All right.
Next slide.
So with that,
I want to turn it over to Julie Griffin who is our first speaker.
And she will be joining us remotely here today.
Thank you. Ed.
can everyone hear me?
Okay. Yes.
All right.
Okay. Great.
So, I was invited to speak with you for,
just a few minutes about open access.
and my career,
actually started with open access services and academic libraries.
I was involved in, digitizing materials describing them
and making them available in open repositories,
or digital libraries.
then I started working in libraries,
making digital institutional scholarship open access.
When I was supporting faculty and students,
staff and students and publishing journals and conference proceedings
and archiving their work in institutional repositories.
And one of many reasons for libraries taking on this work
is the rising cost of serials or licensed content and,
libraries wanting to support alternative means of access to scholarly literature
while we do what we can in negotiations with publishers to lower prices.
And I should mention that libraries
and publishers provide open access services.
So, as you may know, many publishers are providing open access options to authors.
And some libraries, including ours, provide funds to cover open access
article processing charges.
and you may
hear, libraries, publishers, societies,
or associations talk about green and gold OA as ways of making your work open.
So I'll just briefly mention that green OA is in reference
to open access repositories, mostly consisting of gray literature
or materials that are not published elsewhere.
And Gold OA is in reference to scholarly, peer reviewed open
access journals.
and I link, to an article in my list of references,
by Peter Suber, about this, if you'd like to know more.
Peter Suber is the senior advisor
on open access at Harvard University and a well-known
expert on open access.
If you're interested in finding open access content,
there are several directories for those linked from the library's away lib guide.
Oh thank you Kirsten.
managed by Philip
Young, institutional repository manager at VT libraries.
And it's also possible, to include OA in your search using the library
library's discovery service or catalog.
the publishing funds I just mentioned are offered
through a service we call the VT Open Access Subvention fund.
we also work through consortia to reduce OA publishing charges
for VT authors when we negotiate license agreements.
And it's important to recognize the support
provided by collections, which is Ed's area of expertise.
As he mentioned.
next slide please.
All right.
So these are a few of the services and initiatives I just mentioned
and that are available to you here at Virginia Tech.
I also provide you with a few resources for identifying open access
journals and publishers and to get started in
assessing journal quality, if you ever have questions.
though obviously speaking with your department is always a good idea.
faculty in your department, as I'm sure you know,
and your subject librarian is also available to help.
The next slide,
thank you, is a list of references.
and the next slide.
providing my contact information if you have any questions.
I also linked to a few online profiles, including Experts, which is
the system affiliated with Virginia Tech that connects my profile
to content in various open repositories and journals.
the library also offers workshops.
If you're ever interested
in learning more about researcher profiles and research impact.
lots of options, for you there, and lots to talk about in terms
of how the impact of your research can increase with open access.
So that's, those are my slides.
I think Corinne is speaking next.
I’m Corinne Guimont
I’m the associate director for publishing and digital scholarship for the library.
I also oversee Virginia Tech Publishing, which is our open access,
publishing imprint here at Virginia Tech.
so I'm going to talk a little bit about why you should
publish open access, or why you should consider publishing open access.
and then a little bit of Virginia Tech publishing.
Next slide.
So why publish open access.
There are several reasons why you might consider this.
first, might be to reduce some barriers to access.
So you might be thinking about
how do I get my information about those people
who maybe aren't tied to a large institution?
one example is I was actually talking to an author last fall.
His research really focuses on trail maintenance, and he wants to be able
to get his work out there to provide access to the volunteers
that do the trail work who might not actually work at an institution.
So providing that free access to materials there, you know, several other
health care,
exercise
science, I've heard stuff on, even communities, you know,
and there are so many, so many examples of why you might want to get
your material out to a wider audience.
This can also help increase your visibility and impact of your work.
So thinking about yes it’s getting out there.
More and more people can also see it that way.
And then with that, there's there might be a greater impact.
You might receive more citations.
You might, see more people accessing and downloading your work.
the other point about open access is that a lot of times
when you publish open access, you are able to retain copyright
a lot of, a lot of publishers that do open access.
Not all, but a lot, will offer or will have a will apply,
Creative Commons license, which allows you, as the author, to retain copyright.
That might give you the ability to reuse your work in the future
or for others to reuse and build upon your work.
just weeks ago, I had somebody, one of our authors,
reach out to me and say, hey, I wrote this chapter of a book in,
one of your publications, and I'd like to use it in my dissertation.
Is that okay? And I said, yes. Absolutely.
You, you retained the copyright for that material.
So that's that's a huge bonus as well.
other things, the more logistical things, maybe not the fun things,
but things to consider are institutional policies.
so Julie mentioned that Virginia Tech has an open access policy.
So whether you're at Virginia Tech or any other major school institutions in your career,
you might want to think about any policies they might have.
And whether either you published open access originally or you,
share your material in a repository.
just thinking about those policies and working within, within those.
And last but not least, probably the least of all,
but very important still, we have the funder mandates.
more and more increasingly, I'm sure that we’re going to talk about this a bit,
funders, especially NEH, NIH,
NSF, they are, asking folks to,
share their work.
Open access is government funded.
So sharing network, open access.
There was recently a memo, the Nelson Memo,
that did kind of encourage or enforce
folks to publish their work, open access in some way.
so thinking about all of those pieces.
Next slide please.
so Julie mentioned this a little bit.
So I'll keep this brief.
but a couple of ways to consider publishing open access.
You can publish in an open access journal.
Or if you're working with book, there are ways to publish open access books.
there's a directory of open access journals.
You can also I did link or I just forgot to include the link,
but I'll jump in and add that later to open access subvention fund.
but just to note that not all journals have an open or have that article
processing chart so far as the process in charge basically provides the,
publisher with funding to cover the production costs.
Because publishing isn't free, there is still some labor and some work involved.
So that's that's what that is going for.
but not all publishers require that.
And also a lot of times even the individual journals will waive those fees.
so even looking at, hey,
does this journal offer any opportunities to waive the CBC?
Maybe if you're an early career scholar or maybe it's one of the early editions or
special editions.
So checking all of those avenues, don't let that APC really shut
scare you away from open access.
but to note that not all journals do,
require an APC, Virginia Tech publishing.
We have 13 journals.
12 of them are completely, free of APCs, only 1 has an APC.
So there are lots of journals out there that do not have APCs.
And the other option is what, Julie called green OA.
And that's just sharing a version of your article in a repository.
You can do this through the Virginia Tech or sorry
VTech works, our institutional repository.
There are also several discipline specific repositories.
So thinking about if you're looking to share a specific discipline,
that's also a great option.
I personally have shared, some of my work in Humanities Commons, which is,
a repository that really emphasizes, the digital humanities, such as area,
some of my research.
you might want to check with your publisher, just,
just to make sure all the permissions are there, but they usually are.
And then also that's also been done to some,
institutional open access policies as well.
Next slide please.
So just a little bit and again
just a little bit about Virginia Tech publishing.
so we are technically diamond open access except for our one journal,
which we're actually in the process of looking at converting away from an APC.
we do have 13 active journals for student journals.
some of those are grad student journals.
So anybody here is interested in checking those out?
Definitely do,
we do publish books and edited volume, which are primarily edited volumes.
You do shy away from research monographs.
and then we also have published some reports, digital scholarship
for digital humanities projects.
We do some media work, such as podcasts.
and then we work closely with Anita with on open educational resources.
But I'll let her talk a lot about that.
if you're interested, I
did include the site or the website link up there.
And one thing that I totally forgot to include in the slides, but I did want to
mention, is as part of publishing, one thing Virginia Tech offers is tome.
tome at Virginia Tech, which is towards an open monograph ecosystem.
so that is an effort.
It was a five year pilot program run by the Association of Research
Libraries to publish more open access books.
so with that, what we do as a university is we partner with,
university presses and provide that funding to the university
press, kind of like an APC or BPC, a book processing charge,
to for the university press to make that book open access.
one really interesting thing thinking about impacts there is what
we've seen over time with us is that those books that,
are still selling print books, they're selling
the same amount of print books as they previously did.
But now what they're seeing
is that those books are getting thousands upon thousands of more downloads than,
what we saw before this,
this initiative over the last 5 or 6 years now.
so thinking about that in college, they're looking for systems like that.
There are several other universities that take part in this initiative.
So if you are thinking about, the future outside
of Virginia Tech at another institution keeping an eye out for that as well.
And with that, I want you to go to Brandie.
Honest to say there's one question.
and we'll it up, handle it at the end.
Or how would you like to do that?
We have a little extra time. Sure.
so, so, one one of the online participants wrote, Does Virginia Tech
journals have an impact factor
because they published in Community Change, but it doesn't seem to cover.
that's a really great question.
And I would have to check with our journals manager on that.
so definitely feel free to email me directly that question at
gcorinne@vt.edu
and I will double check and follow up on that off the top of my head.
and don't believe we do.
But again, I will follow up with our journals manager and,
possibly, the, the people we work with that manage our journals.
All right. my name is Brandie Pullen.
I'm the resident librarian working in data curation.
And I'm going to be talking about open data.
Next slide.
So why should you share
other research outputs for example your data.
You have this really common scenario where you found a published article
that's really relevant to your current research topic,
and you want to dig into how they got their results.
However, important details for understanding the process
aren't found in the article.
You really need the data to look at.
