
both the cause and the effect of that cultural change.
It's only successful in
those disciplines because the disciplines are ready
to put the latest research into
it automatically by default, it's second nature.
Sometimes I put it this way.
You would never write an article and then put it in
the drawer and never share it with anybody.
What we're waiting for is the day when
you would never write
an article and fail to make it open access.
Publishing it in a paywalled journal would
be like putting it in a drawer
where very few people would ever see it.
In physics, we're at that point,
nobody would ever write an article in
physics and fail to share it on the archive.
The same is starting to happen in other disciplines.
BioRxiv is a great success in the field of biology,
medRxiv likewise in medicine,
but they're both new and they haven't had
time to create this cultural
change in their own disciplines.
When recently is that both disciplines were
heavily covered by the Ingelfinger rule
until fairly recently.
Some of them, that is to some degree, they still are.
Some of the scholars sharing
preprints in medRxiv are hitting the Ingelfinger rule,
and there are journals that won't
consider their work just
because it's already been shared through medRxiv.
That problem never comes up in physics,
mathematics, and the other arXiv disciplines.
[NOISE] That's one reason
why they were able to move ahead.
Another is that physics is a much smaller discipline.
In the field of particle physics,
there are about six journals altogether,
and there's almost no other important research field
with such a small number of journals.
All the journals in particle physics, anyway,
have made peace with the Cornell arXiv
or with green open access, repository-based open access.
Not only do they accept submissions
directly out of the Cornell arXiv,
they even host their own mirrors of the Cornell arXiv.
They're symbiotic with that,
and that doesn't happen in other disciplines.
It's a good question why the symbiosis
ever started or got off the ground.
But I still think it's accurate to say the arXiv,
the technology, the practice,
if deposited in there, is both the cause
and the effect of this cultural change.
Earlier, I referred to a vicious circle
that holds things back, for example,
in the humanities and a virtuous circle
that pushes things forward in sciences.
I think the Cornell arXiv is a good example of
how a vicious circle turned into a virtuous circle.
The same thing can happen, probably will happen,
probably is in the middle of happening
in every other field.
It's just that it's already happened
or even long since happened in physics.
All right, thank you so much, Peter.
It's been a real pleasure to have you here.
I know some of our panelists need to go.
If others want to stick around for the segments on
open data and open educational resources,
that would be great too.
But if folks need to sign off,
we really appreciate your input in this Q&A tonight,
so thank you very much. With that, I'm going to move
on past the Q&A to other types of open.
We've identified three that
we think are most important to academia,
the first of course being open access,
and the other two being open data
and open educational resources.
There are other types,
of course like open source,
but I think these are the types that you're most
likely to run into in academia.
I want to turn the presentation over to my colleague,
Jonathan Petters to talk
about open data. Take it away, Jon.
Can you hear me?
We can.
I now have to tell you when to
click because you're doing slides.
I have transitions in
my slides, I didn't think about this.
I'll say click and you click.
That sounds good.
All right, great. Hi everybody, I'm Jon Petters,
I work in data services
and data management and curation services.
We're going to talk about something
else that can be more open,
not just publications and art or in books,
but we can also think about
sharing other things like data.
A little quick historical perspective.
You can do two clicks.
Western world in the 17th century,
we start sharing research and scholarship
with articles and letters and journals and books,
and the 21st century,
we are sharing lots of research and scholarship
by articles and books.
Still lots of articles and
books, articles and monographs.
Still very retrieved in how a lot
of research and scholarship we're sharing.
But we were just talking
about open access to publications.
There is this new thing you've heard of,
perhaps called the Internet.
The Internet allows us to share things much more
rapidly and can make big copies of stuff.
It's much easier to share stuff.
We can share articles and books much more easily,
text stuff much more easily these days,
and trying to do it more freely, without restrictions.
It's what we just heard about, it's wonderful that
Virginia Tech's making it easier to do so.
But there's other things we can share with the Internet.
We can share wonderful puppy pictures,
corgis, and lots of other fun things.
But we can also share
other research objects like datasets,
software, pre-registration of clinical trials,
a lot of other stuff we can share.
Next slide. Sharing other research outputs,
not just texts about our research,
we talk about what we found
and discuss all the findings ourselves,
we share the data itself.
What might be some advantages
of sharing things like data and code that
were used in the creation of
research findings and answering research questions?
