[Edward Lener] Good evening, everyone, and
welcome to our Connecting
the Opens: A Panel Discussion
for the Future Professoriate event.
We've got several speakers here tonight
and I'll be introducing them in a minute.
But the events here are
all connected with the Global Open Education Week,
and it worked out well that it was
this week and not next week
with spring break and everything.
We do have several events planned.
So, for the in-person folks
I shared a handout that
lists some of those events and details.
And in the chat we'll place the link to those as well,
so you can see the different events.
And some of the people
that are here as speakers
today will be leading those events.
So just a brief review of tonight's agenda,
the different speakers, and
what they'll each be talking about.
And these names will mean more to you
in a second as I introduce folks,
but you can see some of the different topics
that we'll be touching on today.
So Open really covers a lot of
different areas. Because it is
Open Education Week,
we're going to give a little extra time
to our two speakers dealing with that.
But we want to take about
45 minutes to an hour, to start
with, for the speakers and then leave
plenty of time for questions
and discussion at the end.
So I'll introduce myself
and then we'll kind of go down the list here.
So I'm Ed Lener.
My title is Director of Collections.
I manage many of
our subscriptions and try
to keep within budget.
And so that's a lot of what I do.
I also serve as the liaison
to some of the departments in
College of Science and
College of Natural Resources.
And before I pass it on, so I don't forget,
I'll just mention - you'll notice in
the bottom corner is a Bit.ly address.
So all these slides will be
available as well if you go to that address.
So Tyler, you want to
introduce yourself? [Tyler Walters] Sure.
Good evening, everybody.
I'm Tyler Walters. I'm the Dean of the University Libraries.
[Edward Lener] Anita? [Anita Walz] I'm Anita Walz.
I'm the Assistant Director for
Open Education and Scholarly
Communications Librarian.
[Laura Neser] Hello, I'm Laura Neser.
I'm an instructor in
the Department of Geosciences
and a faculty author
of Open Educational Resources.
[Corinne Guimont] Hi, I'm Corinne Guimont.
I'm the Associate Director of
publishing and Digital Scholarship,
and I oversee Virginia Tech Publishing.
[Edward Lener] Okay. And hopefully Brandie will be
here by the time we get to
their portion of the segment.
And Philip, are you online?
[Philip Young] I am. Hi, everyone. I'm Philip Young,
and I manage the repository
in the Libraries called VTechWorks.
[Edward Lener] Okay. So to kick us off here,
Tyler Walters is going to talk to us a little bit
about, kind of the big picture view
of open access and open education.
[Tyler Walters] Great. Thank you. I'm just going to- the slides. So, yes.
I'm going to kind of do the 30,000 foot level,
what is all this stuff,
but you're going to hear more specifics
from other speakers.
So I'm not going to read these things to you.
You're welcome to read them,
but to summarize quickly,
we're talking about open access.
It's kind of the generic term.
It's kind of this umbrella for everything.
And it is this principle that
scholarly information should
be shared openly and
freely and to be used and
reused, really, with little to no restrictions.
Really emphasize the "no restrictions" part.
These items can be held in copyright,
but they would then have
an open license applied to
them so people could make things of them.
So this movement -
you could call it open access,
really starts to gain legs,
become more organized,
really a formal movement by 2003.
So this has been around 22 years now, or so,
and this is- and I'm starting to feel old,
because I know a lot of people who
went to this meeting,
I didn't, in 2003 of
the Max Planck Society in
Germany. And there's a document.
It's called the Berlin Declaration
on Open Access to Knowledge
in the Sciences and Humanities.
And the text there is
a basic quote from the document.
It really describes, you know, again,
what is open access.
And of course their statement
puts a lot more meat
on the bones than I just did.
It really talks about freely available
via the internet, the public internet,
and that these articles should be used to-
they should be able to be used to crawl them.
To kind of be used as data,
applying software to them.
All sorts of different uses.
So not necessarily just
human reading, that we all know and love,
but lots of different ways to do things with
the text and scholarship
that we have in front of us.
And again, this should be free
and openly available.
So moving on from there,
I think it's good to talk about the people.
So who are we talking about?
Who's involved in this
and what's, more or less, their roles?
So, of course, at the very core
of it is our faculty,
our researchers, who- What do they do?
Of course they're creating.
They're sharing scholarship.
They're reviewing other people's scholarship.
They can serve as editors
for journals and book series.
They evaluate scholarship. So clearly,
they are authors, they're creators,
but they also review and evaluate material -
the scholarship of other professors, as well.
Next comes the money.
So it is the faculty that receives the money.
So where does this come from?
This could be private foundations.
A lot of it comes from,
in this country, US federal agencies.
In other countries, it is typically
the national government that's
funding a lot of the research.
So that's where the dollars come from.
That's where the dollars come from still,
but we'll see how much
as things are changing currently.
And of course, universities
as an institution and their libraries,
where we support
the creation of the scholarship and
the libraries part, specifically,
is to make it accessible,
help preserve it,
help to generate and create it, of course.
That's obviously- when we say
"we're helping to create,"
we're helping
the faculty and their research groups,
which can include students, of course.
And really the last
major group is the publishers,
scholarly societies are also publishers,
as well as community organizations
for a certain subject area.
But again, as publishers,
they are supporting the peer review process.
They're helping to validate
and disseminate the works.
So those are kind of the groups involved.
And then yeah, the dilemma,
the part that doesn't seem to go so well,
some people will just
outright say this is broken.
Okay, it's broken, but
it's been kind of broken and
operating for, well, 30 years or more.
So it's kind of interesting to think
that it's broken
because something's still running.
But the federal agencies
in the US themselves,
there's about 42 or so that have contributed
funding during the past fiscal year,
fiscal year 2024,
and that's about $111 billion in
basic and applied research.
So we're talking about quite a bit of money.
And again, you know,
who's supplying that money?
It is us, the US taxpayer
that funds the agencies.
And other parts of the dilemma
are researcher, faculty members publishing.
In a traditional publishing sense
they give away their rights once their -
and I'm talking about articles -
once an article, or a book,
manuscript is accepted by a publisher,
it's typically in
the agreement that the author,
the faculty author, is giving up their rights.
Don't do that. That's my opinion.
As much as you can, not do that.
That's where the problem really,
really begins.
Faculty, of course, as I mentioned,
are involved in
the peer review editing process,
work a lot with publishers.
And then of course,
what do the publishers do?
They sell it back to
the universities and it's
us, the libraries, that purchase it
and the cost keeps
increasing every year,
just like your rent does.
So it doesn't slow down.
And that too is part of the problem.
If the citizenry has funded
the research through these funnels,
through the federal agencies,
and researchers are paid through
grants from the agencies to do the research,
why are we paying so much when it's
really already been bought and paid for?
That's the dilemma.
And of course, some benefits to
open access is- it is this,
you know, public access to new knowledge.
So I'd like to point out
that there are groups out
there, not solely researchers,
faculty and students at
universities, there are groups.
The most vigorous ones
I can think of are those
around health concerns, patient right groups.
They want access to
the latest health sciences literature,
typically funded
through the National Institutes of Health.
There could be people they know,
family members,
there are folks who just kind of
get involved in this movement to make sure
that the latest research
is made publicly available.
So it's not strictly scholars.
But, of course, having it openly,
freely available online through
a repository means there's
greater visibility to the scholarship.
There should be easy,
quicker dissemination of the works.
We like to think there's potential
for greater impact of the work.
In fact, there's research out
there that shows that there's
potential for an open publication,
like an article, to have up
to 19% more citations
than an article that's behind a paywall.
So I think that's significant.
Of course, just being
open and being out there and being
able to Google this material and find it
helps to increase
the profile of a researcher,
and perhaps other researchers
are coming across this material.
So we have there's a lot of
potential in the benefits.
Now I'm going to kind of quickly go
over what I call, "just what are these modes?"
What are the modes of open access?
How does this really come about?
How do we see open access?
So the first one
I'll mention is the open-
what we call, open institutional repository,
or some people refer to this as green access.
But it is it looks pretty much
like a website to you and I,
but it is very structured,
has a lot of good cataloging or
metadata about the materials
that are in there and scholarship.
Again, open, publicly available,
freely available.
A lot of publishers actually support this.
Most of them do by this time,
but what they support is
taking what they call the
author accepted manuscript can go
into an open repository.
Now, what is that?
That's not the version of the article that
you see published by the publisher.
It's that last version that's typically in
a PDF file that's approved
of by the publisher after peer review.
So it's not formatted and the like.
But those are the versions of the articles
that will appear in repositories like this.
And publishers refer to
this as a self archiving policy.
And to date, I'm not
sure that any of the major publishers,
scholarly publishers, are against that.
I've not heard of any.
It's taken a while to get there,
but for some years now
the major-
especially the major STEM publishers,
have been on board with that.
We do operate an
open scholarship repository here at
Virginia Tech and you
heard Philip Young online introduce himself.
He runs that service.
It's called VTechWorks.
It's been around since late 2012, early 2013,
so it's getting a little bit older,
but Philip will tell you more about it,
but it now has over 100,000
items in that repository.
Probably a good third
to 40%, somewhere in there,
are theses and dissertations
written by Virginia Tech students.
So there's an awful lot of
student scholarship
that's available there as well.
Next is the open journal.
This too is typically
referred to as gold access.
Again, similar to the repository,
except this is pretty much
a journal publishing process like
any other scholarly journal that you've seen.
Authors submit their manuscripts,
the manuscripts go out to
peer reviewers who are typically
other researchers at other institutions in
the field who are experts.
Who could comment on the article.
And it goes through that kind of process.
It's accepted or it could be accepted
with changes, with some editing or, well,
this is just- well,
can report rejected. That can happen,
of course.