Who knows if the corresponding author will respond to a request for them.
But what if this wasn't a common scenario?
What if you didn't have to ask?
So other reasons to share your data?
it maximizes transparency and accountability, enables
scrutiny of research findings, increases the impact of visibility of research,
promotes innovation and potential new data usage, leads
to new collaborations between data users and creators.
Encourages improved data validation of research methods.
Reduce the cost of duplicating data collection.
You can think of think big, like
telescopes that are out there getting data.
You can't run them multiple times.
It's easier to just run it once and then share the data for everyone
who needs to use it.
And it provides important resources for education and training.
Next slide.
So a couple of other reasons why you may need to share
your data is if your work is grant funded.
NIH and NSF now require you to address the sharing
of your data in your grant proposal.
And there are other institutions that do this as well.
And some journals also require you to publish your data.
If your manuscript is accepted for publication.
Next slide.
So some barriers to data sharing.
There are some technical barriers to data sharing,
but you don't really have to worry about them anymore.
We’ve come a really long way since the early 2010s, when all of this started.
Unless you have big data, then you don’t have to worry.
investment stewarding
data can be really expensive, legal and ethical concerns.
If you have information about an endangered species,
maybe you need to redact the location information.
Or if you have human
participant data, some of that is going to be sensitive as well.
And you'll need to just, sorry,
you need to just take that information out.
And also some cultural barriers to data sharing.
Lack of academic incentives.
If you want to get tenure, they aren’t really looking at your data.
and disciplinary differences.
There are some disciplines where it's already really popular to share data.
Think of the genome bank or again like NASA,
where they're sharing their data as opposed to
some other disciplines where they aren't sharing data yet.
And the goal is to have your data as open
as possible, but as closed as necessary.
Next slide.
So what does all of this mean?
Try to aim for fair data that's findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable,
and trustworthy repositories that is, repositories that value
transparency, responsibility, user focus,
sustainability and technology.
Next slide.
And we are here to help.
In the spring there is a course Grad 1524.
It's a one credit pass fail course on the best data management practices.
You can also find us online at data.lib.vt.edu.
That is your Virginia Tech data repository, a service
to publish your data with support from libraries faculty and staff.
So we're always there to help you if you want to publish your data.
Next slide.
And the last thing I'll say before I hand it off to Anita.
You graduated. What happens to your data?
Well, for most funded research, Virginia Tech will own your research data
and your advisor is responsible for stewarding it.
You should make a usable copy of your outputs available for your advisor.
Try to follow good data management practices, inventory of what you will
or have created, and make sure you talk with your advisor
about access to your data you create well before you graduate.
You don't want to be out the door and then realize,
oh wait, I really wanted to work on this data for my PhD and not know if you can.
So be sure to talk to your advisor.
Yeah, I'll pass it off to Anita.
Great.
so my name is Anita Walz.
It's nice to meet all of you.
how many of you are teaching right now?
Your TAs in classes?
Okay.
three of you in the room, and probably more of you online.
but you have some.
Next slide, please.
you have choices in your teaching and your research in your service.
You have choices now,
and you will have some different choices in the future as well.
So I hope this presentation is helpful for you.
as, as you’re, thinking about what can I do now?
What can I do later that I might want to think about now?
next slide please.
So the context here is teaching and learning.
And this is sort of openness applied to teaching and learning.
And my my main question for you to think about is how can I use
open tools, resources and approaches that meet my goals?
for my teaching, for my students learning and to also serve the public good.
Next slide please.
if you feel like I don't want to know anything about this,
just tell me other how to get connected
with other people that are grad students that are interested in this.
there is a network for you.
So the GO-GN Network is an international network of grad students
that are interested in open educational resources.
These are people just like you who are dealing with all of the same
deadlines and questions and requirements.
so please,
and they have the fun penguin logo.
so look them up.
There's no cost to join.
It's a really supportive group.
Okay. So next slide please.
you might think, well, what is this open education thing.
it is a lot of things.
It's practices, it's philosophy.
And I'm going to talk with you about some of the values,
embedded in open education.
sometimes people think, oh, that means that you don't have any
admissions requirements.
No, this is different than that.
So we'll just go through some of the values of open education.
first being that it's students focused and student centered.
It's not centered on faculty.
It's not centered on staff.
It is about putting the students first.
next, open education
is focusing on enabling and being inclusive.
so it reduces all kinds of barriers.
It involves people who might not otherwise be involved.
And it really opens up possibilities. Next slide please.
open education focuses on sharing with open licenses.
You see a wide variety of licenses here.
Raise your hand if Creative Commons is something that rings a bell for you.
If you've heard of Creative Commons before,
maybe you’re on the software side and you're more interested in
in open source software licenses, there are quite a few.
so I want you to think open source for learning materials.
is kind of the domain we're after.
next slide please.
please take a look at this.
later on, this is a chart of what the different open
licenses allow in comparison to things that are under copyright.
Copyrights.
Automatic open licenses allow you to put or are a layer
that you can put on top of a material that you own, that you created yourself.
And to give,
other people
additional rights that they otherwise would not have.
So the orange arrow points to allows adaptation.
This is one of the beautiful things about open licenses and that you can
you can customize the material to make it better fit your particular
audience, your particular geography, your particular use.
next slide please.
and it also allows redistribution.
So sharing is a big deal.
with open educational resources.
In fact, it's it's really the heart of, of these kinds of resources.
next slide please.
the community, the open education
community tends to be very collaborative.
and or at least we talk about being collaboration.
Something sometimes harder than that.
but feedback is, is very often welcome.
People ask for feedback on their work.
Next slide please.
there's a focus on exploring new ideas about all kinds of things,
not just limited to teaching, learning, and research.
People are all over the place in terms of looking,
looking at new ideas and incorporating in their work.
next slide please.
in open education, it's really important to give credit.
Where did you get this idea?
This is beyond,
being a good scholar and citing your sources.
It is giving credit for things that you adapted.
so it's really important if somebody created something that they,
they get some kind of credit.
but will not go deeply
into that with, with, Creative Commons licenses.
But it is a, it is a requirement if you're using the CC license.
Okay.
and then these also offer some meaningful reward.
So next slide.
there's an ongoing conversation about how does this affect promotion and tenure.
Very much a topic that we're discussing.
And then, last slide in this series anyway, is a lever.
You can use open practices to do all kinds of things.
affordability, equity and inclusion.
involving different kinds of, formats.
enabling authors to be published in a creative way.
reduced cognitive barriers.
So next slide please.
one question is why do we not just do what everybody has always been doing?
why this change.
And next slide please.
you'll see this.
These are this is Virginia Tech data from 2001.
And you'll see that there are impacts
particularly around cost for learning materials.
So to students have students have
reported
impacts on their grades, impacts on their ability to pass a course
because of their access or lack thereof to learning resources.
next slide.
students are reporting more food insecurity
and homelessness. Next slide please.
and we see some of sort of a flattening of, of course material costs.
so let's zip on two
more slides, and I want to just give you one more of these,
give you a really basic definition of open educational resources.
they are free.
Permission is granted.
upfront.
You don't have to ask.
permission is granted for customization.
And they can come into almost any kind of format or medium.
there are longer, discussions there.
But, in the slides, if you go two more,
sorry, three more, one two.
Three, four.
Here's a list of the largest places
where you can find open educational resources.
lots of different formats and objects and textbooks.
But, please take a look at those slides.
If you're you're wanting to just see what's what's available.
So some great places to look.
thank you.
yeah.
And my last question really is what can you do to make to
what can you do to make what you do more open?
and we're going to turn this over to,
Doctor Don Orth, who is, emeritus professor of
Fish and Wildlife, and he's going to tell you
about, the books that he wrote.
And I was really thrilled to work with him over several years on this.
and I'm excited that that he said, yes, I will join,
Dr. Orth
Hello. hi.
I'm Don Orth, and I did say yes.
And hopefully you can hear me. Can you hear me?
Yes, yes. Okay.
There is also something green that is currently covering your camera.
Oh yeah, I yeah, yeah, that's on purpose.
Yeah. So
okay.
Okay. Okay. Now now you can see me.
All right.
So this is, me in my natural, natural habitat.
and so I appreciate, the,
people who have spoken before me, they've really put in this, put this topic
in a great context so that I can simply go and present my story
and hopefully generate some more questions from, from this group.
and I really feel honored to speak to you tonight.
This group of, of 50 or so, students enrolled in graduate
education at Virginia Tech are destined to do some wonderful things in the future.
Oh, we don't know what, but,
hopefully some of it will involve,
book publishing and,
and I've been interested in publishing for a long time.
But book publishing is a different area, especially in my field.
So about ten years ago,
like most professors, I
had a long list of, my publication plans, and it was probably 20 papers
long, 20 papers said I was at some level of involved in writing or publishing
or simply asking for money to do the work,
and that's that was my modus operandi.
about the time I began learning about open education or open data and open access.
really, I was quite a skeptic, initially.
And I did attend some of Anita's early workshops at Virginia Tech's workshop.
And really, I was intrigued.
And and I was eventually, you know, lured into the process of writing a book,
this open, education textbook called Fish Fishing and Conservation.
What it really did for me, it was reinforce some good ideas
that I was doing in my scholarly work, and also pointed to some flaws
in the way I was working.
My logic, my writing, my thinking,
and and my thinking about how the readers were thinking.