Well, first, they
facilitate potentially new research pathways.
If I share my research data in my field,
which was meteorology, before I got into this work,
sharing meteorological data that I gathered or created,
maybe it's used in an entirely different field,
something I never thought about.
If we share stuff openly and make it easy to use,
the same type of things can happen much more.
Certainly, a lot of data during the pandemic has been
shared following these blueprints
to allow for interrogation output.
Another thing that's good for,
enhancing the transparency of research.
I would tell you in many cases,
the article when you're looking at a research article,
it's the advertisement for the work,
it doesn't give you
all the pieces that you need to
know to really understand that work.
If you really want to dig into it,
you need to see the data underlying things,
understand the instrumentation,
configurations for models, all kinds of other stuff,
not just what's in the article.
We can get a much broader understanding
of the work that was done
and further enhancing the reproducibility of the work.
So I have a much better chance
of being able to recreate and
reproduce or redo,
repeat experiments if I can actually get all the data,
get the configurations for the instruments,
annotations for actually many of
this text, whatever it may be.
This sometimes has proven to be troublesome of late.
If you click, we have
this fairly old study now, the well known Amgen study,
which talked about this biotech giant
that tried to reproduce,
I think 50 separate studies of biomedical research,
and was only able to reproduce the three of those 50.
Maybe it was four, but it was
a very small number and this caused quite a stir,
people were worried about, well,
what does this mean for the integrity of
the work that we're looking at?
It has prompted some concerns
around reproducibility of research.
If we have data, code, methods,
we can have a better chance of reproducing others work.
Finally, those are all the carrot reasons,
I should note that many funders
and journals are now requiring data sharing,
making data available with
research articles and at the end of research grants.
It's not just something that's good
for research in general,
you're going to have to do this in
many cases and in many cases,
researchers already have to do this.
I have a question for you regarding
sharing research data and using other research data.
Feel free to put your answers in the chat,
I'm curious what people will say.
How have you used or are you currently
using another person's research data,
software in your own research?
Maybe somebody else in your research group,
maybe from something you found available openly online?
Indirect question is, if you have or have not done this,
that's kind of a yes or no question, how did it go?
Was this easy? Was this hard?
Was this really challenging?
Let's give people a little bit of
time to say what they think
for the quick yeses and nos is in the chat.
Oh, I'm asking people to be interactive.
It's scary, I know. Pretty much straight forward?
Okay, that's good to hear.
Using open source software, it's great,
but the documentation is not good,
if you compare it with licensing
pay packages, fair enough.
Yeah. It's great but the documentation is not good.
That could be a good title line for this kind
of thing. Anyone else?
Yes, and at times it is very challenging.
Give a little bit more time [inaudible].
Asked to share data, yes.
As we go further in our research fields,
it's common for people to ask you,
''Hey, you did a really cool work.
Can I see some more of what you've done?''
Different side of the coin. Another reason
that I only share data, it's easier to share it.
[LAUGHTER] You make it available a while ago.
I'll be more interested to hear
more about that if we have
a little bit of time, honestly.
Okay. We'll move ahead for here.
We heard some answers that this is not super hard,
it was pretty straightforward. That's great to hear.
But in other cases, the documentation is challenging,
it's hard to get the appropriate contexts
to reasonably use another person's dataset,
hard to get people to respond to data requests sometimes.
There are a couple of things here, and one
of the reason I want to ask those questions,
because we're moving into, so I was just telling you,
we'll pay sharing research data and code.
This is a great thing, we should all be doing it.
Well, it's just not that simple.
There's other things to worry about.
Let's look at some of the barriers,
some of the issues we might encounter.
Click. Barriers to this.
Click. One of them is technical.
Using other person's data and getting
the appropriate information to use that data correctly.
To be able to use it for the things you want to do.
What information does somebody has
to provide when they're
sharing their data to
allow you to use it the way you want to use it?
It's maybe a tractable problem, but it's challenging.
What kind of metadata needs to be shared with it.
How do we make very big files available?
That's still a big question.
Technical barriers. Click. There are
also legal questions and
ethical questions around sharing data.
The most obvious one there.
There are others, but if you click, human subjects data.
If we get data that originates from human subjects,
unless we have specifically asked for
a consent to share that data, it's really hard to do so.