But typically, it's going to get published.
And the real difference here is that
an open journal is going to make
those materials
openly and publicly available.
They're following
different business models out there.
They're not charging a subscription fee
that a library or
an individual would pay,
or a license, if it's online.
So, there's other ways to do it.
Um, there's controversy around some of that.
There is what has been common,
I think we're beginning to get
away from a little bit,
is what's called Author Page Charges.
So if a manuscript is accepted,
then the author is essentially given
an invoice to pay
the publisher for its
costs to put the article out.
And those can range. I think
typically they're kind of $1,000 to $3,000,
but they can be less, they can be more.
There are those who like to charge
more and like to try to justify it.
This is- hence the controversy,
this is not really
always helping to
make things freely available.
The commercial publishers find
ways to raise the costs,
anyway, which creates a boundary to research.
We also have open research data.
So this data can mean a lot
of different things depending
on the kind of research that you're doing.
But there are requirements now from
federal agencies that articles
and the underlying data that supports
the findings of the article
are made publicly available.
So that's- we've had faculty
ask a lot of questions about,
"Well how am I supposed to do that?"
There are a variety of ways of doing that.
We do support
the Virgina Tech Data Repository.
The Libraries manage that on
behalf of the university.
Anybody within the university community
can deposit their data there.
You also see data going to-
there are repositories
with some of the federal agencies.
So if you're getting funded,
say, out of the NIH,
health sciences work, they have
a repository for data that it may go there.
So there's a variety of places it could go.
And as a library, we're service oriented.
So we do help faculty get
their materials to wherever they need
to be. With us, or somewhere else.
And the real reason we're here this week is
open education, and open educational resources.
And this too is a little bit
different from the other types
that we just talked about,
but of course, it has
that commonality of, in the end
it's an educational resource.
It could be, commonly, a textbook.
It can be other kinds of
multimedia material used in education,
but it's freely available to the reader.
So typically, that's going to be students
in a course that are looking at these things.
We have a really robust program.
Here, over the years, we really
started back in 2013,
when we created
our open education librarian position
who, sitting to my right, is Anita Walz.
And I think for us,
the really neat thing about creating
that position and getting Anita on board
is - it was the third known
open education librarian position in the US.
So we were out
there trying to figure out how do
we help create these materials
and help other people make use of them.
So this week, open education week,
we've been doing something for panels,
sessions,
symposia since about the year after that,
2014, going forward. We started to partner
with departments on campus to
publish open educational resources.
Again, typically, but not
always, an open textbook.
The first one we did
was Fundamentals of Business in
2016 with a professor from
Pamplin College of Business.
That particular title has
been revised three or four times now.
I think it has over 600,000 downloads.
Somewhere around 300 institutions
worldwide, use this book.
So- Fundamentals of Business.
So it was kind of our first big project,
our first title,
still continues to get a lot of attention.
So from there we moved on to
a small grant program that we
make available to faculty
to help them meet some early costs around
creating the open materials
that they want to use in the classroom.
Typically, that can pay
for student time, who
are working on the project,
maybe there's some other related costs.
Anita can tell
us more about probably some of
the crazy things that come up.
But labor is always a good cost to that.
It's also that year, 2016,
we started really formally
labeling our work, our program,
the Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech.
So you'll see that OEI or
open education initiative out there.
We've worked with, since then,
I mean, it's 2025 now,
and we've worked with
probably nearly 20- I bet 20
different academic departments,
plus the cooperative extension service,
have published with us.
Virginia Tech Publishing is
a partner in that as well.
But Anita here has touched on every project,
if not been at the center
of it, along with faculty.
So I think one of the things we've
learned through this kind of
programming is: these really are partnerships.
And the faculty, typically,
that we've worked with, are happy
to have it and are grateful to have it
because they start to learn
pretty quickly, if they don't know already,
how much effort and time it
takes to put something like this together.
But another important quality of
OER materials is the rights aspect to it.
And they can be copyrighted,
but they typically have
a creative commons license
that allows for some level of
openness to the material and some level
of reuse, or even recreation,
rewriting, perhaps, of some
of the textbook or resource that's available.
So I'm sure we'll hear a bit
more about that shortly.
That's what I've got. That's a quick primer
on open access and
hopefully it's not all too confusing.
It can get confusing.
But I think those are the basic elements,
so hopefully that's helpful to you.
[Aimée Surprenant] References?
[Tyler Walters] Yeah, you'll get the slides and
references to those things.
[Anita Walz] So my name is Anita Walz.
I'm the Assistant Director for
Open Education, and welcome.
It's nice to see all of you here today.
I'm going to be talking a little bit
about- a little bit
about the program that we run,
but mostly about why, and what this might
mean for graduate students
and early career professionals.
So, some things that
you might want to know regardless of
what institution you end up working
at - look for support.
We do a lot of different kinds of things.
What we do is challenging,
but you might be able to find
someone, usually in a library
or center for teaching and learning,
who can help you along the way.
So don't try to do this alone.
I would love to ask you a couple
of questions. And I have
the chat pulled up
and also the participant list pulled up,
but for those of you online
and in the room, please raise your hand:
Do you teach or are you considering teaching?
How many of you? Yeah. Okay. And some hands
online too. Thank you.
What about- Oh, boy,
now I can't get my slide to change.
Thank you.
Trying to click on that. Okay.
Hands up if you have
heard of open educational resources.
Anybody heard of this before?
Okay. Some hands up.
So, for a lot of people it sounds like this
is new. Thank you.
And then hands up again,
are you familiar with
creative commons licenses?
Anybody, you've heard of these?
You've seen maybe something
that says creative commons,
but it's maybe a little
bit murky at times. Okay.
So these are some of the building blocks
for the open education movement,
and this is not just a movement.
It really has a philosophical backing.
It has a collection of
value driven practices.
People ask for a definition,
and it's really hard to find one
because there are [unintelligible]
of our values that this appeals to.
Um, but some of
the ways that this ends up getting
used is in encouraging
access to content for everyone.
In looking at student affordability,
one of you said,
paid a lot of money for my physics book.
I wish I had known.
So affordability is a major barrier
for lots and lots of
people in going to school.
It's good for the institutional
reputation to say,
we do this, we support
our faculty and our students this way.
It's good for equity and inclusion,
leveling the playing field
for all who are otherwise,
completely qualified
to participate in learning activities.
Um, it's an outlet for creativity.
As Laura will probably talk a little bit about,
and a venue to
contribute to your discipline.
You're in your discipline because
there's something
really interesting about it.
You would not be studying
what you study without
some strong interest and
probably a desire to give
back either now or in the future.
So we characterize this
as being student centric,
cross cutting lots of different sectors:
institutions, K-12, higher ed.
It has a lot of
different ways you can slice this.
The focus is really on
sharing and including other people,
enabling possibilities, reducing barriers,
giving credit where it's due.
So really, like, service oriented,
which I love about this movement.
And it leverages a lot of open practices,
both licenses, open access, open pedagogies,
open publishing, and it has
an openness to doing things in new ways,
which are not always
comfortable. And openness to collaboration.
So, if you want
to take something back with you,
if you're a grad student,
there's also a community for you.
The global OER graduate network Go-GN,
go-gn.net, is a place
where you can connect with other
grad students if you're like,
Hey, this sounds kind of interesting.
I want to meet some other people
that do this kind of work.
They have webinars.
They have fellowship kinds
of opportunities. Really great,
very global group of
folks who are doctoral students,
masters students, or early professionals.
There's also a research base for OER.
The Association of-
American Association of Colleges and Universities
has a relatively
new OER research database.
There's a research project
out of the Open Ed group.
So there is an increasingly
larger research base,
not the case a few years back,
but this is getting to be old
enough that we're doing more research.
So let's talk a little bit about
what open educational resources
are because oftentimes people say,
Oh, it's free textbooks.
That's the number one thing I get.
Oh, it's free textbooks,
and it's more than that.
It does include a lot of free textbooks.
These are things that we've
created in collaboration
with Virginia Tech Publishing
and with other groups around campus.
We've also done videos.
Kayla worked on this video series for VetMed.
We've done work with virtual reality animals,
creation of VR animals for the VetMed school.
We've done things with homework software
and online calculators.
So there are a lot of different artifacts
that are used in teaching and learning.
Any of them can be under copyright.
Any of them, if you own it,
you could put an open license on it.
So as well as this is a music channel,
YouTube channel of music
related to a book that we worked on.
So there are two main characteristics
of open educational resources.
They're free for anyone.
Not just students. You can
share them with your grandma.
Permission is given to customize them.
So through
usually a creative commons license.
So those two things are
the most important characteristics
of open educational resources.
I would caution you if you find
it online, it's free.
You think, Oh, this an OER.
Does it have does it
have permission given for customization?
Does it have a creative commons license?
Okay, maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't.
So that tells you something about
whether or not it's
an open educational resource.
Is it something you
had to log in to get into?
Then it's probably not
because it's not available to everyone.
So the two main
characteristics of these, I'd say, are-
if somebody can close that box on top,
that would be really
helpful to be able to see.
Two of the main characteristics
are that open licenses,
creative comments licenses -
thank you - allow adaptation.
And they allow redistribution.
So sharing and making
it your own or making it fit,
something that you want it to be
are really incredible things that you can do
with these versus
regular in-copyright materials
where you really can't share and you
can't update them or
customize them to fit your use.
Um, Dr. Neser will have a lot
more to say about those things.
So as future faculty, you have decisions.
Congratulations. You have
decisions about your research,
about your teaching, about your service.
These are important decisions
for you to consider
now and as you move forward in your work.