So I have distilled, you know, what I've learned over the past
3 or 4 years, about book writing
and open education into a list of lessons.
hopefully this will help you, remember some of these things
someone is in
charge of going forward and backwards with my presentation.
So thank you very much for doing that.
the book is,
downloaded free.
Currently, thousands of students and scientists have read it,
from over 99 different countries.
So it's received great.
reaction early on.
I didn't know how to,
anticipate the action.
but one of the first, you know, things to remind you of any time
you're working on something as big a project as your book
or dissertation, it's just to honor the giants who, you know, use.
I stood on the shoulders of giants and every day writing these chapters
and try to understand, oh my God, I oh,
the ideas are not copyrightable.
All right. But my words are.
And yet I was relying on the ideas of these giants. How do I honor them?
And this is a picture of Bill Ricker, who is deceased.
And I met him.
he was a distinguished scientist.
He's probably in his 70s when I met him, and I was 30.
Tremendous impact on me
to understand that
scientists are real people,
and they struggle with the same things we struggle with.
tremendous scientist here who deserves to be honored to.
Next slide.
My next, point really is, you know, we're all working to engage
with the student and in writing, engaging with the reader.
And so for me, that meant in teaching and in writing, writing a lot of questions
and activities that would prompt the students to, to dig into their paths.
What do you know?
What conclusions can you draw?
What solutions?
can you think about while you're reading?
It seemed like a simple process.
And of course we do this in all of our work, but it really, for me,
it did remind me of this simple poem by Mary Oliver.
it's, it's longer than this, but it the three lines are.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Talk about it.
And if we could only rely
on remembering those three things every day,
our lives would be so much richer.
And also, what she did was just take some powerful ideas
and make it a simple three statements.
And the more I could think about writing a book,
which would have some powerful short statements in it, you know,
that that would motivate me to to work on this.
The next slide.
It really it's, the obvious statement writing a book.
It's, it requires discipline planning.
Most people don't want to do it for those reasons.
It's hard work if you're doing it right.
fortunately,
I've had a lot of, good help, and that's essential in the process.
In the next
slide, I really emphasize the target for my communications,
and it's gotta be clear from the very get go.
Who understanding who these students are.
who these readers are that you're writing for?
The minute I really settle on and and could answer that question
sufficiently, then the writing process just, accelerated.
so I had to think always about
myself.
A 20 year old college student.
What do I need to hear?
The next slide really emphasizes that, you know, I learned it.
The better that this book aligns with your main purpose
purposes in life, the easier it is going to be to stay motivated.
so, you know, we we can overcome
almost any thing if we know why. Why?
It's important and textbook elements in this case.
Just last month we received
the first book review on this open education textbook.
And so many of the things I felt strongly about,
and putting in the book that, questions to ponder
are Profiles of fish conservation, a key takeaway section, and others.
These were the highlights that were mentioned by the book reviewers.
So I am maybe doing something right here.
The next slide. I.
How we do it.
All right.
So next slide is from Anne Lamott.
this is an early book
about writing that I read when I was an early college professor.
And, you know, she emphasizes the point.
You just get down and write a shitty first draft and challenge yourself
to write as many words as possible in a short of amount of time.
So you get past that writer's block stage,
and then you can begin working on finding the simple way to explain this.
In subsequent revision.
Next slide.
it seems obvious, but it's really easy.
especially as you get further
along in the writing process to forget about all the mentors,
all the people who had a strong influence on your life and influence your ideas,
what you're writing about and trying to put into this, textbook.
So I had a lot of mentors, and I, a lot of people in present day
who were essentially book could not be done.
could not be written by a single author.
The next, slide,
it really is, to encourage you
to notice and realize
when you're having one of these puffer fish moments.
Puffer fish is is a fish that, it's, a stress reaction.
It reacts to, a challenge or predator is that it fills up.
It's,
internal parts with water.
And so it looks like it's all puffed up with air, but it's really water.
And so this when they do this, the puffer fish is really not going to swim.
Well, it's not going to eat well, not going to do anything well but prevent
becoming a prey item.
And so it's, comedian,
Hannah Gadsby introduced this idea of puffer fish moment
when she gets so angry and upset
with her targets of her humor who,
may tend to have a different view than hers.
She she gets angry and then really becomes,
you know, lost in a in a fury of of anger
and not able to do anything, not able to communicate.
So often when we are unable to relate to the situation
or the people in our presence,
we have these puffer fish moments where literally cannot, can't.
Don't expect me to function properly because I don't have the skills.
I don't have the necessary information or the necessary of empathy.
So this, puffer fish moments, I guess
it it's a good way for us to just stop and say, I'm sorry.
I'm not ready for this discussion yet.
I'm. I need to wait.
And drain all this water from my system.
All right,
the next, is a rule from a Ted Lasso.
so, be a goldfish.
And in which he means, you know, don't let one bad thing, one bad review,
one goof up, you know, really stop you from continuing on and moving forward.
so basic and lasso, use the goldfish because,
people have repeatedly
emphasized the fact that this fish has a very short memory.
Three to 10s. And so be like a goldfish.
Forget about all those things that are, you know, mistakes
you've made in the past and work to improve in the future.
So be a goldfish.
However, realize that the,
the goldfish does have a memory that is much longer than 10s.
so here's a case where the the reminder is actually a false statement.
Yeah, goldfish do have a long memory.
So a little fish fact for today.
and next slide is, about publishing.
Never, never in my career have I
seen such a challenging situation for our publishing situation.
And it affects you, the early career researchers and graduate students.
you are vulnerable.
There's stress to publish.
To publish in the best journals.
to get as many publications in
good journals and not just.
Oh, my gosh, you got to pay for these publications.
So that's taken more money out of your grant publication.
So all of these things really make it a, a system
publishing system that works differently for early versus, established scientists.
And that's unfair.
So I think I'm out.
I don't let's see if there's another slide here.
Yeah. Okay.
So many references.
And, that should be at also the first review that did come out.
It was it was ironic, you know, when I received it
because it was behind a paywall.
So here was a, you know, first thing written about this book that I had
published, and I couldn't read it without getting past that paywall.
You really emphasize the value of open
education.
thanks for listening.
Glad to be here tonight.
Hey, thank you, Don, and thank you to our other speakers.
And for those who attended in person here.
You may have noticed
some of the giant book covers on reverse of this wall as you came past.
that's where that
one photo of Don next to the book cover was.
We had an event a couple weeks ago honoring Virginia Tech book authors,
and he was one of the speakers there.
Okay, so we wanted to open it up for some questions.
And we do have some discussion prompts.
But first, I want to open it up
to see what questions you may have.
And we have some chat that we need to address or don't.
The only ones we've had we answered already or we brought up already.
Thank you for yes, thank you very much for the presentation.
I just have one question regarding data management.
So, I'm planning to use
some public data from one public institution here in the United States.
the Maryland Department of Transportation, to be exact.
I'm studying vehicle dynamics, so they were, like,
more than welcome to share some me some data regarding the water film
thickness, history when it's rain on the roads.
It's going to help me model some stuff.
And, so as I understand, they were like public data.
I just have to ask for it and just hand it over to me.
very kindly.
So if I want to write the journal,
any part of the data except from the part of, like,
citing correctly the source of the data and probably get some acknowledgments
who I have any other videos to study like it was public or not.
So they ask specifically for them, like, look, we gave data like I process
looking good for that plan.
Like want to publish like give an extra permission
or if it's public data from the beginning.
yeah.
Yeah, I'll speak to that quickly.
I mean, because in in my field, we deal a lot with,
previously published data and data, which is in someone's research
lab or data that's in someone's public, depository.
So I think the critical thing, if it's public,
you know, certainly free to use it with attribution.
However, in all of these cases, the more you can do to explain
what you're doing with the data, whether it's public or
or whether or not someone is providing it to you, to, to use,
as you explain what I'm doing with it and, and keep people in the loop
because often the, the author may know more about the data, may be able to help,
maybe able to point out issues or errors that you're making in interpretation.
so but be sure to
look for how the how it's license, how it is licensed.
And that's where the Creative Commons helps.
It makes that clear. Thank you so much.
in some places like Open Science Framework.
you cite it of course, but you can do it at whatever you wish with.
It was kind of polite,
maybe to send a nice email to them saying, hey, I'm going to use your data.
That's great. Thank you.
One of the first ask them,
like I explained clearly, what is my research field going to use it?
So in the first email requesting like I'm a student practitioner right.
I this data is like input for this model to estimate the hydroplaning speed of car.
Like I explain pretty much thoroughly what what I'm using it for you,
but probably going to making the point where I want to publish something
out of using that data.
So that was like so of course I wanted like of course asking for
that was in my mind, of course.
But just like if we have the discussion, double checking would be nice.
Yeah.
So ideas if you have already opened up a raport
and you were already talking with people, it's always nice to just shoot
another email and just be like, hey, I was going to publish this.
I'm going to cite you for is there anything else that you want?
Like usually you're fine with just a citation, but
is of course already built like, thank you so much.
commercial
data sets sometimes can be a different issue sometimes,
but but the publicly available stuff is just, like, more open.
Okay. Great question.
Do we have others?
I was curious, so,
I my experience with publishing,
in an open access journal is that we had to pay, the fee.
I know that not everybody has the budget to do so.