How do we share it in a way that does not violate
the subjects confidentiality or create ethical issues,
specific challenges? Couple ways to do this.
Two clicks. De-identifying the data in
such a way as to minimize risk of
confidentiality breach. That's a challenge.
You still have to tell
people you are going to share
their data in the first place.
That's often a reason we tell people we can't help
them share their data is because they didn't
ask that they could share the data.
Then there's other legal frameworks like data
use agreements to allow for
sharing of human subjects data,
that just takes lot of time and effort,
strictly signed off by the institutional review board.
That can be quite challenging and of itself too.
Other barriers. Click. Cultural areas.
We're just hearing the very last question
that Tom Sanchez had about cultural issues
around sharing publications openly.
Well, there are certainly cultural
issues around sharing data.
I like to call it, the common one is data mining.
My data's mine and your data's mine.
Everybody wants to use other people's data
but did not want to share their own,
because they still have
more publications they can get out of it.
That's the currency of the realm.
Cultural issues are certainly a thing
with this emerging practice.
Other ones. Click. Specific ones around cultural things.
Big science versus long tail.
When I say big science,
I'm talking about research that's happening around,
that are very large multi-million dollar or even
multi-billion dollar research campaigns.
People who are involved in
these projects like particle physics,
where you heard well about particle physics have
no choice but to share data
because they're coming off
a really expensive instrumentation.
They all shared their data, they always
have, astronomies like this.
Versus long-tail data,
like small groups working in research labs where
the data was generated
in that group, just stays in the group.
They're not used to sharing the data.
It hasn't been asked for,
it's just stored on computers in the lab.
Then we also have, click,
as goes mentioned before, disciplinary differences.
Some fields because of
by virtue of the research they're doing,
have commonly shared data for decades.
Other ones are just coming into this and doing it.
More recently since the 2000s,
genomics has become a place where
a lot of research data has been shared,
and also in ecology has become more common thing.
But in many fields, this is
just not something that happens and
it's not something that's valued
or if there's any incentives for,
so it's not happening very much. Happens here.
Click.
Finally, this costs money.
Developing infrastructure to share data, cost money.
Where is that money going to come from?
This is always a funny question,
because everybody just start
pointing fingers at each other.
The libraries provides help in sharing
data at no cost to the researcher.
Doesn't cost you anything as
graduate students or faculty members, but of course,
our salaries and our tools
are paid for by something. It's not free.
Click. Important players in this research data space.
There are many different kinds.
Players. Click. There are organizations that
are advocating for
research data sharing without barriers,
sharing research data like the Research Data Alliance.
There are professional societies are looking at this,
other ones in different fields and
different disciplines are really
looking at this right now.
Experimental Biology Association,
the American Geophysical Union's
[NOISE] quite big on this.
Click. Just up the street,
just up I-81, the Center for Open Science,
which is run by a Psychology
, originally Psychology professor.
Advocating for open research and
transparency of research processes and methods.
Non-profit organizations like that.
Click. Other ones like advocacy groups like SPARC,
which is a Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition,
which has a lot of interest in open everything,
open publications, open educational resources.
I will note, click,
they developed a resource
that I was involved in to create
a resource for sharing all of
the federal requirements around
research data sharing by many of the data,
larger research agencies, National Science Foundation,
NIH, USDA, and so forth.
Those are all important groups.
Click. Journals. Journals Play a big role on this.
A lot of people are still publishing their research
in journalism and will continue to do so.
Journals are asking for research data to be
shared underlying the results that are talked about.
Data availability statements plus
the Public Library of Science has had one since 2014,
and many other journals now have
these data available in these statements.
Click. Finally, can't be about the libraries and
research institutions like this one which have
an interest in seeing more research shared.
The more we can get out there, the
more that other people can do with it,
fulfilling our global land-grant
mission as an institution.
Click. Culture change.
How does this happen?
We like to call this an emerging academic norm.
They'll take a little while for it to happen.
I like this particular figure from
Brian Nosek who is
the director of Center For Open Science,
talks about this is a triangle [BACKGROUND] of
things that need to happen for change to occur.
Making it possible with infrastructure,
and making it easy with
good user experiences and interfaces.
Becoming a normative thing in
communities in different disciplines,
making it rewarding, and finally making it required.
Right now in the resource data sharing
and open data landscape,
parts of this triangle are
happening at all these levels right now.
Infrastructure's being developed.