Uh if you'd like to take a look at
some point to find these kinds of resources,
there are five main places where I would
suggest you could start. At the top,
this guide that has
links to all of these five,
but these are the major,
I would say major English language,
although there are quite a few
other languages represented here.
But primarily English,
there are Arabic channels,
there are French channels,
there's Spanish channels.
So these have lots of impacts.
As Dean Walters mentioned,
they are adopted at
other institutions
because they're freely available.
They're used in many different countries.
Um, they have a really wide, really,
really wide audience,
which is really exciting because
that means somebody's work is getting
out and it's getting used.
Fish, Fishing, and Conservation
is a book that came out
I think, two years ago,
and it's a peer reviewed textbook -
actually have a copy of it here -
It's a real book.
The digital copy is online in
PDF and in something called EPUB,
as well as an HTML format that looks like
a book that is
in a setting called Pressbooks,
or in a platform called Pressbooks,
and it's really exciting to
see this knowledge be
available to people all around the world.
Okay. So savings at Virginia Tech,
really exciting, over $4 million
since the project started,
and we have a lot of other sorts of impacts.
Some are perception, some
are about institutional effectiveness.
And by students, we do hear students say,
there's this transaction
between me and my professor.
My professor shows that they care about me.
I want to learn. This is
one way to make that
happen to show that you care about students.
So do consider getting to know,
getting to know your students.
I'm going to skip through that.
Your future students are really important.
They do encounter barriers,
not unlike yourselves toward
the impacts
of course material costs on learning,
both finishing college, staying in a class,
not dropping a class,
getting an acceptable grade in the class.
These are significant barriers for students.
We also hear about basic student needs,
and you probably- either you
or you know classmates
who really struggle with
basic needs. With food,
with providing for their families,
whether their families are
abroad or they're here,
students have a lot of
things that are- that they balance,
and that affects the ability
to purchase expensive course materials.
So my question for you is, what can you do?
What can I do to make what I do more open.
And with that, I'm going to turn it over to-
to Dr. Neser.
[Laura Neser] You can call me Laura. [Anita Walz] Okay.
[Laura Neser] Hi, everyone. I am Dr. Laura Neser.
I am an instructor
in the Department of Geosciences,
as I mentioned, and I started teaching here
at Virginia Tech in the fall of 2021.
I've been teaching these types
of courses since 2016,
so I had some experience.
These are by far my largest courses though.
I teach the really large
introductory Earth Science courses.
I have a little over 600
students per semester,
and I teach a combination of
asynchronous online and face to face courses.
By far, of my Geoscience classes,
the one called Introduction to Earth Science,
which I brought my adapted open textbook for,
is my largest.
There's usually somewhere between 100 and 300 students
in each section of that class that I teach.
So when I got here in fall of 2021,
I used a commercial textbook
because at my previous college
we were required to all use
the same textbook for
the same courses and
agree on it ahead of time.
It was a commercial McGraw Hill textbook.
I think it cost students somewhere
around $70 to $90
to include the Canvas
integrated homework as well.
When I got to Virginia Tech,
which had my largest classes,
I noticed that first semester,
there were a few student comments about
the high price of the textbook
for a non-majors
class that they're not
going to continue on in
and just return the book
to the bookstore for pennies on the dollar.
So that's what pretty much inspired me to
look into open textbooks
and things like that.
So I decided in spring of 2022
to use an existing open textbook
for my classes that I found online.
Anita had hosted a workshop with
University Libraries called... "Open Textbooks"?
[Anita Walz] Introduction to Open Textbooks [Laura Neser] Thank you!
"Introduction to Open Textbooks" that I had attended
and she gave me a list of resources,
places to look. I used
an existing open textbook in spring of 2022,
and I noticed already on some of
my student reviews that
students appreciated it
not costing any money.
So I included a few of
my favorite student reviews here since then.
So thank you for making the textbook free.
I liked that she had her own textbook for free.
The instructor provided
a free and easily accessible textbook
for us to use throughout the course,
which was extremely helpful
academic wise and price wise.
Then this one, especially,
I really enjoyed the free textbook
because it is difficult for a student
to spend hundreds of dollars on
textbooks that they can
probably never use again.
I totally agree with that sentiment.
All of us at this point,
have been to college,
and it's a big budgetary concern
to pay for textbooks,
especially when you know
it's for a class that
you're probably never
going to have to use it again.
So that was my motivating factor,
just to help decrease
that barrier to education for my students.
And especially when you think about,
I'm not going to do
the math in my head right now,
but 600 plus students per year buying
a $90 textbook is a lot of money going to
publishers for information that
can be freely obtained online.
So one great thing
is that I learned throughout
this process that faculty can
actually adapt open educational resources.
So the book I
used that first year that was free,
it was close to what I wanted,
but there was some information
missing that I usually cover in my class.
I noticed a few errors
that were in the textbook, as well.
And so I learned from
Anita's workshop that you
can take an existing work
and edit it yourself and
with the help of an institution and
then re release or republish that
work under an adapted textbook license.
Then finally, the last
thing that I love about it
is unlike subscription models,
when I was in college, this wasn't as common,
but now I've noticed a lot of
textbook manufacturers say for four months,
you can access this textbook
for a lower price,
and then you lose access to that textbook.
And it's this subscription model
that I know is
trickling into everything in
our lives, including textbooks.
Open source, open educational resources.
They're free forever. You can't
really- I don't know. Can you...?
Yeah, they're free forever.
They're on the Internet forever. And so
there's no subscription
that students have to apply to.
I just want to mention how I've seen
these OER engaged
with my colleagues and such.
There's a yearly conference.
It's open nationally. I'm not sure- internationally?
[Anita Walz] Mmhmm.
[Laura Neser] Internationally? Thank you.
And it's called the Conference on Higher
Education Pedagogy, or CHEP,
and it actually takes
place at the Virginia Tech Inn,
which is so nice for here,
because I can just walk over to the conference.
But it's open internationally.
Anita and I, and Kindred Grey,
who is a graphic designer
for the libraries
who helped us with the book.
We created this poster.
It pretty much just gave an overview of
what should educators do
to get open resources.
My own timeline throughout
the center of what
year I did what and how I did it.
And then on the right, we included
some grant information,
so you can get money to support this.
One of my colleagues, when I told him
I was doing this
open educational textbook mentioned,
Yeah, but, you know,
if you work with a publisher,
you get the royalties from your book.
And I said, when I was a student,
I would get so annoyed
when a faculty member made me
buy their book that they
then would make more money off of.
So I kind of rolled my eyes a little bit,
but I said, Thank you for your input.
I continued on this project.
So if you're interested to the poster,
I did create a little bitly link.
It's just bit.ly/PosterCHEP
Somehow that wasn't taken,
and it's the actual poster.
So if you want to look at that timeline,
there's some grants on there that you can
access as well. Please feel free.
The poster is also published under
a creative commons license
so you can share
the poster with whoever you like,
or just take bits and pieces
of the information as well.
So this one is a little repetitive.
Anita had already mentioned
some of the repositories.
But what I do want to
mention if this is something that
interests you for teaching
with a free textbook,
the firsts things first,
look for one that exists.
That's like the most ideal scenario
that you find a free textbook that you can
just put in your syllabus and
put your course materials with that textbook.
Depends on the nature of your studies.
I lucked out there are actually
a few different geoscience textbooks
out there that are
open educational resources,
and I was able to kind of stitch together
various ones to make my perfect textbooks.
If- I'm not going to read all of this,
but I included a few extra repositories,
I think, more than the previous slide.
There are so many places that you
can search for open educational resources.
There's quite a bit of overlap,
so you will notice in different repositories,
they have the same resources.
And I'll just say from my own experience,
if you come across a resource
that you think is good for your class,
it's okay to stop there.
You don't have to do an exhaustive search
of every single repository that's out there.
It's okay to find one, try it out,
and then you can always revisit,
you know, in a later semester,
which is what I did.
Okay. So one thing I wanted to mention
was... there's... I kind of mentioned this,
but there's some open resources
that might say, be exactly what you want.
Or you might do what I did and find
multiple different resources
where I said,
Oh man, I really like
this chapter in this book,
but it doesn't exist in
this other open textbook.
So in 2022, I worked with
the University Libraries to develop
my own adapted textbook,
Introduction to Earth Science,
and if it weren't
for using the University Library support,
I could never have done
this project correctly on the first try.
I could have gotten something out there,
but it would not have been as
nice and smooth and polished.
So for wherever you
might find yourself in the future,
seek out your institutional librarians.
They're trained professionals.
They really are so helpful.
You know, Anita gave me advice.
I would come up with a timeline,
and she said if it was reasonable
or not or maybe
a little too ambitious to do
a lot of stuff in the summer.
But yes, so anywhere
you find yourself in the future,
please reach out to
your institutional library or
resources because they helped me find books.
They helped me find grants.
I got a little over $3,000 total,
just money for my summer salary
for doing these types of projects.
And they gave me training in Pressbooks,
which is the HTML site
where you access the book,
and that's what I would
edit to make it my own.
So it's a very daunting task
when you first look at
Pressbooks to try to edit things.
It's kind of like a big online sandbox,
you know, when you try to figure
out how to format and things.
And Anita gave me training,
and I'm sure most libraries
would offer similar support.
And these are just all eight
of the existing books.
Again, like I said,
I'm lucky that there's a lot,
but I took bits and pieces from all of them.
So, as I mentioned,
one of the most valuable things
you can do is work with your institution.
And for me, one of the biggest benefits was
keeping it above board, legal.
I didn't have to worry about if I
accidentally used copyrighted material.
In the instance of my textbook,
Anita discovered that
an existing open textbook was
using copyrighted material for
an entire chapter, all the figures.