So, how does it work when the NSF or other, agencies
ask you that, some of your data should be available for free, open access,
but you you're not sure that you can pay to publish in an open access journal.
Does that mean
Just make your data available online?
So there's, there's two reasons. Yes.
You can make your you should still be able to make your data
available online outside of the journal article.
And that should always be free.
You could always publish data for free,
but then the article itself, if you're not able to publish it
in open access, there is that green OA option of sharing.
I think you went over that really quickly.
Yeah.
Can we start over again with a green OA business because, it's it's complicated.
You know, for me, sometimes, to understand.
Yeah.
So there are we we tend to refer to open access as different levels.
Green, gold, diamond, green open access typically
is sharing a version of your article in our repository.
So here at Virginia Tech we have VTech Works.
and I believe there's a link in the slides but you can also just Google VTech Works.
and it pops right up.
And you can share any,
any pre-print of your article in VTech Works.
Sometimes you do want to double check with your journal just to make sure to
double check permissions.
Sometimes they have some rules around how it's typeset, so sometimes
they will let you share that typeset version that they made
in your, your, word document or something.
but just checking around that.
But you should be able to still share that material and a repository
and that should meet the funder mandates.
And so you published in a journal that is not open
access, and has a paywall or whatever.
You cannot post that published version.
so anywhere online, however,
you can publish the final accepted manuscript.
That's and so I've got one here.
and, and we put in a thing saying this is an author generated
copy and make it for, version that will be published in.
And then we put the journal name. Yeah.
and because Virginia Tech did some magic with the law,
and I don't understand even journals that don't allow
this.
We can do it.
Yes, that's where I get confused.
I do have one of the slides towards the very at the.
Oh, okay.
Some workshops that we're going to be offering that focus just on that new policy
and how it works.
[inaudible] But I’d also recommend if you are looking at all of the Nexus
journals and they have an APC, Virginia Tech does have the open access article
subvention fund that you can apply for as a grad student to cover funding there.
And then again, also check with the journal.
Sometimes they have special waivers.
I know, our journal that does do an APC with Virginia Tech publishing
offered several waivers for their first few issues,
and we'll occasionally do it for some other issues.
So check with your journal,
see what options are available out there before ruling it out completely.
even checking to see if there's any funding in your department
may also be an option. For faculty that are applying for grants.
We encourage them to put money in the grant request
to cover that, and that is allowable under the rules.
So that's ideally the best way to get some funding right at the outset.
And then it's there when it's needed.
one other thing that we
haven't touched on yet related to OA publishing is
more publishers are now offering what are called
read and publish agreements.
And so for certain societies and certain publishers
may now have a read and publish agreement, it's essentially
like a subscription plus open access publishing rights.
So for instance
the Association of Computing Machinery, ACM,
we can access those materials like a normal subscription.
But Virginia Tech authors can also publish those
journals and their conference proceedings.
And some of them are very niche like that and some are more broad.
One we have, for instance, it's broader is Cambridge University Press.
So they have journals in a lot of different areas
to have some statements about this question.
Okay.
so I'm not sure if this was part of the question,
but just in case APCs can be funded through the Open Access
Subvention Fund, up to $1500
per article and $3000 per author per year.
[inaudible]
this is for articles published in fully open access journals,
any amount over the per article cap
provided by the libraries can be funded by your department. And
and there is a raised hand when you get to that, online.
Okay. Ahmed, would you like to chime in with a question?
yeah. so thanks all for the presentations.
It was really interesting to know that I'm in an article situation,
so I just, I want to ask about something for the 1500,
per article if we are two grad students at VT
and we're publishing one article, can we take benefit of publishing
an article that requires like a higher, higher amount of like,
fees?
Did I say it right, or is that confusing?
Yeah, Julie would be the best one to answer that.
But, basically, I think, oh, it's for a single author
is identified as either the primary author or the corresponding
author on each article is is where it's keyed off of, like,
okay.
Yeah.
So for two authors on that and publishing fees is pretty high.
We cannot take the benefit of that.
Right.
I think you're right there.
Okay.
Thank you.
But can we talk about predatory journals?
Oh, sorry.
That was gonna be my question actually,
Yeah.
Like, since I now have a couple articles published, I've been getting
a whole bunch of emails
advertising for me to publish, and these open access journal’s are,
inviting me to write chapters in open access books.
And for the most part, I can tell from the way they're written
that they're predatory.
And I kind of just delete them immediately.
But I guess that was going to be my question.
It's like on the face level,
I see the absolute benefit of open access, like when it's done right.
like a lot of my colleagues are not,
people who have access to most paywall journals.
but I guess, like what is kind of maybe
the negative side of it and like, what how do I don't know.
Well, how do these predatory journals go?
So there are a lot of them out there.
And it can be hard to tell, especially since sometimes they will pick a name
that's very similar to a reputable journal.
one good starting point
is the directory of open access journals.
So that is sort of,
I guess, like you call maybe a Good Housekeeping seal of approval
or something.
They have reviewed the journal, their acceptance
criteria, their editorial board, all those types of things,
and made sure it is a legitimate type of publication.
So it's, you know, there's no perfect system
out there, but it's a good indication right there
if it is one of those that has been reviewed and approved,
secure that the Directory of Open access journals
that we that is
run on a basically a membership type basis where so we are a contributor
to that to help make that available to people
because of the value that that brings in terms of helping distinguish
what what's really a place you might want to publish and what's one
you probably want to but pass on opportunity.
And I find I get those all the time too.
and many cases
it's targeted towards a specific article I wrote or something very specific.
Other times it's like an area
that has nothing to do with my knowledge or areas of research, and yet
they want me to be like a featured speaker or they want me to do that.
You just know that those are kind of sketchy kind of, options.
So, so, so other than to say I'll also offer something that, we,
we are a publisher, but we also offer publishing consultations, in the library.
So again, if you ever see something
and you're like, I'm not sure about this, I looked it up.
I'm still not sure.
Email me or publishing that meeting you.
There's several people on that list, and we're more than happy to help
figure that out for you.
If you're like, I am really this one is this one is very questionable.
We're in the library. We're here to help.
There's also a checklist online,
called think check submit.org.
And it's a it has checklists for books and for chapters and for journals
that you can work through to identify that asks you questions about,
the, the publisher,
the trying to, to figure out is this reputable?
there's also an association called the
OASPA
and I'm blanking on exactly what they are, but they have,
like directory of open access journals.
They have some requirements.
yeah.
About ethical practices.
Do you want to say I was trying to think of the, the acronym
I want to talk about it's open access scholarly public publishing association.
Yeah. Yes.
And it's,
it's a European based association, but they also have
a ton of great resources, a ton of great webinars as well.
some things that have access.
Europe is actually a bit ahead of us here in the United States.
a lot of the best information is actually based out of the UK or Europe.
Sometimes.
Like the,
the hard part is that sometimes,
the landscape will shift.
So I have a, a paper about 20 years ago in Frontiers in Psychology,
which used to be a reputable open access journal.
but it's just gone down, down, down and said I wouldn't publish there today.
In fact, I consider taking up my CV because it's such a poor example.
Now, there are some frontiers journals that are still good and but the psychology
one don't publish there.
It's not very good. So, so that's really hard.
But I guess that's the calculus that you have to make
for any journal with impact factors changing and things like that.
So, so it's, it's yeah, it's actually
an interesting thing about where to send your, your work.
So you said like you even consider taking it off your CV.
I guess like, yeah.
What happens if you publish
in one of these journals like, it can cause a lot of problems.
It's it's if you, I had a student who made a mistake and published,
a paper in, really predatory journal.
and, he was not able to publish the data in a real journal.
Right. So that was it. It was it was gone.
and, it was, it's embarrassing because it has typos.
I mean, they introduce mistakes and errors, and the figures
got all messed up and, and and so he tried to get them to take it down
and they wouldn't. So, Yeah.
So when you Google his name, you'll sometimes come up with that
article unfortunately.
So there's yeah, there's just like there is a cost to it,
but there's not much you could do about it. So
just hoping your other reputation over overwhelms that.
That part. Often your adviser or others in your department can advise.
Yeah about that.
And just to get one of the ones to pursue and which one thing to avoid
what's, scary now actually, is that
there are predatory, conferences.
Yeah, I've been getting invited to those too.
Right.
And I think that sounds great.
Some of what I've got to say, like, I want me to be a speaker on a topic
that’s totally [inaudile] Yeah, absolutely.
That's kind of
yeah, not good.
Can you advance?
A few prompts here.
So for our speakers,
Have you personally seen OA rise on the list of
scholarship priorities in recent years,
why do you think this is so or not so?
I would say yes.
I think and it's it's hard to say.
I mean, anecdotally, yes.
I think, we've seen a lot more authors come to us in the past six years.
Now, that's also to say Virginia Tech 2017.
So a lot more authors are hearing about us.
but I have, again, like I've talked to folks who are
more interested in just getting the work out there.
they want it to be seen.
They want people to be able to see it
without the paywalls, without running into issues.
So I think that's becoming a rising priority is just this kind of
understanding of,
I want anybody to be able to access my work without access to a paywall.
And I see that, I've done a lot of work with digital humanities over the years.
So even in the not not necessarily just the journal space, but in a lot of spaces
and even in people who are creating kind of web based projects, who are looking
at ways to get some historical data out there as well.
Are you finding that to be true on the data side?