There's discussion with communities of how this fits
into the research aims of communities.
Policy, there are data sharing requirements,
in general sharing requirements.
All of these things are happening, all at the same time.
I'd say infrastructure is something that
certainly needs more funding.
I'll always say that. Click one more time.
Okay, so we have the old slide.
One thing I want to know about culture change,
I always like there's opportunity to bring up Max Planck,
this old dead white physicist.
I'm going to paraphrase him.
He liked to say that
new ways of looking
at the world [BACKGROUND] and research,
they'll tend to just
become adopted by the research community,
it tends to be that the older guard
retires and the new guard just
comes up and they accept the way that that's
the way things are and that's the way it always has been.
There will be certainly a lot of pressure
to make these emerging academic norms occur.
But this is going to be at some level of
generational change as things are.
This is why I always enjoy talking to
graduate students because you guys are new to the field.
Some are not yet set in your ways.
So we can talk about changing
things and do things differently.
Click. It might be the last slide I have.
Okay. There are a lot of thing I'll note is that
for help for talking
more about sharing your research data,
you can just contact us at dataservices@vt.edu,
and we'll be happy to talk more to you.
I'll be happy to talk to you about sharing your data.
We do share data for plenty of graduate students
associated with their theses and
dissertations or with journal articles.
Done it many times. I'm happy to
help you do so and to think about doing it well.
All right. Thank you, Jon.
Are there any questions about open data?
Whirlwind around open data.
[NOISE]
Unless there are any questions,
I did want to open the discussion just a little bit.
Thanks for that, Jonathan,
that was really well done.
Unlike open journals,
psychology has embraced the open data,
I think with open arms and for
very good reason because we are
concerned about replicability a lot.
Because also our datasets are
normally large enough that we don't have to
worry about confidentiality necessarily of
the human subjects and
small enough that we can share them.
There are some questions, however,
when you open it up to a bigger group,
and these are things that we were
struggling with in Canada
because the granting agencies are requiring open data.
What counts as data?
We have geoscientist and they have rocks.
They put the rocks in the machine and the machine goes
[NOISE] and it gives them an infinite amount of data.
How do you archive that?
How do you decide what's stated and what's not?
These are things that everyone struggles with.
Of course, and this is
a reason why I'm quite pleased with
this open data movement is because it forces you
to think about putting your data
in a comprehensible way when you're doing it,
because you need to share it
with someone else [LAUGHTER].
As a supervisor, as a grad dean,
having that structure from
the beginning is really important so that you don't
have to do what I did, is go back
and try and recreate what I did in 2000,
with the spreadsheets that I had
that had very challenging [LAUGHTER] names
for columns and things like that.
I had to actually go back and redo
all the analyses to figure out which condition was which.
Two things I could point out,
and I'll try and answer them.
Thank you very much for that comment and
the question. What is data?
That is a really hard question to answer,
and it's going to be very dependent on
what field you're in.
I think maybe even more
useful is what's the useful data to share?
If I'm doing computational modeling on the clustering,
generating terabytes and terabytes of model output.
I can make that available on a website,
but it's not really usable
and nobody's going to
actually be able to take advantage of that.
But the final statistical results I got on
my model that are much
smaller would probably be more useful to share,
maybe some snapshots of what
the realizations looked like along the way.
But it really depends on what research are you
doing as to what's useful to share?
It can be very large, it can be very small.
I think Peter left,
but he manages folks talking to them about what data is,
is a really fun question.
Convincing them that what they've
generated as data is fine,
which sometimes is very challenging [LAUGHTER].
The research funders typically go as the research results
what's necessary to share
to validate your research results.
Which is a very nice and pithy sounding thing
that doesn't tell you what to do [LAUGHTER].
But this is one of the things where
the communities of practice,
is what the NSF likes to call them,
have to come together and say,
well, we're going to share a data.
Well, what needs to be shared and
what level of information needs to be shared.
It's probably not terabytes and terabytes of data.
Generally, when people tried to give me ten terabytes,
the first thing I'd ask is,
why do you want to share that and who's it for?
That's a really challenging one.
What was the second thing you brought up? I just lost it.
Organizing your data so that others can use it.
Yes. I'm glad you bring that up.
One thing I typically say, especially to graduate
students about this is you have to take time.
To prepare sharing your data,
you need to document it appropriately.