And so we kind of were like,
Well that sets us back, of course,
because we were going to use this chapter.
And Kindred helped make new figures.
I would make new figures
and then send them to Kindred,
and Anita and say, Is this legal?
You know, is this different enough from
the original figure to release?
And so that was one of
the most valuable benefits because, again,
when you see creative commons license,
you should be able to assume it's
all free to distribute, remix, adapt.
But of course, sometimes-
I'm sure it was
accidental because we reached out.
It all was resolved very easily,
but it was an accidental copyright violation
from a previous book.
I'm not gonna go over
all the different types of
creative commons licenses,
since Anita mentioned them.
Generally, I try to keep
toward the top few licenses.
Those are the ones that
you can take their text,
change it, and add to it,
and then redistribute for free.
You pretty much always have to attribute,
no matter what you do,
attribute, attribute, attribute.
If you changed a figure,
you have to say where you changed it from.
If you remix the text,
you have to tell people that
you changed the order of the text.
So my book has a whole section
called version notes,
and it's all the changes.
It wasn't just I took
a paragraph from a book and stuck it in.
I took a paragraph changed it to
fit my own kind of narrative
and then put it in the book,
and then I had to tell people that
I did that with the text.
So just make sure you try
to keep it above board.
And again, institutional support
was just- it saved me so much time.
I would never have caught the copyright
violations, to be honest.
It wasn't even crossing my mind.
That was a possibility.
So institutional support
I cannot stress enough.
And last but not least,
if you're interested in
accessing either of my adapted texts, the-
oh, sorry. The text went on it a little bit.
The QR code in the bottom left was
the first edition that we
published in December of 2022.
It has embedded quiz questions
that students can do online,
and they also come with QR codes.
So if you have a PDF version
and you're looking offline,
you can take your phone and still
take the quiz, which is really nice.
Kindred Grey, our graphic designer,
did all of that for me.
I did not have to make QR
codes or anything like that.
And then the upper right one is
our newest second edition
published a few weeks ago.
It arrives tomorrow in the mail.
So I brought the first edition.
But it is free to access.
There's a whole new chapter in there,
and I really think we
improved greatly
on the second edition from the first,
which was kind of my own experiment
and seeing how to adapt.
Please also feel free to email
me at any point, at any time.
It doesn't have to be
soon after this conference.
If you have any questions because you want
to do a project like adapting a textbook,
I'm more than happy
to answer any questions or
even try to help you
find grants, anything like that.
And certainly work together.
[Edward Lener] I love the little dinosaur
in the QR code. [Laura Neser] I love it too!
It's a Virginia Tech QR code.
It has a dinosaur in it. I love that.
All of the QR codes in
my textbooks are little dinosaur QR codes.
It's wonderful. Perfect for that topic too.
[Anita Walz] And I will say Laura is being a little bit
modest in the popularity of
her book because her book
has over 180,000 downloads?
[Laura Neser] Yes. [Anita Walz] Not including in
the Pressbooks version.
So there was a need for this.
You did beautifully.
We've gotten really good feedback
from people who've adopted and...
Laura was a dream to work with.
She's a scientist. Her notes were
like a lab notebook.
It was beautiful. It was so
great just to see the organization.
[Laura Neser] Thank you. [Anita Walz] It was a joy.
[Laura Neser] Yes, document everything when in doubt,
document everything you're doing.
Even if you think it's innocuous,
make a little note.
Like, I made a quick
little change in this sentence.
Just put it all out there,
and then the librarians can help you sort
it out. Thank you.
[Corinne Guimont] Broadening the scope a bit. We're going to
talk a little bit about open publishing.
So I figured we'd start by
taking a look at the publishing process.
Now, this might be familiar to many of you,
and this is just a really broad kind
of high overview of publishing process.
But typically you're sumitting a manuscript.
It goes through some sort of review,
maybe peer review or editorial review,
maybe a combination of the two.
And this can be for journals or books.
Let's just say that,
too, really broadening that scope.
There's probably some revisions happening.
You're going back and forth with
your editors for a journal,
making those revisions, making those changes.
And then hopefully it's accepted.
And at that point, you have
that author accepted manuscript
that we've mentioned a couple times now.
At that point, then you kind of
move into the copy editing
and typesetting phase.
There's probably
a whole lot more emails
back and forth at this point,
some minor changes,
some proofing, all of that.
And then your book or your journal
is finally published.
Your journal article is finally published.
But when we're talking
about open access publishing,
this process is going to look similar,
no matter what type
of publishing you're doing.
But when we're talking
about open access publishing,
what we're really looking at is
that fourth step that
author accepted manuscript.
And this is the step
where your agreements are signed.
So when you're talking about your copyright,
when you're signing over
that copyright to the publisher - or not,
if you didn't create a commons license -
this is where you're seeing that information,
and that's where you're able
to kind of get an idea
of your rights with your publication.
If you're doing an open access,
that gold OA open access
model with an APC involved,
this is where those fees are collected.
Those fees are supposed to be
used for copy editing and typesetting.
I say supposed to be because
some of these are astronomical,
and I will tell you right now
some fees are way
too high to copy edit
and typeset one article.
But that's why those fees are typically
collected in this phase.
And then just another point,
if you're doing that green OA and you have
that version that can be
uploaded to a repository,
this is that version that can be uploaded.
So before it goes into
copy editing and typesetting,
before the publisher puts its final,
pretty prettiness on it.
This is that version that that
can go into that repository.
Now, we talked about this a bit,
but just to really reiterate,
why publish open access?
You're reducing barriers to access,
whether it's educational materials,
whether it's your research,
whether it's your data, whether
it's any of your work.
You're reducing the barriers to access.
And yes, that's a huge, huge benefit
for our readers, for students, for everything.
But it's also a benefit to
you because when you
reduce barriers to access,
more people can read your work,
more people can cite your work.
You have more visibility
and impact as a scholar.
You can also
potentially retain the copyright.
We're doing that creative commons license,
you retain the copyright of your work,
which is a huge help
for you, as we've talked about,
to be able to reuse and
allow others to reuse your material.
Then there's the more logistical sides
of things - the institutional policies,
which I know Philip is going to go into,
and then the funder mandates which we touched
on a little bit with federal agencies.
So, maybe repeating,
but we'll just keep repeating.
So how to publish Open Access?
You can start- If you're
thinking about a journal article,
there is the Directory of Open Access Journals.
I looked earlier, there's over 20,000
journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals.
Now, we talked a lot about APCs -
or we've talked a little bit about APCs -
over 13,000 of those journals
do not have an APC.
So not all open access requires APCs.
You can look in there and look for
journals that do not require that fee.
I know a lot of people kind of shy
away from that because
they don't have the funding.
They don't know where they're
going to get the funding,
but there are over
13,000 registered journals in
the Directory of Open Access Journals without those fees.
So that's a great place to start.
You can also check your discipline,
see where other folks have
published and get an idea there.
If you're looking at publishing
a book or a monograph,
there's the Directory of Open Access Books.
Now, this isn't like a list
of publishers like you would hope,
but it is a list of books.
And what you might do is look for
books within your discipline,
see where they've published,
and then know that
those publishers are open
to publishing open access.
Some publishers might have what
we call BPCs - book page charges.
So you have those fees involved.
If those fees- Those fees tend to be higher, not always,
but tend to be higher than your APCs,
because what you're talking about is
a full book, not an article.
In those cases, there are subventions out there.
So Virginia Tech has participated in
TOME: Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem.
This was a five year program
with Association of Research Libraries...
Yeah Tyler? AAU,
and was there a third? AUPresses,
to be able to provide subventions from institutions
to the university press that was publishing
the book to make that book open access.
The university presses were able
to still sell the print version at
a profit to be able to continue
to collect funds to
keep their operations going,
not in a bad way, but the digital versions
were freely available online right away.
What we found is that some of
these books that were funded through TOME
have actually more downloads
from the digital versions than books are
purchased through the print versions. Or even
downloads through the paywall version,
or of paywalls of other books.
So we're seeing a huge increase
in the books published
through this - through repositories.
The other benefit of any open access,
I'm just going to say, is if you're retaining
the copyright of your work,
if it's open access,
you can deposit that work in multiple places,
which helps increase the findability of the work.
So you can have a work
in Virginia Tech repository.
You can have a work in
a discipline-specific repository,
and that might help folks
find it in multiple places.
I'm going to say bottom line
here is talk to your publisher,
find out what options exist.
If you're working with a university press,
if you're working with a journal,
if you're working with a society,
some of these folks
have different subventions,
different options, to be able
to cover fees. If they have fees.
Some of them might not have any fees
at all, but we just don't know about it.
So talk to your publisher,
see what options exist.
We've touched on this already,
but I'll just reiterate the green OA.
So that is taking that, again,
author accepted version/manuscript and
publishing that, or depositing that
into an institutional, or any repository.
We have VTechWorks here
and that allows the work to get out there.
The information is getting out there.
It's just not
that final pretty typeset version.
Some, again, final tips and
tricks for publishing OA.
Talk to your publisher. Plan ahead.
If you're working off of a federal grant
try and fit those fees into your budget.
You know, kind of an idea of
what... where you want to publish.
Plan for a little bit of wiggle room with
your grant budget, if that's possible.
You can also check with your department,
whether that's at Virginia Tech
or any future institutions,
see if they have any funding or
subvention set aside for these fees.
And then, again, look for those diamond open
access options. For 13,000 journals
of diamond OA in
the Directory of Open Access Journals.
For books, I've been doing
some deep dives into university presses.
Here are some university presses that
are 100% open access.
Now, many university presses
have a hybrid model where they
have some open access collections
or series, but some of them are not.