So, Corinne mentioned the Nelson memo.
we're seeing more and more institutions being told
by the federal government we need data to be shared.
And so we're seeing an uptick now.
Now, there's always a delay.
So last year NIH rolled out their DMP policy.
So once we're done publishing for the past like three years,
then we'll see even more. Do you mind explaining what the acronym DMP stands for?
Oh, sorry, DMP Data Management plans say when you're briefing it all day.
Yeah,
librarians like that.
And then you have some workshops on data management plans.
All right.
Yes, yes. There's workshops.
There's a whole class.
There's they have a wonderful questionnaire too.
So if anybody is writing this grant go talk to them.
They have a questionnaire
that kind of has a question of like, what are you going to do with your data?
And you answer it and then you take out the questions,
and it's kind of like a really handy data management plan.
all lined out. I love sending people to it.
so I’ll put that plug out there.
Just on behalf of Brandie and their colleagues
I'll say don't wait till the day before it’s due to ask for the DMP.
May well and then wait until you collect your data before you have a plan.
I mean, you should have a plan first if you possibly can. Yes.
It also helps you make sure that you're collecting all the,
I don't think you mentioned this.
Sorry if you already did.
does Virginia Tech library
have any publishing agreements with certain publishers?
Like, for example,
at my previous institution, the libraries had an agreement with Wiley.
So I guess first of all, author was affiliated. Yes.
So that was what I was talking about earlier with the read and publish.
Yeah. So Wiley is one of the publishers.
Okay.
So, like as a student, if our first authored papers for a dissertation. Yes.
You know, Wiley Journal, we published open access
for free, but you guys are free to us.
And Wiley is actually one of the pretty easy ones because it's all their journals.
So like, we
have Springer Nature, we have a similar agreement.
But it's not all the Springer Nature journals.
The first of all, anything that starts out Nature, chemistry
in Nature Geoscience, Nature Astronomy, etc., those are not included.
And then certain other Springer journals are not included.
So those get more tricky to explain, but something like Wiley
or Cambridge Universities, that other one and that are kind of across the board.
Right now. So it makes it easy to publish.
And I believe, Philip has a list of those.
on his Lib Guide. [inaudible]
It’s on Philip’s Lib Guide and I actually maintain that because
a lot of it is through the State Library group, which is called Viva.
And so it's not just us negotiating.
It's it's collectively around the state.
We can get better terms on things that way. Thanks.
Yes
Another question, we got to think of the data
management planet, like publishing data and sharing their data.
How is the security or protect this from plagiarism.
I'm talking about.
If you have, like, a raw data, you can make a lot of things with it.
Like you can process it one way or other, like can look at from that perspective.
I'm I'm thinking about mechanical engineering data.
You can always post-process in different ways.
So if I'm accessing some other student or research data,
how do you actually protect like not share like not plagiarized
like or exciting everything because you have like tools to do it right now.
And the reason for like actual text
was for the actual data.
I mean, okay, so you don't know. When you publish something,
it's out there.
and what I always tell people is
there is risk, involved in publishing. So,
if you don't want people ever to use it, the best place to keep
it is in the bottom drawer of your dresser in your apartment and not share it,
but because you want it to get out there, publish it.
Exactly.
and so you are letting go of some control,
by publishing and,
there's always risk and there always has to be some trust.
If you want to talk about the copyright side,
and those kinds of things there, there is some protection there.
But data is special.
It's like this weird thing. It's
it always has copyright zero on it because it's data.
And like, as much as you sitting down and collecting
the data has been amazing, wonderful work.
Anyone can sit down and collect the data.
So it's just when data is out there, it's just aggregate
form of information that everyone can collect, right.
So it's always going to have a CC0 license.
And you can always just cite it and you're good to go.
and I think,
interpreting that data in different ways isn’t consider plagiarism,
just data itself.
[inaudible]
So yeah.
Thank you.
We have any other questions in the chat.
Then there was one that was backing up.
Ask him to elaborate more on the agreements with with publishers.
Okay.
It says could you please elaborate more on how we can use these agreements
so we have a research guide?
I don't know if you want to share that.
I think
it's in the, chat.
Okay. You've already shared that there's been a lot of.
Yeah.
So, yes, the, the research guide will list which publishers
we have agreements with that will link you directly to those agreements.
So you can see the the specifics for each one as I'm kind of hitting, highlights.
But each one is a unique agreement.
And I think partly that's because publishers are also trying to
figure this out as well, how they're going to,
so read the details.
Basically the criteria, though, is that if you are connected with Virginia Tech
and you are the first author or corresponding author,
however they define it for that publisher, then if you've submitted an article
and it's accepted for publication,
it will be covered under the agreement.
there is no cost to you
in most cases.
You do have to accept that.
And that's caused a little confusion
with people because sometimes it sort of feels like that.
Oh, this is too good to be true.
I'm getting a free article like, what's this about?
And so we've actually had authors decline it and we have to reach out.
So wait a minute. This this is legit.
And we have a subscription this is how it's coming.
And you might want to reconsider.
And most cases that's what happened.
A few cases they still opt not to
that's always the author's rights as the creators of the content.
But in most cases, as soon as they find out, okay, this is this is real.
It's not some kind of scam.
And then they can publish that
OA.
Yeah.
Great questions.
So, I have a question.
Do university publisher, have a very different way of charging open access.
I have a variety of leveraging open access compared to commercialized publisher
like Springer, because one of the journal that I'm looking at, they say they shifted
from Springer, the OUP, Oxford University Press, in order to promote open access.
That's why I say that
because Springer, apparently they also do open access as well.
Yeah, that's a really great question.
so a lot of times it's so for example,
our Virginia Tech publishing, you know, we get money
from the universities budget that's able to kind of make things open access.
So if you're looking at different library publishers,
they might have a different funding model that does that.
Springer.
Elsevier, those big publishers are there.
Their primary goal is to make as much money as possible to make that big profit.
So they're looking to charge those higher APCs.
So a lot of what we're seeing
is more journals moving to other either library presses or university presses.
I know Oxford charges a much lower APC, in order to either
completely get rid of those APCs or to reduce the cost of the APCs.
I know we were looking at data a while back of some of the if you see,
some of them are over $10,000 now, which I'm going to say is a publisher,
it doesn't cost that much to typeset an article.
So like just paying attention that when you're seeing,
APCs quite that large, that's fully for them to make the profit.
You as the author are not making any, any royalties off of that.
So if you're seeing journals move, it is probably
because that journal is trying to help save their authors funds there.
And that's a really great move.
And I applaud that journal
and there are cases where the editors have decided
to to move a journal or create a new journal after
objecting to the practices at wherever they were based originally
There have been multiple cases of mass
of resignations of the entire editorial boards.
because they have felt that, it's it's
not serving their readers well to publish.
they usually end up starting a new journal with a different name,
in a different
with a different posting situation.
but the old journal lives on,
they call it the Zombie Journal.
So I think editorials is,
is an interesting one because,
back in my home country, I was applying to an editor,
Corio Rowe, which only requires a Bachelor of Science.
And so that made publishing a company.
So, people won’t be happy to know
that your the first the first line of defense is actually,
you know, a person who is not an expert in that field apparently.
And judging [inaudible] for the editorial decision
So apparently, the role of this editor
need to be, you know, really that you really know that
the things in that field and then I'm not sure if, publishing,
company is making enough profit to hire all those quality editors.
So a lot of the times with journals
the editorial board is made up of volunteers from universities.
So, a lot of your professors might be at or on an editorial board,
or even grad students could be on an editorial board for a for a journal.
Sometimes they get a little bit of funding.
Most of the time they're doing it completely voluntary.
so there is kind of that expertise.
Sometimes when you see an editor position at a publisher,
that's not necessarily that they're reviewing the content.
They might be doing some more of that production work
and they'll say editor or they're they're doing some light copy
editing, depending on the type of position.
but with
most of your journals, you're seeing, those editorial boards
are going to be experts in the field, kind of basically volunteering their time.
It does go towards their promotion and tenure credits.
but primarily they're not paid or not paid a whole lot to get those roles.
So that's the other thing.
when you think about the whole
structure of everything is, you know, you have authors writing the material.
You have editors
who are kind of volunteering their time, and the only main
people making the money in that situation is that publisher.
And so if you really think about how that structure works,
and then the university goes back and we're paying, tons
and tons of money to provide access to those same materials.
So that's kind of
why open access is so beneficial in terms of making sure that we have access
from the get go
Yeah, it's a little like Las Vegas.
The house always wins.
Yeah.
just to put in the back of your mind, if you do,
become a professor, and you
there are benefits for being on an editorial board.
so there's usually, two levels.
There's the, the editors, and sometimes they're called action editors, the ones
who, actually take in the, articles and then send it out to the reviewers.
but there's also an editorial board, which is basically,
the, the people that the editors
are going to send the, paper to, to review.
if you're on an editorial board, you'll probably get more,
manuscripts than you would if you if you weren't on the board.
but it is a line for your CV.
You get to read stuff before it's published.
and then there's just a little bit of,
name recognition that you're, you're,
you're on that board and, and you're providing service to your, community.
So, but you don't have to wait for someone to ask you to be on an editorial board.
You can write the journal and say, hey, you know, I have this great expertise.
Let me know if you want me to.
If you want me on your editorial board.
And sometimes they'll go, yes, absolutely.
we need you. You can also volunteer to do peer review.