What formats does it go in?
What's going to be shared?
You have to think of all these things.
Who's the primary beneficiary of this?
It's not the people you're sharing it with.
It's you.
You are the one who benefits because you're
the one looking at your data all the time,
and you're the one who's looking at
your software all the time.
Then you're doing in
this project and you think you know everything about it,
but then for some reason,
you have to go away from it for a couple of months.
Then you come back to it and you're like,
what were these columns about?
What was I doing over here?
You don't know and you waste
a bunch of time figuring it out.
You're the primary beneficiary of your documentation.
Then your lab group will benefit,
your advisor will benefit.
But you're the one who's going to benefit the most.
Do these things anyway. Thank you for that.
Thank you for those comments. I appreciate.
Then of course, librarians are
really helpful resources with these things
because they already know how
to and they even know what metadata means.
They're really good at helping you figure
out how to organize your data in a way
that is going to allow it to
be accessible for you and for others in the future.
Use your library and see your secret weapon.
I added in a slide but we didn't get it
into it because I added it while Philip was talking.
But for anything research data,
if you have questions, research data,
we have a very large data services unit with
the disciplinary experts in
different fields and in different parts of research.
We are very happy to
take any research data questions that you have,
including organization of data.
We can help with a lot of things.
If we can't help you, we'll find the people who can.
[OVERLAPPING].
Then on the other side,
finding those open data sources
as well is something
a librarian can really help you with.
That was really helpful and
important during the pandemic when we were
trying to encourage students to
analyze already existing datasets
if they couldn't collect their own data.
The librarians got I think
a little push from that as well.
Yeah, that's very true because a lot
of research labs were shutdown,
so you have to go look for what's available
so you can keep pushing things ahead.
[NOISE] We're here to help with all of those things.
All right. Unless there are any more questions,
we should probably move on to OER.
I don't think I've seen any or hearing any.
Thank you very much, Jon,
and thanks also for your comments, Dean Surprenant.
That was really interesting observations about
having to go back to data after a long time.
It's definitely something we want to
avoid through documentation,
and read-me files, and things like that.
Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over
to Kayla to talk about open educational resources.
Thank you so much, Philip.
As Philip said, my name's Kayla McNabb.
I use she, her pronouns.
I'm the head of Instructional Content and
Design for the University Libraries.
Within that role, I work in a unit that
makes a lot of open educational resources.
We're going to talk a little bit about
open education in general
and specifically Open Educational Resources this evening.
Slide. [NOISE] It looks
like I also included
transitions and I'd forgotten [LAUGHTER].
There's going to be a lot of clicks.
There is a significant amount of
overlap between OER and Open Access.
OER is generally going
to be related to teaching and learning.
Whereas open access is more commonly related to research,
as we've discussed here.
But there is a significant amount of overlap and we'll
look at that in a couple of contexts this evening.
OER are often open access.
What better time to talk about
them than Open Access Week?
Open access materials can be used in classes.
Some of these, particularly focused on say,
research articles, might be used
as readings in classes and things like that.
In those cases we see a lot of overlap
between what is open access and what might be OER.
But you can find more information about this at
this handout that our colleague
Anita Walz created a couple years ago.
This is in our institutional repository and it shows
the interconnected pieces between
open access and open educational resources.
That might be of interest to you.
But if we take a bit of a step back,
what are open educational resources?
They are freely available and typically online.
However, they may include
some costs because printing is not free.
If you're going to get a physical copy of a resource,
you may still have to pay for that physical book.
But generally they're going to be freely available
online in one format or another.
They are openly licensed.
When we're talking about open educational resources,
the way we typically think about that is can you read,
reuse, revise, retain, remix,
and redistribute the item, the Rs.
That is how we determine whether or not it
is openly licensed enough to be considered OER.
There is a sliding scale
there that we'll look at here in a moment.
They are also created for educational purposes.
That's another area where there's a little bit of
overlap between open access potentially,
They do come in various formats.
Textbooks, videos, handouts,
software could be considered
an open educational resource
depending on the the context around it.
If you created a piece of software for say,
quizzing as an accompaniment to an open textbook,
then that could still be an open educational resource
even though it is the software.
Comparing them a little bit more.
First, how are they dissimilar?
OA, open access materials are scholarly outputs.
That's the terminology that is often used.
There is some debate over whether or not
some or most OER might fall into that category.