These are all 100% open access presses.
University of College London
is relatively new,
100% open access,
some other- University of Vermont as well.
So this is a growing area.
And then finally,
we have Virginia Tech Publishing.
So this is our publishing group
here in the library.
We are 100% open access.
So we have diamond open access journals.
Again, no APCs.
We have currently 14 active journals.
Four of those are student journals.
Some are grad student journals,
so feel free to look into those now.
We have published
monographs and edited volumes,
so I have a couple of those right here.
This one was published
just in September and already
has about 600 downloads
to just give you an idea there.
This one has just published, like a couple weeks ago.
I haven't checked the downloads on that yet.
And then we also have
done some student publications.
So this one, actually, I went to an event right
before with the Department of History,
and each student in the class was
able to publish an article, or, sorry,
a book chapter in
here, and it's now published.
Students, actually, some of them
already graduated and came back just
for this event because of how excited they
were about publishing this book.
We've also done reports,
digital scholarship projects,
we've worked quite a bit with Anita
on open educational resources,
and I've included a link to
our website here if you'd like to learn more.
[Edward Lener] Okay. So I've been checking
email a little bit while we've been going,
and I did find out that
Brandie is not feeling
well today and won't be joining us.
So we're going to move on to Philip.
[Philip Young] Great, thanks. Let me see if I can control the slides.
Hold on just one moment.
I'm having a little bit of trouble.
Is there someone who can forward the slides for me?
[Corinne Guimont] Okay. I can do that. If you just say "next slide" I'll hit the button.
[Philip Young] Thank you.
[Corinne Guimont] Let me just get to you.
[Philip Young] Great. Thanks so much.
So again, I'm Philip Young,
and I manage the repository
here at Virginia Tech called VTechWorks,
and this is where deposits
from our open access policy
go and are made
freely available to the world.
We get thousands of downloads
from around the world every day.
Next. So what
the open access policy here at Virginia Tech
does is that it enables deposit of
the accepted version of
scholarly articles with no embargo.
So the accepted version
is not the published version,
but it has been through
the peer review process.
So it may not be as
nicely formatted as the journal version,
but it contains all the information
that underwent peer review.
And so, in effect,
it contains all the same information
that is in the published version.
And while many publishers do
permit accepted versions to be posted online,
they typically place an embargo on
those of 12 to 48 months.
And so the advantage of our policy
is that it covers all journals,
and there's never an embargo.
So you can post your accepted version
of your article right away.
This policy was in the works
for a few years before it went
through university governance in 2020,
2021, and was approved by
the Board of Visitors in March of 2021.
So we have almost four years
of to OA policy now.
It is a part of another policy,
policy 13000, which is
Virginia Tech's policy
on intellectual property.
That's a quite extensive policy
that covers all kinds of things,
patents, all sorts of things.
So this policy is
actually on page four of that policy,
if you want to look it up
it's on the VT website.
There is a guide to the
Open Access policy that covers much
more than I can put
in this short presentation.
So that link is right there.
And you can also just go to
Virginia Tech website and
search for "Open Access Policy"
and it should be the first link that you see.
We're not the only ones with an open access policy.
There are more than 100 institutions in
the United States with OA policies.
We happen to be the only one in
Virginia with an OA policy.
So this is definitely
something you should check out
when you take a job in
another university, is see
if they have an open access policy.
And that way, those institutions,
you can always put
an open access version of your work
online when you publish in
a subscription or paywalled journal.
Next. So one unique thing
about our policy is that
anyone with a VT affiliation can use it.
So faculty, students, and staff.
Most policies at other institutions
just cover faculty.
So we're only among
five or six institutions where
everyone at the university is covered.
As I mentioned, this does cover
the accepted version of a scholarly article,
so not the published final version,
but it should contain
all the same information since
it has undergone peer review.
You can deposit your work the day it's
accepted with no embargo.
We did choose a time window
there because... to encourage people to
deposit their work as soon
as possible after publication
because lots of people get
table of contents alerts or Google Scholar alerts.
And they may click on
the article and find that they hit a paywall,
and then they may search for an open version.
So it's good to have
that open version available
as soon as possible after publication.
The other reason is that in Elements,
which is available to
faculty and graduate students,
it pulls in publication metadata
from about 20 different sources.
So the advantage of this is
that you don't have to enter the metadata.
All you have to do is find the article
metadata, claim it,
and then deposit the article.
So you don't have to enter
the title of the article,
the journal name, the date,
the authors, all that sort of thing.
It's already there.
So that one month is really a nudge,
but certainly you can deposit
your accepted version if
it is after that time period.
Deposited articles go to VTechWorks,
which you've already seen a little bit.
As I mentioned, it gets lots of
downloads from around the world.
It is indexed in Google
Scholar, all search engines,
and various OA tools
that help people find
open versions of articles.
We have Elements for
faculty and grad students,
and we've gotten about 99% of
our deposits through
the policy through elements.
It is fairly easy because of
the metadata already being
present upon publication.
For staff and undergraduates, can
email us and we will provide
access to the relevant collection.
Next. So this is what
a deposited article
under the policy would look like.
As you can see, the researcher
chose accepted version to
describe her manuscript and
that becomes the link to the article,
and clicking on that would pull up the PDF.
You can see we also have
download counts there too.
So I notice fairly frequently
that accepted versions get
quite a few downloads,
and I think that's because people
are hitting paywalls and looking
for an open version somewhere.
And so often these versions
have hundreds of downloads.
Next. So this is
an example of a title page
of an accepted version.
So as you can see, it is not as nicely
formatted as the final journal version.
And I put the arrow next to a good practice,
which is making sure
that viewers know that it's
an accepted version of an article and
then putting
the full citation there with a DOI.
One of the interesting
things about VTechWorks
is that downloads greatly exceed views.
And that's because our PDFs are pulled
directly from
Google Scholar search
engines and other places.
So we get lots of
downloads and not quite as many views.
So people are not seeing a VTechWorks item,
they're just retrieving the PDF.
Because of that, it's nice to tell people
which version they're looking at because
we know there are also
a lot of preprints out there,
which are not peer reviewed.
So this author is saying,
this is the peer
reviewed version of this article.
Next. So as I mentioned,
there are ways of
finding open versions on the web.
And if you use the OE policy,
this is how people
will find your open version.
So one nice tool is Google Scholar,
which is very good at
bringing versions of articles together.
If you look at an item in Google Scholar,
at the bottom of that item entry,
there's a series of links,
and one of them says all versions.
They may say all three versions,
all five versions.
That- If you click that link,
you will see all the versions
that Google Scholar found,
and frequently you will find
a repository link in there,
an edu link from a university repository,
and there's a good chance
that that is the open version.
There are also some nice tools out there,
such as the Unpaywall browser extension
that works in Firefox
and Chrome and what it does-
It does something very similar.
It looks for versions of articles based on
the DOI on the journal landing page,
and then it puts
a little tab on your browser
when it's found in open version.
OA Helper is very similar.
It's available on a few more platforms.
So, those are some tools that you
may want to look into to help you
find open versions of articles.
We also have lots of resources here at
Virginia Tech for open access,
we have a general open access guide.
I just shared the books link earlier.
So that guide covers
open access pretty broadly.
It covers journals. It covers
the OA policy, covers preprints.
So if you're interested in
a broad view of open access,
you may want to look at that guide.
Because the library has been working with
publishers for many,
many years, increasingly,
our negotiations with them
also include publishing
open access in their journals.
So you may want to check
out the OA discounts link.
For many of those links,
the fees are entirely covered.
So when you're thinking
about a journal to submit an article to,
you may want to look at that
first because the fees
could be covered there.
And then, of course, I have the link
to VTechWorks,
which I think you've seen in
a couple of places
earlier in the presentation.
And again, it gets a lot of usage.
So anything in VTechWorks
will get found on the web,
and we have lots of downloads
from all over the world every day.
So thanks very much.
And I'm happy to
answer any questions that you might have.
[Edward Lener] Thank you Philip. And I'll just mention
a few quick things there.
One, the discounts:
We have been talking about possibly
redesigning that libguide so
that URL may change,
but definitely
the discounts are sticking around,
just might be listed at a different site.
And Philip mentioned about
the OA policy here at the university.
And he was really essential in getting
that moved through
the university governance system.
And that is no easy process.
All right. Thank you to Philip.
Thank you to each of our speakers.
So, we've still got some time here and we want to
open it up for questions and discussion.
So what kind of things resonated you?
What questions come to mind from folks
in the room and also on the chat?
[Aimée Surprenant] So there's a question in the chat
from Eleanor.
How are materials published
under Open Access or
common licenses considered for tenure processes?
[Anita Walz] That's a great question.
A lot of journal articles,
if they are peer reviewed are open access.
They are treated no differently
than any other journal.
The validity of the venue is considered,
the prestige of the venue is considered.
Departments have their own ways
of looking at things.
You might want to add something to that.
With regard to things like course materials,
we're working on it.
I think in a research institution
that these are valuable.
It's really valuable and,
when we talk about peer review,
really valuable to show
evidence of peer review.
What kind of peer review is done?
Why is it rigorous enough?
Those are all things that
will be important in
the tenure process regardless of
what kind of material you're publishing.
[Corinne Guimont] Yeah, so the focus
tends to be - not all departments,
not all universities are like this -
but it tends to be more so on
the rigor of scholarly quality.
So if we're talking peer review,
committees want to know, was your work peer reviewed?
Was it- Was it editorial reviewed?
Was it both? How much review was done on this?
A lot of publishers, ourselves included,
do tend to list a peer review
statement on the copyright page.
So if you're publishing a book
or some other material,
you can ask about if they have
a peer review statement. That can help
committees, too. Something like that.