And they’ll want you to do peer review.
And sometimes, if you really as a grad student,
probably close
to the end of your career, your, your supervisor can also,
if they turn down a review, they'll, they'll say,
but I have a student who do a great job in this review,
so you can get a little bit of that in as well.
Ideally what you want to see is that people that do have the credentials
and have the credentials in the field and under questioning. So,
here's an example on one of my classes
where there was some stuff published on vaccines,
but the person publishing it had a degree in geosciences.
So they they had an advanced degree,
but it wasn't really related to the subject matter.
So, that’s questionable [inaudible]
and I've read that recently, in the past two years, I've turned down all requests
for reviewing articles because I haven't kept up with the literature.
And it's just not fair for me to be reviewing articles anymore in my specialty.
You know, the other thing, a lot of journals,
anybody who sign up to be a peer reviewer, so if you want to like,
go and read the review and these are my subject areas,
that's an as a way to also kind of start that process earlier if you wanted to.
Some are looking for a lot, not just journals for publishers.
We're looking for peer reviewers constantly.
So like peer review is an important part of the process.
and it's something that you want to start diving to earlier.
you’re more than welcome to
the Journal will kind of decide as they get content to say
I think our next prompt might be a good tie in here.
talking about incentives.
And we also have some information in the chat from Don,
recent article highlights the problems of unethical, current
publishing system, especially relevant for early career professionals.
So that, citation is in the chat, and we can,
export this,
that.
That's helpful. Yeah.
And so, yeah, the system,
of incentives changing in ways that encourage scholars to publish share OA. Share data OA.
Create or use OER, etc.
So by incentives at least in academia
promotion and tenure is is a big piece of that.
But there are other aspects as well.
So yeah, if you want to start with that, Anita. I would say with, with regard
to getting cited and getting your work read
that open access is fantastic because you have more readers
you there is.
I think in the, there's, there's literature that indicates
there's an advantage
or a citation advantage for publishing an open access publications.
with regard to OER, that's tricky.
I know that some people are using
their OER publications in their tenure and promotion dossiers.
Some of them use it as part of their faculty evaluation report.
And we are working on, some
deliverables,
some, some statistical metrics, some thank you, some metrics,
that we can provide to authors on, the impact or at least
the number of downloads, the countries from which they come,
for different platforms where things are hosted.
that's not as prominent,
yet at a research university,
but I think it's coming eventually.
really a lot of times,
if you're in an institution where journal articles are sort
of the coin of the realm, other things are overlooked.
But that doesn't mean that they don't have value.
You're you're promotion.
and tenure dossier is really your argument for why
the institutions should continue to invest in you.
So there's there's always space to make that argument.
It's just whether or not people make the argument and
whether they feel like their department is going to be friendly to that.
That kind of argument.
So it's lots of lots of variation.
I always tell people, if you're you're an assistant professor,
talk to your department head about what
what would be valuable for you?
what is a good move in your career is this a a something
that will be looked upon favorably, or should you wait?
because those are those are important decisions.
Yeah,
I'd say yeah. Oh,
I'll speak up unless somebody else is speaking.
Can you hear me? Yes, yes. Okay.
Thank you.
I think the system of incentives needs to continue to evolve.
It's still pretty much immature
and doesn't recognize the full extent of the problem.
or how to how to fix it.
The other thing I think, we all need to recognize
is that our systems for retention and promotion,
are always a time lag with the real world.
And so open education is one,
open access and open access publications.
It's one area that's probably the least well understood
and described in promotion and tenure guidelines.
In my experience, I can I can guarantee you I can pick up
our, departmental guidelines right now, which were recently revised.
And it doesn't really say anything for the the,
assistant professor about open education, whether encouraged or not.
So I think that the result is that you need to all rely
on your most trusted mentors
because department heads change, policies change guidelines
change, and, and, and an individual will give you bad advice.
Often.
I've heard many, many people advice not to write a book,
especially anyone untenured or one to early career.
that's not always.
good advice for individuals. So.
I say no for sharing open data, though.
so the University of British Columbia
in 2017 put stuff about open
data and open publishing in their tenure promotion track,
but we haven't really heard about it from other places.
Other places just are not valuing sharing your data for tenure track.
We have laws though, that are asking us to share your data. That's the incentive..
You know
well, and this is interesting
a thing about the power of the federal government.
because you may not know this, but there wasn't any IRBs at universities
until that
70s and 80s, you know, I mean, and it was only because the federal
government required it of all universities accepting federal money.
So, so there really is a,
a way that the federal government can make things
very different, in a very fast way
that universities tend not to.
Well, they can't fight back against it.
And, and so, yeah, I think that's
I think that in, in Canada, it wasn't until the late 1990s
that they had IRBs, It’s crazy.
I was just going to say, from the publisher point of view, NEH has started,
but in the past couple of years, a program called the Open Fellowship Book Grant.
And that's actually so, somebody, a scholar gets funding from NEH
and that certain amount of different types of grants,
typically the fellowship grants.
But there's some other ones as well.
The publisher can then go apply for this open
publishing fellowship book project grants and get and receive.
I think it's $6,000 now.
I we just received one for 5000, but then just recently upped it.
So there are more incentives even to publishers to go
and find the funds to help cover this open access costs.
So that has grown a little bit a little different than the data.
But, just to note that we received that from NEH
and I'm sorry, I'm mostly familiar with the humanities,
when it comes to the book projects, but I'm sure there's some similar funding
options
as well.
I think that's an important point, too, is that there are disciplinary
differences, I think. So keep that in mind.
Absolutely.
Right.
So we addressed journal impact factor a little bit
during the initial presentations. But
Want to expand on that maybe a little?
And how has publishing
affected your decision where to publish has it affected
your research goals, etc.?
I would say Journal Impact Factor definitely played a role
But in my being in Asia, because,
we are very metrics oriented back then, either publish at least
[inaudible]
but then, even though some journals have, impact factors, I will urge everyone
to cross check because some predatory journals also impact factors.
It is a good measure.
It's a good indicator, but it's not robust enough. I would say it's.
Like, you know what that is
and what the authors
told us about the journal impact factor vary so much.
I think it would be a good idea being put in your paper
like the journal impact factor when you're published,
because you also like, I could like publish it, like it's going to get good.
Yeah.
But right now when I'm publishing is maybe 0.8 0.70 impact factor.
I had complete other like requirements of publishing,
but like for strains with like I publish much faster compared to the same five years,
I generally export better as like what I publish.
Did you publish?
But then and it goes reverse.
Thank you.
Publishing was pretty good and I know like this really bad.
Like, yeah, but when I publish it was one of the top journal.
So maybe good idea to track also this type of correlation.
If we speak about journal impact factor, it's
making a decision. They don’t change very quickly.
They do change but it it takes years and years to for that to happen.
but it also varies a lot on discipline. Yes.
So, so psychology has craft impact factors.
I mean it's like two, three, four, but whereas
some of the yes, there's a that's a great point.
But then the discipline is important.
basically the impact factor is a ratio that's focused
very much on recent citations and recent publications.
So that's important consideration too, because you think like, biotech,
you know, 18 months is getting old
or maybe whereas like mathematics,
you know, might be 18 years old and still be very relevant.
So somebody is trying to solve this theorem or prove or something
that the citation patterns can really vary.
by discipline. There is a guide, from the research
impact, intelligence
group in the chat.
and a link to a metrics toolkit if you're interested
in learning more about these different metrics that we used.
And so then I think
you're kind of getting at quantity versus quality.
and in the UK,
they used to do this research exercise
every five years where all the faculty,
had to
put in their top five journal articles,
and, and so that,
really incentivized people to go for the, the, the big journals.
Right.
The ones that are hard to get into that take a long time but have a lot of impact.
but then, you know, universities are not that different from anything else.
If you started going after people like hiring someone,
then just before the research exercise so they could have their impact.
in the faculty in the, in the UK, we're moving all the time,
you know, because you're constantly going someplace to increase the,
the impact because of the funding for the university was based
very heavily on that, that number that they came up with.
so, people game the system no matter how you set the system up.
So that's I.
So, yeah,
I was just going to, very much along the same lines.
Don added in the chat that,
the recent promotion and tenure guidelines update
that he was referring to says something along the lines of both regular scholarly
publication of high quality and high impact in line
with production of aspirational peers.
So they aren't mentioning the impact factor
by name, necessarily to be able to kind of future proof of that.
So we definitely see this kind of response, and it does look
different in different departments and at different universities, for sure.
I think it was a good point.
You made earlier. That
T and P process in particular tends to lag some other development.
So absolutely.
Yeah. Yes. And one more thing.
Some classical journals, you know, very classical like over 100 years of journals.
They might have low impact factor, but then it's very hard to publish
in those journals, which is weird for me.
yeah. So,
in my opinion, JIF is only an indicator
for those grades on journals that you do know who they are.
And then that might be the indicator.
So in in our
if everyone through, there must be certain very classical journals
that, you know, even though they are based on the high
and then the publishing that you can brag about it.
So I think, yeah, gives justification.
Good point.
Anything else for the impact factor?
So does OA still have a perception problem,
kind of getting to that predatory issue that we already touched on.
So, but are there other things that you want to elaborate on
I would say,
OA has had different kinds of perception problems.
So originally it was nothing that's free can be good.
there's no free lunch.