We're not here to get into that argument today.
They are similar in many ways though.
The availability is one way.
We've talked about this a little bit already.
They're always free and accessible without restriction.
In an ideal scenario,
we would be able to say that about
both open access materials and OER.
Their licensing is also similar in many instances.
Public domain or CC0.
In this instance, we're not
retaining any of that copyright,
or they are released under a Creative Commons license.
That might be a term that you have heard before,
or might be familiar with.
We'll look at that a little bit for comparison.
This list is split up by
the top five bullets
are considered open educational resources.
But all of these could be considered open access.
We'll look at this in a bit
of a different way on the next slide as well,
so we won't drill into it too much here.
But a lot of the similarities around
open educational resources that I would want to point out
is this sharing piece.
Attribution consistent throughout,
but the way you
share it is going to look a little bit different.
You can see on this slide we've got the most open,
down to the least open,
so it's a little bit of a different way to
visualize what we were seeing on that last slide.
Then this is a set of
all of our different Creative Commons licenses.
In general, what we would
hope by and large is that we would use CC BY.
Attribution is required, but other than that,
you could change it however you'd like.
You can adapt it into something else that
maybe you would use to make money.
That would be fine under that license.
But there are some folks who say you write a textbook,
it's important to you that someone not be able
to take and adapt
your textbook and then make money off of it.
That might be the way that you feel
about it and that's fine,
and there is a license that would allow for that.
If we use a CC BY NC or non-commercial license,
then someone would be able to use your work, re-mix it,
distributed however they would want to,
but they couldn't make money off of it.
We have some different pieces
here to mix and match to make sure that
the license that's on the work that you
create is what you're going to be comfortable with.
Using OER. We just looked at all those licenses.
You may be creating things,
but you also may be looking for things that already
exist that you want to use in your teaching.
All of these licenses allow for fair use for teaching.
Whether or not something falls under fair use,
there are some general best practices related to that.
But if you're concerned whatsoever,
I would encourage you to reach out
to your copyright librarian.
You can check any resource that you find
to determine what the license permits.
That's the thing that I would encourage you
to do as soon as you find something,
say maybe a video that you want to
include in your Canvas course.
See what kind of licensing it
has so that you know what you're allowed to do.
[NOISE] You may be able to, based on the licensing,
take that video, download an MP4 version of it,
and re-edit it to add in things that
you want to make sure that you
mentioned with your students,
that may not be allowed based on the license,
so you want to know what you're covered.
Then know your five Rs,
like we talked about a moment ago.
Reuse, revise, retain, remix, redistribute.
If you have that CC BY license,
then we can do all of these things.
We just have to say where we got it
from and give that person attribution.
Then lastly OER should allow for
as many of those five Rs as possible.
When you're creating your open educational resources,
think about what you're willing to allow
other folks to do and push yourself to
allow for as many of these as you
can so that it's going to be as flexible as possible.
In this part of the conversation,
I like to mention some things about remixing.
You may think, well,
I put a lot of time into
presenting this material this way,
I think this is the best way to teach this material.
You may be very right in your context,
but folks in a different context,
maybe in a different country or using
a different language with their students
than they may need to translate the work,
would not be allowed to do that if you
don't allow for remixing.
Or they may be using this with
high school students or with senior citizens.
The population that's learning may be very different,
and allowing for that remixing can really help.
Generally, less restrictive is better.
But whatever you decide to put in place,
you want to just make
sure that you've thought through it.
How do you find OER?
There are lots of different places to look.
There are lots of repositories and that sort of thing.
If you're looking for learning objects or lesson plans or
syllabi that you might be able to adapt or build off of,
we've got some links here for OER Commons,
the Odyssey learning object repository,
which we support in the university libraries here at
Virginia Tech and MIT OpenCourseWare.
MIT OpenCourseWare has been around for quite a long time.
It has a lot of resources for a variety of
disciplines that they share on their website.
Then we've also got a couple of links here
for open textbooks specifically.
A lot of folks, when they hear
Open Educational Resources think
Open Textbooks, and that's fair.
It's a huge impact for
students when their textbooks can be opened.
OpenStax and the Open Textbook Library have,
I don't know at this point,
several hundred textbooks,
it's really grown over the last few years.
I would encourage you to check those out and
see what might be available in your area.
What about creating your own OER?