Journals also tend to have peer
review statements on their websites.
So being able to kind of point to that
a little bit more is
really going to be beneficial.
There are different types of peer review.
So also being clear
with your committee in terms
of what peer review they're looking for.
There is kind of that closed peer review where
neither side knows so
that you don't know- As an author,
you don't know who
is peer reviewing your work,
and the peer reviewers don't know
whose work they're peer reviewing.
So- and that's completely closed
completely anonymous peer review.
You might hear it referred to
as double blind peer review.
Then there's also kind of the single blind,
single anonymous, peer review
around... whether... maybe
the peer reviewers know that
your work is being...
know who you are as an author.
Sometimes that's inevitable,
especially in smaller fields.
Like, some fields,
there's only a handful
of people doing this work,
so they can typically figure out who this is.
So that's one side
knows who the other side is.
It's typically that the reviewers
know who the author is,
but the authors still don't
know the reviewers are.
And then there's kind of
this open peer review,
which is a little bit more
nebulous, where
everybody knows who everybody is.
Now, some open peer reviews
go so far as to literally be...
I've seen cases- Kathleen Fitzpatrick is
at Michigan State University,
and she has literally posted
her entire book online
and opened it up for comment.
And that's
kind of her version of peer review.
So there are cases like that.
So having an understanding
of what your committee is
looking for in terms of
that peer review might be helpful too.
[Edward Lener] Just add to that, one thing
that tenure committees are often looking for
is impact of a work
and being able to demonstrate 100,000
downloads, or whatever the number may be,
that has a certain weight to it of its own.
So in addition to, certainly,
the peer review aspect.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, so the open access
and, does it count for tenure
are kind of orthogonal questions.
So something can be open access and not
count or not open access and not count.
I mean, they're completely orthogonal.
However, each discipline does
things, counts things differently.
And so your job as
a new assistant professor is to
figure out what that counting is.
What counts?
And so in my discipline,
psychology, a textbook counts for nothing.
And almost sometimes is
a negative because they think you're
spending too much time on teaching the
textbook rather than on your research.
In other areas, it's seen very positively,
and so it really does depend a lot on that.
And we will be, I think I'm going to
bring up at some point the question about
predatory journals and things like that.
And that is also orthogonal to the open access,
but it is something
that is important to talk about
because your discipline will
know what journals are the top journals,
what journals are ones
that are predatory journals,
et cetera, so you'll need to
try and work figure that out.
And those sometimes change
over time a little bit.
So, um, That's... yeah.
And thanks, Anita for some
of the tenure stuff.
[Edward Lener] One thing that also brings to
mind is an article I heard about recently.
I've got the title in front of me.
It's, "On the folly of
rewarding A while hoping for B."
And it really kind of says it right there. [Aimée Surprenant] Yeah.
[Edward Lener] You have to match the rewards
to what you're trying to get.
[Aimée Surprenant] Absolutely. Yeah. So then next question,
how does generative AI interact
with open access and common licenses?
Does the copywriter of
a traditional publisher protect
the author's IP any differently?
[Anita Walz] So let's say, just clarification,
creative commons licenses,
that's the name of the licenses.
Where do we even start with that?
So just because something is under
a CC license does not
preclude AI from harvesting it.
Unfortunately.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yes. [Anita Walz] The only way to prevent that
is to put it in the bottom drawer of
your dresser and close
it and not tell anyone it's there.
In fact, commercial publishers are
increasingly, because they own
the copyright on works,
they are selling or leasing
entire bodies of works to AI companies to
be harvested and making
lots of money doing that.
So, we see lots of publishers doing that.
I don't know if you want to...
[Corinne Guimont] This is an ongoing topic of
conversation in the scholarly publishing world.
And I would say, yes,
having an open access publication with
Creative Commons does make it easier
for AI to grab your stuff,
but as Anita said,
if you don't want AI to get it,
hide it in the bottom drawer because
other publishers are selling
your material and making
more money off of it.
AI is getting the material
in one way or another.
So thinking about it
more as an opportunity for
ways for more of your work to
be found through AI, I think, is helpful.
Publishers are using AI,
in their own in-house practices as well.
So it's a tricky situation.
There's licensing agreements all over the place.
I was listening to a webinar recently.
I think it was University of Michigan was
talking about the need to,
with their material that's not open access,
the need to figure out this
licensing aspect with AI,
and a lot of the conversations come
back down to what the authors want.
So also having a conversation with
your publisher about that
is also going to be helpful.
Finding out what their practices are,
what their policies are.
But I think AI and harvesting your material
is going to be a tricky process,
no matter how or
where or what you're publishing.
[Anita Walz] When I first read your question,
I thought it was going to be
about how does AI interact with copyright.
And I will just mention that there are
two reports from the US copyright office.
I just put this in chat.
If you go to copyright.gov/AI,
there was one that was released
about four weeks ago
that discusses the copyrightability
of materials that AI generates.
What's under copyright. What can be copyrighted,
because copyright is automatic.
What can't be copyrighted.
And describes some of the difference between
those two things. It's a long report.
You probably don't want
to read the whole thing,
but reading the executive summary,
so you have a general idea of
what is going on in that
space would be a good thing.
[Edward Lener] Put the report into AI and get back the bullet points. [crosstalk]
Yeah.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. So, Dr. Neser,
is it possible for a grad student to
develop an adaptive textbook and
create OER for teaching purposes?
As an international student
I may not be eligible for a grant.
So, wondering if you
had any recommendations or
advice on best practices
for approaching such a project.
[Laura Neser] That's a great question. I mentioned
grants because I happened to get grants.
I probably would have attempted this project
even if I didn't have grant
money to do it because I was motivated
to provide my students with
a free textbook without having to
change my course design as
much as I was with the existing textbook.
You can certainly adapt
existing open educational resources
and not get paid for it as your pet project.
And I would recommend
using a website such as
Pressbooks to get started.
I know there's a few others out there
that are relatively user friendly, where when you
try to adapt a work in Pressbooks,
Anita can explain a
little more about the process,
but you can clone an existing resource,
and then you can go in
and edit it as you want,
or remix as you want,
or add whatever you want.
And it's nice because it has
some hot key buttons that
are easy to understand
where you move your cursor over it.
And it says, do you want to add media? So you
can insert a photo that
you took or something like that.
And it's relatively user friendly.
So you certainly can do it for free.
I encourage, if you're motivated to
provide free resources for your students,
you know, you don't
have to wait for grant money.
I just lucked out that Anita
had opportunities. [Anita Walz] The library.
[Laura Neser] The library. Not Anita.
Anita made me aware of opportunities that
the library had for grant money.
So yes, certainly, you can
adapt resources for free.
In terms of best practices,
one thing that was
mentioned was just make sure
you document all the changes you're making,
even if it seems minor,
because as I learned,
once you're months into the project,
you're not going to
remember the thing you meant to
remember a month ago
about something that you changed.
And so I had a Google Doc
that I could share with others.
And it was just a bulleted list with dates.
Like, on this day, I made
these changes on this day.
And screenshots, sometimes, if something
was wonky in Pressbooks,
so I could troubleshoot it.
So, yeah, just document document document.
And then there was
a slide Anita showed and a slide
I showed that showed kind of
the permissibility of
the different Creative Commons license.
Some of them, when the least permissive ones
will say creative commons,
but you can only share them.
You can't remix them and then share them.
So just be aware of
what license the work already has on it,
and then a quick like Google
or Bing Search will just tell you.
What are the rules on that license?
So as long as you follow the licensing rules,
then, honestly, you're in the clear.
I left out because I had
the University Libraries to have my back,
and it saved me time, as well.
So it is a little more time
consuming to take on a
project like this on your own,
but it's certainly doable.
And yeah, please feel free to email me.
If Anita wants to
drop my email in the chat.
And I'd be happy to also
help guide once you're a
little more formed in your project.
[Aimée Surprenant] The grants that you have in
your poster aren't ones that
are only for US citizens.
[Laura Neser] Correct. [Aimée Surprenant] Whether they are for
the Virginia grants say instructor,
so it doesn't say
professor or anything like that.
So it's possible that you would be
eligible for those as well.
But you never know.
And for those of you in
the room who can't read the chat,
Anita has offered to
meet with people if they have
an idea about a project
to help assess feasibility.
[Laura Neser] Highly encourage that. [Anita Walz] Yeah, I would
also talk to your advisor too,
because this can be very time
consuming and it
depends on what you're starting with.
It's sort of like renovating a house.
Maybe you've seen people do this,
and some houses don't need a lot of work.
And then other houses...
[Aimée Surprenant] Once you start opening them up...
[Anita Walz] You see lots of problems when
you open up
that one certain wall and you're like,
Oh, no, all of our money is going there.
So some OER, like the one where we
discovered those copyright problems
was like, Oh, no.
How bad is it? So there's
a bit of work involved in just assessing,
is this a good project?
Is this the right time?
And sometimes you can use
open educational resources
that already exist,
and they're like, you know,
almost what you want.
They're not quite what you want,
but it's in a good enough category
and the time that you might
spend putting into making it
better is not the right time for it yet.
But it could be. Really talk to the people
who are also overseeing your academic work.
[Audience member] Yeah, I was wondering if you could
expand on if it's only journals and
books and articles that are kind of
under this, or under the open education model,
or did you put syllabi and
course materials and
lesson plans under that, too?
[Anita Walz] Right. So there are,
what do we call them? Pieces?
Other artifacts that do
have open licenses on them.
They're primarily in
the OER Commons site.
MIT Open Courseware also
has openly licensed syllabi,
really useful if you
want to know how someone
else is teaching a
particular course or discipline.