You get what you pay for.
Now, I think we're seeing,
publishers really trying to
to, generate lots and lots of revenues by publishing lots and lots of articles
because they're getting paid on an article basis.
And so it's and it's entered some,
problematic incentives for publishers
and for the volume that they are trying
to push through.
open or not,
AI is also having some very strange,
impacts, where
it's pretty clear that nobody has read an article
because there are notes from the AI,
from the LLM appearing in journal text,
indicating, I’m this kind of AI and I can't do that.
And, no one has caught it.
And those articles run into outside regions, which is
pretty prestigious industry, you know, and so that that's a separate issue.
But I think, OA, the issue right now
is that because it's another revenue stream, publishers,
publishers are really pushing to increase the number of articles which
doesn't speak well for
The evaluative of process of
of editing and of peer review when you have an unlimited scope,
or unlimited pool of things that you want to publish.
So it's
yeah, for OA, when there's
no article processing charge, that doesn't happen.
But with APCs, it's more likely.
So it's, yeah, it's a problem.
But I'd love to hear what other people think about the perception,
you know, what you get is what you pay for and you can pay for.
And if it's free, it's not worth anything.
publishing isn't free.
Somebody is paying for it, right? Yeah.
You're paying for other article processing charges or,
you know, the university is paying for it by purchasing those subscriptions.
so that's one thing that I think there is still some lingering.
I agree, I think it's kind of going there's the perceptions changed over,
but sometimes people were like, oh yeah, open access, is free
and why would that be a good thing?
And all of that and that's one thing I would say
is that open access isn't necessarily free is just anything.
a business model
so that's that's my little soapbox for that.
There's
It’s described like free as in free puppies. Yes.
[inaudible]
Yes. For for open educational resources
that’s long been an issue.
and just thinking about quality control people will say,
well I looked at two of them and therefore all of them are terrible.
does not, compute.
So so I think there's
starting to be more of an emphasis on peer review.
Peer review is fantastic for,
knowing what you need to change
in your book or your journal article.
never had an author say, oh, the peer review is unhelpful and,
because it is always helpful and it's very difficult
to get that kind of feedback unless you, you specifically request for it.
We we pay our peer reviewers in most instances, not all.
Dawn, for your book, I believe that they were not paid,
but it's not typical to pay them in your field.
In other fields, we can't get reviewers unless we say here's some money.
so for a book, yeah, for a book.
So, so but it's it's really valuable.
The feedback is really valuable.
for the quality of,
you know, depends. Right.
So we want to make sure
if something is peer reviewed, that it's very clear
in the front matter of the book.
What kind of peer review was it?
how did, was it anonymous, single, double or
you know what what kind was it?
Because it matters. Yeah, and speaking to.
Oh, sorry, I was just going to jump in and say, that's
also a really important point as you're doing your research and putting together
your thesis and dissertations that that information is available.
And it's really worth checking out how something was reviewed
before you lean too heavily on it in your own work.
Yeah.
Thinking of open access journals, the directory of open access journals
I think one of the requirements to be listed in that directory
does have to do with that peer reviewed component.
So if you're seeing a potential predatory journal,
checking back with that, with DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals
is a great way to know, like, hey, is this legitimate?
Is there a peer review component to this journal?
So I have a question regarding peer review.
So peer review used to be double blind,
but then some publisher nowadays they publish the name of the peer review.
Do you think that is a good practice.
So they they publish the names of the names of the peer reviewer.
I'm more familiar with
that information being disclosed at the end of a process, after
the author has incorporated or not incorporated
those those, peer reviewers comments.
I think it adds some accountability.
because people know
your name is going to be disclosed.
but we still have we still offer to our reviewers,
the option to be listed or not listed.
Sometimes they feel like it's an endorsement
and they are uncomfortable with that for whatever reason.
It can be political and could be.
They just don't.
They have it's a small field, and they have personal relationships
with people and they're uncomfortable with that.
Yeah, I can say personally,
I have, peer reviewed journals that follow an open peer reviewing process.
So, I, the author knew that I was the peer reviewers and I knew who the author was.
it was an interesting experience.
especially me working in publishing to say, like, this is a brand new process
and something I've done, and it was
there was an accountability piece that
But it's also hard to eliminate any bias when I know who the author is
And this is a person I know.
I mean, library publishing isn't a massive field.
So it was somebody I've met before.
so I think there's, there's pros and cons to both. Blind peer review, you,
get people who will go off the rails with comments.
Not all the time, most of the time not.
But it does happen.
Open peer reviewed kind of discourages that.
But at the same time, sometimes people,
already have a bias, whether that's a good bias or a bad bias.
In some cases it can be, oh, I know this person. That work is good.
I'm not going to put too much effort into my peer review.
or it could be, I don't know that this person is terrible.
I'm going to say things are wrong, even though they're not.
so thinking kind of about just that.
I don't know if there's a perfect answer.
I think somebody said earlier that people game the system,
no matter what system is,
Just one thing I’ll add, and in many cases, even if it is a blind
review, where the author isn’t disclosed sometimes can be figured out from the context of the article
yeah, but not always. Totally.
Like if somebody sends you six articles to sight, like,
you should take a look at these things, article by the same person.
that's what they also want to add up like this, accountability.
And I think it's better to be public not to disclose
because it's also happened to me like include these like five, six references
and like you can kind of figure it out.
Someone from that research group.
So probably I don't think is the best idea
each time like receive those type of comments like these include
these five six references.
Because on the one side, the one that you're asking to be published
on the other side, maybe four or then 3 or 4 of them are actually good, but
maybe two of them are not actually anyone.
But you don't know what is going to happen.
Like if you don't like fighting.
So probably
sometimes you don't want to fight, it's included and just get done with it.
And I, I think that opening like not blind peer review, like open peer
review, would actually allow us to reduce this type of phenomenon in practice.
So, Don had an interesting observation as well.
saying that,
some journals, acknowledge their reviewers,
but they don't indicate which articles they've reviewed. Yes I’ve seen that
So that's another solution.
And if a reviewer does give comments, you're not always required
to incorporate all the changes you need to justify why you have not.
And so but that can be hard, especially the first couple times
you want to just you want the article published.
So you don't want to raise potential roadblocks.
But but sometimes you do have to say yes, this makes sense.
I made that change.
But this one because
the author doesn't understand or this is not really related to
to what I'm trying to say here.
That's also something you can talk to the editor about.
So for a journal, I mean, I personally had an experience,
but I've also seen other other folks, other editors do this where they'll say,
yeah, you can skip that one, that it doesn't really make sense to us either.
So if you're reading something and you're like,
let this comment from this peer and it just doesn't really fit,
what are your thoughts on it?
So just working with your editors. Or sometimes you’re going to get one reviewer
telling you one thing and the other telling you the opposite.
And remember it
Is your work ultimately. Right.
So you, whatever comments you're going to incorporate,
you want to be able to stand by them Right. So.
Do you want to move on? The next one is the workshop
that was our last this last question
other other questions in the room or on Zoom?
yeah.
Do you want to say just a little more about open,
educational materials.
So, textbooks, there are a lot of them available more and more every day.
So if you teach a class, do a search to see if there any open textbooks.
You'll sometimes get pushback from students
who don't like to read stuff online and don't want to be printing things,
and they actually want a book.
But many of them you can actually order anyway, because there's some there.
And, the printed ones are those are like at a production cost.
So it's, you know, $35 versus $270 over at the bookstores.
So, I think that's something that,
people have been doing more and more lately.
But then there's also open syllabuses
and open other sorts of materials.
and if you
do something that's really cool in your class,
you can publish it in the library with the Creative Commons.
Right?
And we do have over against the far wall.
As you walk out here, we have, a display
set up with some of the open text books that have been published.
So you kind of flip through and get a sense of some of them.
So I’m putting in the chat,
two different links and the slides have those
five kind of links to the five largest places to look for these resources.
What's really important is people who are creating
these, need to actually get them into those, those venues.
It's not enough just to, to post them,
you know,
post them online and hope somebody finds them.
so we're pretty proactive in terms of getting our work
into those different networks so that it can be found,
I don't know what else is helpful.
I would say with regard to, to,
to open textbooks specifically, you'll find
many, many, many for the first two years of college.
The courses are bigger, they're required.
Everybody takes them, and community colleges
specialize in those first two year courses.
We're starting to see more, at the upper
division level and graduate level.
we're also, seeing and we can speak to those students
participating in student book projects, whether they be.
So there were several here at Tech.
One was in the Leadership and Community Education course
and with the graduate teaching scholars, I believe I sent that one around.
but students
contributing as part of a capstone course or part of a,
writing experience, and, you can talk.
Yeah, we've done several, the John Sarah was a history department.
We've done a sociology agriculture team.
Those are the top,
positive governance, where it's
they've been either like a capstone level undergraduate course.
Are you going to graduate level course where students have their final project
instead of just writing a paper, was putting it to a book, and it was
published as an edited volume, had the Creative Commons license.
in one case, the professor went and did
a second edition of the same topic with a later class.
So we're seeing some of that too, which is a great way to incorporate
publishing into classes.
a great way to get people I know.
one professor in history told me
during the pandemic that that helped keep her students engaged.
And in March of 2020, as everything was shutting down as,
hey, we're still publishing something, we can still publish,
everything else is shut down, but we can still publish.