You could find something
that already exists and re-mix it if it's allowable.
One of the examples that we have here is
a Fundamentals of Business book
that I believe is in its third edition.
Now, I need to update that link.
That was created based on
an existing work by
some folks in our business program here.
It's free and digital or at the cost of printing and
shipping if students want
to have a physical copy of the book.
That makes that information so much
more accessible to students.
We also have an example here where
the University Libraries collaborated with VetMed to
create virtual learning modules
for a cow and a dog and a horse.
Now, I think also so that students
could use VR to better
understand the anatomy of these animals.
In order for students to be
as prepared as possible before
they start interacting with the live animals,
they're able to use these virtual models to fully
understand that anatomy before
they actually start interacting with the animal,
which is great for everyone involved,
I would imagine. What about open education?
I mentioned open education just as a concept briefly
at the beginning before we got
into open educational resources.
This is a term that you may hear,
particularly as you are
students who are obviously interested in higher education
more broadly and becoming future professoriate faculty.
One concept that I want to
introduce is related to open pedagogy.
That's the broader umbrella that you might hear about.
These links go to some different resources.
The link on open pedagogy there goes
to a book that was put together with
a lot of guidance and some writings
around thinking through this
as a way to build your pedagogy.
Under this system,
students take part in
creating and sharing their own resources,
so it's a very participatory type of pedagogy.
The example we have there first about
project management for instructional designers is one
that was created early on in this development
of open pedagogy and sharing this as an approach,
where they just realized that there wasn't a text for
this class and wanted to create that.
They engage to the students in this class to
decide how instructional designers
needed to learn about project management,
and then had the students in
the class work toward putting together
this textbook that's been revised several times.
We've also got another example here
where students collected CC0 literature
from the early American time period
and put it together in this anthology,
and then wrote supporting text or
explanatory texts that you would
expect to have in an anthology.
They were engaged in both
reading the literature but also processing that and
then being able to explain that to
future students and helping them
understand why this is
something that's worth reading in this class.
There's a lot of different levels that a student
has to engage with in order to be
able to create something like this in
open pedagogy based class.
Then we have open educational practices
more generally as a concept.
These are impactful, non-disposable assignments.
That means they don't just write a paper that goes
to you as an instructor and you
read it and you give them a grade.
These are assignments that are going
to be posted on the web
or going to go into some other,
maybe some presentation that's going to be shared
more broadly or are
going to be put on a blog or something like
that and it invites
students to play an active role in their learning.
You may have students
pursuing things that they're more interested in
as a way to make sure that they're
engaged and they're invited to play that role.
I believe that is it for open educational resources.
If you have questions,
please put those in
the chat or in the Q&A, and we can address that.
Great. Thank you, Kayla.
Any questions? Our colleague Anita Walz who
Kayla mentioned, works a lot on
open educational resources, open textbooks,
and that thing and
you can look for those in VTechWorks,
there's a collection that's
just open textbooks and I think we have
more than 20 now that were created here at Virginia Tech.
Those are tremendous resources.
When they're openly licensed,
anyone around the world can access those and use them,
translate them, use them for different audiences.
It's really a tremendous resource.
I think Virginia Tech has adopted a policy,
not a policy like the OA policy
I don't think, on OER
and can you say a little bit
more about that? Kayla do you know?
I'm trying to remember that
was very actively happening around
the beginning of the pandemic and
that whole time periods a little fuzzy in my brain.
But there were some rules that were handed
down at the state level regarding OER.
We've been working on policy
as an institution in response to that.
I can look for our link to that and put that in the chat.
That'll be great. Yeah, it did come from
the state level to all public universities I believe,
and I think it was encouragement to
create them and document them from what I remember.
But Anita is our real expert on OER,
so you can find her
on the library website and send her a message.
Yes, and Ginny shared a link to the OER guide.
If I remember correctly,
the guidance from the state was
for low and no cost resources,
which is a a point of concern and
potentially contention for folks
who are interested in supporting OER.
Because low-cost could mean lots of different things.
That is something that we're
also heavily discussing and trying to
encourage toward the no cost versus the low cost.
I have to admit the time that I
used an open access textbook in my class,
a lot of students weren't happy with it.
They said that they
didn't like to read it on the computer and
so they felt like they spent way too much
time printing it out because they
didn't want to order it,
they don't want to pay to order it and
so they just printed stuff out.