A lot of our work-
I don't think we have a syllabus for you posted.
[Laura Neser] No, but I wouldn't mind.
[Anita Walz] A lot of professors say,
Okay, I have the slide deck.
Can I also share that? Or people say,
I have a quiz bank.
How do we want to share that?
Or I need a quiz bank
because you created this book,
and I'm stuck because
I don't have a quiz bank.
So we've done a lot of projects where
we've worked with people to
create those kinds of things.
So you're exactly right
that there are a lot of
different artifacts that could have these
licenses and I would say,
OER commons is the place with
the most granular search by format.
Some of these others are very much like-
book. Which is valuable.
[Laura Neser] I did create chapter-level quizzes and
chapter-level student reviews with
a company called openclass.ai,
and they publish everything
under Creative Commons license,
and they had a representative that
worked with me, that looked at my book,
came up with the questions and reviews,
and then I just had to review it and say,
Oh, this is worded, you know, not
correctly or something like that.
And I put it on OER Commons,
and it's clonable for
instructors to use themselves.
So if there's a question that you say,
Well, I didn't cover this, you can just pull it
right out in your own version of the class.
And I found that resource
really useful, as well.
Of course, they're a little bit
of sales people because
they're also trying to work with
Virginia Tech to get Canvas integration.
They have it at
Arizona State University already,
but there's no requirement.
You know, I just said, Oh,
sure, I'm open to asking.
And then they worked with me to make
all the units to share.
[Aimée Surprenant] Okay. You alluded to differences in journals.
Curious if you're seeing
trends in which journals are
pushing for open access
versus those that are sticking to paywalls.
Yeah, you know,
it just changes all the time, right?
So... and it's very discipline...
specific. [Corinne Guimont] It's discipline specific. It also
might depend on
the specific journal you're looking at.
I mean, big companies, Elsevier, Springer,
they're also looking at open access, they just have
higher APCs and higher-
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, and like Nature isn't the best. They do it, but-
[Corinne Guimont] Yeah. [Aimée Surprenant] it's just expensive.
[Corinne Guimont] It's very expensive. I've heard of APCs as high as $20,000.
Please don't do that. So there's
still... there is those open access issues.
And I think there is
a trend in terms
of moving towards open access,
and there are those big
publishing companies who are looking at
how can we use this to some advantage?
But I think it really depends
on your discipline.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, and there are a lot of
journals that do a mixture.
They'll do a few open access
articles from time to time,
or they'll make an article
open access for a year
or something like that.
So there's a lot that will do that,
and someone talked earlier
about negotiating the APCs,
but you can also negotiate
open access versus not.
[Corinne Guimont] Yeah, some journals, especially
the big publishers, will have an option.
Hey, just pay this APC
and we'll make it open access.
It doesn't matter if it's
a special issue or not.
So if you do have the
funding set aside for an APC,
even if it's a little
bit higher than you hoped, that is an option.
You can negotiate that,
kind of talk to the publisher,
talk to the journal editors. Have that conversation.
[Tyler Walters] It's really hard to find that material.
When you get one article, you know,
faculty members pay that fee,
and maybe it's at
Elsevier and you're searching.
It's truly the needle in the haystack.
They'll have open access material,
but it's not very accessible.
And it's in the midst of all
this other stuff that's behind a paywall.
[Anita Walz] My sense is that
publishers are looking
at all of these things,
library subscriptions, open access fees,
others, like selling
data, selling things to AI.
These are all revenue streams.
Like they're commercial entities,
and they're... If something
else is kind of slimming down,
they're like, Well, look over
here and let's see what we can do.
So there's opportunism on
the part of
commercial entities
because that's what they do.
So I would say the ones that are most
frustrating are the ones where
we as a library subscribe to it,
and then someone also pays
for open access because then we're
paying three times. Four times.
Paid the salary of well, I don't know,
Professor's salary, we paid- they paid,
you know, to free peer review.
We have paid a subscription.
They paid an OA fee.
It's... Wow.
Yeah. It is what it is. I hate to say that, but...
[Tyler Walters] It's a very mixed bag.
[Aimée Surprenant] It is, yeah. And it changes so quickly.
And I don't know what's happening
with Europe and California
and all of those things
with something Elsevier and...
[Edward Lener] There's also a lot
of variation from one publisher to another.
So we've tried to work with publishers
that want to work with us or
these read and publish type agreements
where we sort of
are paying for some of that upfront,
but then our Virginia Tech authors
can publish at no charge
or a significant discount.
[Aimée Surprenant] Can we talk about predatory journals just a little bit?
So we probably all get emails,
greetings on the day, or
something like that that always starts out,
Gee, I noticed that
you are a cognitive psychologist.
Would you like to publish in
[unintelligible] science journal. And you go,
Hmm, this doesn't make any sense to me.
Those are easy, right?
[Edward Lener] And that's often the level of the match.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. You just wonder where are they?
But there are others that look
like legitimate journals,
but aren't. And then there's
kind of the middle ground,
which is the most difficult where it's got
peer review and possibly
peer review from reasonable smart people.
But then they accept
all the papers or, you know,
they ignore the reviews,
or the editor doesn't
do anything or whatever.
So you have... There
have been in the past, sort of
search places where you can check to
see if the journal is predatory.
Is that still available?
[Edward Lener] Yeah. Well something like the Directory of
Open Access Journals is very good.
That has some evaluative criteria
before it will get passed
through and approved.
So that is a free and open site,
but they accept contributions from members.
So we do actually participate in that as
an institution and are
a member in that way to help support that.
Because of the value of that kind of information.
And predatory journals often will attempt to find
the title that just...
establish one with just a slight twist.
It's so close, that it could easily... [Tyler Walters] One word difference.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, exactly. [Edward Lener] In physics, for example,
there's Sound and Vibration and Journal of Sound and Vibration.
And I can't even remember offhand which is which,
but I know one's very legit
and one much less so.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah.
[Corinne Guimont] I also heard about a resource that's
relatively new. It's predatoryjournals.org
[Aimée Surprenant] Okay. [Corinne Guimont] And it's a group of researchers
who decided to start, kind of, creating
a list of some of
the known predatory journals.
I haven't done a deep dive
into the list myself,
but that might be a place to also check if
they have an idea what's out there.
And it was literally- the copyright on
the website is 2025.
So this is pretty up to date.
[Aimée Surprenant] That's cool. It's really helpful.
But I think the best advice
is to ask your colleagues
who publish in the area.
What are the good journals?
What kind of level of journal are
you aiming for? Sort of depends.
There are some results or
papers that are going to change the world,
and you want to publish those in
the top top journal
and other things
which are interesting and fun,
but not really unique.
And so you can publish that
in a lesser journal,
and you sort of get
a sense in your discipline
about what the good journals are.
And then if you're in business,
they actually have a ranking.
Like, you got to publish in
these 15 journals or it doesn't count at all.
So they're very clear
about which journals count for what.
And by the way,
they are predatory conferences now.
And so they like,
try to get people to come to, like,
Greece or something like that
to go to a conference.
And when you go, you find out
that you've paid your registration fee,
but they're just...
So be careful with that as well.
[Tyler Walters] Yeah, it seems like anytime there's
a business model where you put
some cash upfront.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah.
[Tyler Walters] There's just that invitation for
rotten people to come along and abuse that.
I mean, we can see it in contractors.
You pay them half the money
to do a roof and they disappear.
And I think we're seeing some of
that in the journal world, and in a lot of fields,
but it's- you have to kind of pay attention.
There is a newish group
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
I say newish, but I think it's been
around maybe 15 years now.
And I think I came
together with this problem in mind that they
wanted to come together as legit publishers
and come up with some sort
of criteria and the like that
really helps to identify
who the legit publishers are.
But it has been a problem.
It can be a problem.
Just have to not assume anything.
[Edward Lener] Really quick turnaround
can also be a warning sign.
[Anita Walz] There's a site called,
and I think Philip is the one
who told me about this originally, Think Check Submit,
and it's sort of a three step process,
and this is from OASPA.
But it's a system that you can
use to critique. What is...
What do we know about this, and ask,
it has a list of questions that
may be helpful to work
through to just make an informed decision
about whether or not
to move forward with something.
And it's in the chat.
[Aimée Surprenant] Okay. Just looking to see...
And some of the Frontiers Journals are on
this predatory publishers list now.
It started out actually as a... [Anita Walz] As okay for a while.
[Aimée Surprenant] good journal, but it's really
gone. Or a good stead of journals, actually.
It's really gone way off course.
To the extent where I've taken
a paper off my CV.
Because it was published in Frontiers back in
2000 or so when it was... [Anita Walz] When it was probably fine.
[Aimée Surprenant] What? [Anita Walz] It was probably fine in 2000.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, it was. But still, it's no
longer... Oh. Okay, cool.
Other questions, comments?
Open data, can you just...
Let's go back to that a little bit.
What that also means is
that there are databases out
there that have data that you
can use and re analyze.
And most of those are
ones that you should talk to your librarian
about so that you can make sure,
A) that it's a good data set to use, but
B) that... what the rules are around
reanalyzing the data and how you can do that
and whether you publish their
analysis or the analysis.
If you think about it, we already have
an infinite amount of data collected.
And, you know, there's
a lot of stuff out there that are, you know,
geological surveys
that federal government has a lot of data
that they should make
available, theoretically.
And so you can
do some really cool stuff with... I don't know,
geological data and weather.
You can put those two databases together
and you can do some amazing research.
[Laura Neser] One of my colleagues primarily uses
open data for river morphology.
And he's collected data from
around the world that are images,
public images,
creative commons images, I guess,
of rivers and figuring out basically,
the fractals of them and then
what prevents it from being a fractal.