They stayed engaged and that was that was fantastic to hear.
so kind of engaging with the students in another way, they might be thinking,
hey, you know, this work is going to be out there
for other people to see and read and purchase.
how do you like how how should I think about that a little bit differently?
So a little separate from open education, kind of open pedagogy, I guess, but
but still definitely related.
And the other thing I'd say when it comes to the upper level courses,
you know, if you're thinking more
about pulling together articles and stuff for educational materials,
maybe look for those open access articles or those open access,
book chapters or something like that that you can pull together
for course materials.
If there isn't a textbook
or a resource automatically together, but still providing some free access to.
That's a really good point.
you don't have to use a whole book, right?
If something is open, you can pick and choose, from lots of different places.
You get a diversity of voices and and approaches as well as fill in material.
Maybe that is in one resource that's not in another.
you do that anyway, with journal articles, would you fill them
into a class of a very specific word for the choose,
So sorry. I'm talking about OA.
What is your take regarding Sci Hub?
What's your take? Regarding Sci hub.
So, Sci Hub is a collection of illegally
obtained,
journals.
in an ideal world, things would look like Sci Hub.
because it would all be free.
but, it is pirated content, it’s illegal.
you should not be,
we we do not condone theft of
of other people's scholarship.
so part of the reason, like we have the dual factor authentication
now where you have to sign in with your password.
And then second factor is because there are cases
where passwords have been compromised here also at other universities.
And somebody would go in and just harvest large quantities of stuff to post.
on Sci Hub or places of that sort. So,
so yeah, I mean, as Anita says, you know,
in one way it's nice.
But the way they got it was definitely not ethical.
Yeah, it's really a, an indicator that there's a problem.
Yeah.
It would not exist if there wasn’t a problem.
And while you're here at Virginia Tech
you should be able to get pretty much anything.
because if the library doesn't have it, you can, request it
and it comes within, like, a day.
So. Well, so it’s pretty good.
So, interlibrary loan, we can borrow others.
we have a new service called Rapid ILL that's kind of behind the scenes,
but it fulfills quicker things
sometimes the hardest thing with interlibrary loan is like over, say,
winter break, because there's it does require
a person on either end.
We may be closed or the other library may be closed.
And trying to get those articles across that channel can be a little hard.
And yes, normally, like if you put in one,
this evening, you might have it before the end of the day tomorrow.
So it's not instant, but it but it's quick.
I think that system, Interlibrary Loan, I also used it a lot.
well, I'm not understanding why it's called, like, a loan.
Because if you loan like a physical book, you have to return it.
But if you get an article from that system... You’re too young.
It used to literally be a book
that would come to you loaned from another university.
They put it in the US mail it would go on the,
on the Postal Express from one university to another.
The librarian would open it
and they would call you on a telephone that was connected to a wire.
Hi your book’s in the library and you'd have to come get it.
And so it was, it was actually they just don't.
Yeah, it doesn't work that way.
And you know exactly that.
The article I know so I'll, I'll
that I was just going to say I've used it a lot too.
And it kind of
is a testament to why open
access is so important, because even a giant institution
like Virginia Tech, with all these resources,
like a lot of the journals that I use regularly, we don't have access to.
So I'm like always,
Just out of curiosity, what area is your research in,
I’m in fish and wildlife conservation, but,
more on the social science side of things.
So like environmental change or ecological economics or like any policy,
none of those Virginia Tech has access, There are areas like
biomedicine was an area where we because we didn't have a medical school,
we didn't have a very great medical collection.
But now with, Virginia Tech,
Carilion School of Medicine we're building out in that area, and that's,
the journals that we buy and subscribe
to often do reflect where the active programs are. So
but I do always get them. And
and one thing I will tell you, with interlibrary loan,
we do see the statistics on that.
So if there are journals that are getting high volumes of requests,
then that’s a sign, you know, we might need to look at that for, for a subscription.
So so that is one plus of putting it through there.
Because
there are every year there's a couple that sort of is
rising to the top.
And we need to pick those up.
[inaudible]
and we do still send books through the mail.
I certainly got physical books through interlibrary library.
So it does still happen
It’s not totally dead.
You see vans on campus that say Virginia Tech.
So the library, they’re, trucking stuff all over the place.
Literally.
What other libraries do they come from?
Just, curiosity everywhere.
I've got one from South Florida, University of South Florida.
There is usually like a cover sheet.
If you got an electronic copy.
Yeah, you may just scroll past the first few pages.
But somewhere on that cover sheet, there's either the name of the university
it came from if you’re curious, or there might be like a three letter code
for that university.
And if you get a physical book,
there's like a band around it that says where it came from.
So but yeah, we start by going local, right.
It's the closest or within our the like consortium network.
And then if they don't have it sort of goes out from there.
I used to work in interlibrary.
Then just one
other question before we, drop off the,
publishing thesis
in our repository.
So, yeah, yeah.
So, you will create,
what is called an electronic thesis,
thesis or dissertation,
when you graduate,
and it will be by virtue of
the way we have things set up
automatically ingested into VTech Works,
which is the institutional repository, public access institutional advisory.
If you have something that you're working on a patent for or you have something
that's really sensitive, you can request an embargo.
So you would have a year for that and to clear it through,
there is a guide for that
also on how to submit your ETD.
the process is managed by the grad school.
There are some requirements.
if, for example, if you have third party content in your
your dissertation, you need to use this figure from a, from an article,
or you need to, use something that is someone else's creative work,
for which you need
to obtain permission or a fair use.
we can consult with you on that if you have questions about how to do that.
Generally, if here you're wanting to repurpose something,
there's most publishers will not charge you.
they'll have a form where you say, request
permission to reproduce,
you know, part a portion of an article, and you'll go through their form and,
and complete that.
Don't wait till the last minute.
because it it can take some time to get those permissions in, but you attach
your documentation, in the ETD system, do you want to add anything to that?
Yeah.
So, most journals will,
not count that as prior publication.
there are a few crazy ones that do,
just, and so,,
Cell, for example, if you have it in a university
repository, they say that it's prior publication, and won’t take it.
so, it's very, very small numbers.
but there are a few, and so,
there's a,
you can embargo it, kind of automatically for a year.
if you are intending to publish it in one of those, very,
very small number of very amazingly, stupidly restrictive things,
you can request the embargo to be, extended.
we really discourage
keeping our data and our, our theses,
private.
It's a public university.
the state is paying for your education
as well as federal government most of the time.
and so, so we have an obligation to make things open if we can.
but there are cases where, that should be delayed,
and then I have had one.
person who is, their,
their work is incredibly political and sensitive.
And if it were published in the public domain,
it could
cause them to be in danger in their country.
and so we have, a possibility of restricting the thesis
to only Virginia Tech.
people, you have to log in in order to do that.
And so that was a solution
that we came up in that case, you had to be a Virginia Tech,
person from Virginia Tech in order to access that.
and so there are lots of nuances, but
that’s pretty much it.
And when we used to publish print theses and dissertation,
there was kind of a running joke among students that they were going to put
like a $5 bill. Yeah.
in their dissertation
and come back several years later and see if it was still there.
It wasn't far from the truth in terms of the amount of time it circulated.
Whereas now that they are digital, people can download them,
they're getting used and accessed around the world, but,
I still think probably the median,
number of accesses is still zero.
I don’t think so, actually, I think that, so
VTech Works is crawled by Google and Google Scholar.
Okay, one or both.
so I think people are getting people are getting read, which is really great.
It's not just your committee these reading things.
And ProQuest is actually doing some projects with
meta analysis.
so they can, suck up the data from multiple
because a lot of times cases don't get published in journals.
and so there's a lot of data out there that have never been published.
but they've been trying to make it available.
and meta analysis there,
there are several researchers also in the university libraries
who are using AI to examine, book length of work.
So they're looking at theses or dissertations with AI
to try to try to further discover things,
so there's, there's,
some really interesting work going on there too
Okay, read a thesis.
So you normally are more complete with your data thesis and education as well.
[inaudible]
Have you ever had someone,
not want their name on,
their thesis for security reasons or privacy or anything like that?
Yeah. And what to do in that situation?
Well, the one that I had, it had been out for 15 years,
so I was kind of like, oh, I think that, you know, we can take it off
the off the shelf.
And we did it.
We did take it off the shelf.
metaphorically restricted it to Virginia Tech, login users.
But it was already out there, so I don't imagine that it did very much,
but, yeah, once something gets into the internet's, it's hard to get it back.
It certainly is.
so. Okay,
so we did have a slide here about the, upcoming workshops,
and that is Virginia Tech's OA policy.
And Philip Young, he is sometimes a speaker at these events.
He's very, very knowledgeable about.
And he actually was on university governance Commission
on Research and helped move it through and everything.
So he is a great person to talk about that.
And it's offered
on an ongoing basis throughout the spring and fall semesters.
But these are the next two sessions that are coming up.
would be worth checking out
if these are the last two or this spring and the fall ones aren't up yet.
Yeah, I think he did well actually today or yesterday,
but it wasn't in time to catch with this group.
But anyway
I it's not this is not your final opportunity.
Yeah.
but it is definitely worth taking advantage of.
And if you have an opportunity to do one of those two, that's great at,
you know, over the summer, we don't do as many of those
PDN workshops just because there's not too many people.
Okay, well, I appreciate our speakers. [inaudible]