Then it was loose leaf and
they much preferred a textbook, which was,
I thought quite interesting because I was trying
to save them money,
but it wasn't as well received as I had hoped.
Then of course, I'm sure that the library does
this quite as a matter of course,
but the materials do need to be accessible.
I did have a blind student
who had some difficulty with some
of the texts, reading on
the readers that the library was using.
He couldn't use his text reader on those.
That is something that like I said,
over the last few years,
especially there's been a lot of
additions to those textbook libraries.
That's something that's become much more
at the forefront because
it's even just any PDF, say,
is difficult for a lot of screen readers to
navigate, much less when you have it,
a hundreds of page long textbook and
there are intricate graphs and things like that.
There been a lot of moves forward and that is
something that we've been
working on in the library
for the books that we've been putting together.
There's been a lot of attention paid
to trying to make sure they're as accessible as possible.
Then again, the library has tools to test,
to see whether something is accessible or not.
You don't just have to rely on
your friends who happen to have a text reader,
which is what I ended up doing for many years.
Yes. It looks like
we have a question in the Q&A.
Let's say if my advisor needs to freely scan some books,
not specifically textbooks for
the purpose of course instruction.
Is it legitimate to do so?
There are several questions that I think
Anita would would pose to you.
Not the least of which would be how much of
the book and how is it going to be shared?
If it's entirely shared within
the LMS and it's not a significant portion of a book,
the answer might be very different
than if they're going to scan
the entire book into a PDF and then
send it out via email to the whole class.
But Philip might be able to speak to that better as well.
Yeah, it's a complicated issue under US copyright law,
we have something called Fair Use.
But it's not a cut and dried measure.
Some people have used an old percentage,
10 percent of a work.
That is not the case.
Really, Fair Use has four factors,
including the amount of the use,
the type of the work, the market
effects, and I'm forgetting one.
But all those four factors have to be measured together.
Then you've come to a feeling or a sense that,
yes on the whole,
this is a Fair Use or this is not a Fair Use.
It's not always about the amounts to the work.
Although if you're doing
an entire book or something like that,
that doesn't weigh in your favor here.
But folks in the libraries can
help you with those Fair Use evaluations.
I believe we have some links to Fair Use
evaluators on the copyright LibGuide.
International law is also different.
If you're doing something with
a book that's published outside the US,
you have to make sure you know what you're doing.
Exactly.
Particularly in Canada.
Canada has fair dealing I think,
and we're actually fortunate in
the United States that we have
this Fair Use as part of copyright law.
Because, yes many nations around the world do not
have Fair Use as part of their copyright law.
We're getting very close to the top of
the hour and I want to thank everyone for attending.
It looks like maybe we have one more Q&A pop-up,
do we want to try to
address that before we sign off for the evening?
The question that we have here, my experience,
the print version is much less
accessible to me than the digital version.
I'm very thankful for a digital version,
especially a free one.
That's an excellent point.
A lot of times when we have books that were born digital,
it's easier to make sure that those are
accessible using things like screen readers.
Like I said, there's been a lot of advances in how we can
do that to make that flexibility better for students.
But we do, as you mentioned,
we hear from students a lot that they do want
a physical copy of the book so making sure that
the physical copy of the book
is as close to full featured as
possible is also a concern because
when we have a digital version of a textbook,
it's easy for us to embed videos and
quizzes and interactive graphs and things like that.
Those things just don't translate to text,
to a physical printed book as easily.
Having both can be particularly helpful for sure.
Anymore questions or I think maybe we can leave it
there unless Dean Surprenant
has any parting thoughts for us?
Well, yes, I do very much want to
thank you all for taking the time
to share your expertise with us.
I think that that's really
what a university is all about.
None of us can be experts in
all of the areas and so trying
to concentrate on something
and be the greatest expert is wonderful.
Then using that expertise is something
that I think can't be stated enough.
Like I said, the librarians are
the graduate student's secret weapon, I always say.
Please make sure to talk to the library for
all kinds of different things so thank you all.
Thank you and thanks to our speakers.
Kayla on OER, Jon on open data,
and to our panelists,
Peter Suber and the members of
the open access policy working group
and thank you all for attending.
I think we will sign off for the evening.
Thank you very much.
Have a great evening.
Okay bye.
Take care.
Thanks so much, everyone.