So different geological-
Like, if the rock's harder there,
the river can't cut into it as well.
And he is very big on open source data.
[Corinne Guimont] I'll just add,
if data's created by the federal government,
it's within the public domain.
Anybody can use it,
so you're able to [unintelligible]
[Laura Neser] A lot of the new satellite data that's coming as well.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. Yeah. So there's
an awesome amount of data out there that
could be really interestingly analyzed.
[Audience member] I think one of the questions that
graduate students are having around that is
that Microsoft, as a graduate student,
Microsoft tells us we have
a certain license of Microsoft and there's
only limited amount of data that we can
store on Microsoft products.
So how can, maybe... How can I tell
people that take videos
of animal or whatever,
and they have all this video
data of... How can they,
like, might be able
to use open repository for that data.
[Corinne Guimont] First, I'm going to throw up
the slide again with Brandie's email address.
[Kayla McNabb] And dataservices@vt is the general email for the department.
[Corinne Guimont] That goes to everybody in
our data services department
who might be able to help navigate that.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, so for research purposes
you should be able to gain access
to more space.
It won't be your personal space, but,
your PI or your department can get
more space if you need
it for research. And then, yeah.
Obviously, check with the library.
[Corinne Guimont] And I'll say
the Virginia Tech Data Repository,
I've run into this myself with some projects
we've been involved in that
do include a lot of video.
There are options to, even if
you hit that kind of quota
that they have set,
you can reach out to them, and they'll up
that and allow you to upload those materials.
So that's always an option
that's kind of like talking
about open access publishing.
Talk to the data professor. Have a conversation,
see what they're willing to
do we want to collect your data.
We want to share your data. So that's
definitely reaching out to them,
that dataservices@vt.edu and
having having that conversation.
Seeing what the possibilities are.
[Edward Lener] Sometimes,
depending on the nature of the data,
there's raw data that you're
gathering that's large
and then it's processed
and shrinks down to a more manageable.
I think another key thing
when talking about data is
just some of the mechanics of it. Of file names,
field labels, those sorts
of things because having
a whole bunch of numerical data
and not knowing what it is six months later.
It doesn't do much good. So really having, you know,
the units, the field labels,
et cetera spelled out so that
somebody else especially is going to use it.
But we've had cases
even where researchers are looking at
their own data and trying to remember it
after the fact. What did they do there?
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. And Philip put the chat,
the dataservices@vt.edu
for archiving data or a data management plan,
which should all learn
how to do a data management plan.
And yes, so you don't go
back six months later and say.
Was male coded one or is that zero?
Is that female or male?
[Tyler Walters] Documentation.
Really matters. [Aimée Surprenant] And back up, back it up.
[Tyler Walters] I won't mention the institution,
but I worked with another group once that
basically their documentation was
their file name. [Aimée Surprenant] Oh, yeah.
[Tyler Walters] And they were bringing up
a new information system,
when they moved the files from the old
system to the new system,
the file names got truncated in half.
So they had no idea what those files were,
and it was a huge mess.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah. And I have folders full
of Excel spreadsheets that say "final data",
"final final data". "This is really the final data".
[crosstalk] - have some real way
of actually doing it so that it makes sense.
[Corinne Guimont] I will just add, if anybody... so a lot of federal grants do require
that data management plan.
And our data services team here has
this wonderful questionnaire that
kind of asks you questions about your data.
How are you organizing it? How are you...
How are you managing it during the project?
So using Google or
Microsoft or anything like that.
And then how do you plan to
store it after the project?
Is there any sensitive information in your data?
I'm trying to remember.
There's a whole bunch of questions there.
And the way Jon Petters, our data management person,
has it set up
is once you remove those questions,
it creates kind of this perfect narrative
that you can just pop into a grant.
I've used it myself.
It's great. Highly recommend.
So if you're ever involved in creating
a data management plan for a grant,
or even just for
your own research project because,
again,
documentation is helpful. Having it for your own work,
whether you're doing a grant or not,
you can reach out and ask him
about that questionnaire, because it
kind of helps you really think through all of
the pieces of your data.
Where can you share it? How can
you share it? How are you managing it?
[Aimée Surprenant] And where do you back it up?
[Audience member] What about,
like, physical physical data?
Like, I know a lot of physical data is,
like, left with professors.
Like, I'm thinking about, like, tree cores.
Like, physical pieces of wood.
[Aimée Surprenant] Right. [Audience member] But if the professor
can't hold it, but it's part of, like,
a federal grant, like, is
that something the library does,
or is it all online now?
[Aimée Surprenant] I'm pretty sure it's all online.
So the physical stuff...
[Corinne Guimont] The data might be the description of
the physical material, or photos
or video or something like that.
So if you're talking
about... So I've been involved
in an archaeological project,
where they have photos.
They have some ARs and VR.
So what we're looking at in terms
of the data in that respect was,
data for the AR/VR.
The data itself images, the videos,
the descriptions, the metadata
around each piece of item. So all of that.
And that's where the data management plan
comes in handy, because having that all figured out,
Hey, how do I describe a piece of
wood to somebody who
might not be able to see that piece of wood?
Is helpful in that respect.
[Aimée Surprenant] Cool.
[Anita Walz] There are some physical collections.
I don't know if you want to talk about
the Geosciences Museum.
There's also an herbarium.
[Audience member] It's the largest in the State of Virginia.
[Anita Walz] So there are physical collections,
I just don't know about tree cores.
[Audience member] I'm just curious.
It's not something I directly work with,
but people in my department do. Yeah.
[Anita Walz] Yeah.
It would be interesting to know
how your department handles that.
We in the University Libraries
retain things in special collections,
but they have certain criteria for inclusion,
so... [Tyler Walters] They don't want tree cores.
[Anita Walz] Now if they were really important tree core, they might,
you know, if it was
the first tree core or something,
but [unintelligible] that historic. Interesting question.
Thank you. Really great question.
Any questions? [Corinne Guimont] We have questions in here to give.
[Anita Walz] We do have questions in here.
[Aimée Surprenant] Oh. Okay. [Corinne Guimont] I think we kind of talked about this already.
[Edward Lener] Then this kind of ties in with the tenure, certainly.
For teaching and research
faculty, that's a big incentive.
[Aimée Surprenant] It is indeed. [Edward Lener] A big ten year project.
[Tyler Walters] Big incentive is the US federal agencies are required to
have a policy by the end of
this calendar year that
your article and the research data
that support the findings in that article,
they must be made publicly
available upon publication.
So no more embargo period.
So you publish with a journal,
there's going to be
this expectation that you're
going to be able to go to an open repository,
if not the publisher itself
and find that material.
And that's everybody.
A lot of people think of
the STEM related agencies,
but I do know
the National Endowment for the Humanities
has gone to
the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy and asked if
they can participate in this, and said
yes. So there's
no discipline untouched by this.
[Aimée Surprenant] It gets back to the incentives.
Faculty are slow to change.
And the tenure policies and
the tenure and promotion committees
are based in departments,
and departments decide
what their incentives are,
what their currency is
in deciding
whether someone gets tenure or not.
And I haven't seen
much change over 30 years. Unfortunately.
[Edward Lener] Like the College of Business, they have the-
[Aimée Surprenant] The College of Business, they
have a list of journals,
and if you don't publish something on list,
you might as well not publish at
all. It makes it difficult.
The reason that it makes it difficult for me
is that the
business faculty don't want
to do interdisciplinary research
because if they published in
a journal that's not on
that list, it doesn't count.
And it's very difficult
to get them to do that and they're
also not necessarily interested in
interdisciplinary grants because, again,
they're not going to
publish in those journals
and grants don't really count
very much for promotion and tenure in that college.
[Edward Lener] I currently serve on
our equivalent of our promotion.
It's called
promotion and continued appointment
in the library, but it's the same idea.
We try to be more flexible
and open in that regard,
but it does put a burden on the candidate
to kind of explain what the significance
of that contribution is in their dossier.
[Tyler Walters] It's a good point, as you mentioned,
that tenure criteria and requirements,
it's not a monolithic
thing at the institutional level.
It's a lot of pluralism
involved and it's really at
that academic department level.
And that's... I've
had to talk to a lot of colleagues about
that and talk about this
problem in the singular.
It's like, no, no, this is in the plural.
If you've got 70 academic departments,
you probably have 70 different P&T documents
that go up to a college level
committee and has to be interpreted there.
So it's, yeah, I agree.
I've not seen a lot of change
over the years. It is what it is.
[Anita Walz] I think the way that...
I think there are several camps of people.
Some really feel like they really need
to cater to what is rewarded.
And then there are other people who
say, You know what?
I'm going to do this anyway.
And I don't care if it's
not rewarded because this is valuable.
So there are both.
Ideally, there would be some, you know,
some validation of, like,
Yes this is good for students.
This is good for you.
This is good for your discipline.
So you can make cases.
Like you put information in your FAR
about your first edition
and I think you put all kinds of data in there on what you did.
Edward Lener] Just to clarify, a FAR is faculty activity report. [Anita Walz] Sorry. Pardon me. [Laura Neser] Annual review, basically.
I actually was going to mention
I just applied for
promotion for instructor
to advanced instructor.
And one of my colleagues offered to
look over my document
before actually submitting it.
And he brought up a point that
I kind of glossed over, that he said,
one thing, like, he had
a little mini committee look at it.
He said, one thing we had trouble
understanding was what work did you do?
Because when we looked at
the other textbooks that you pulled it from,
it looks like it's the same material.
So I had it kind of... I had described,
you know, I took
this chapter from here, you know?
And then I was so grateful that I had
that long document of all the changes.
And I said, That's going into
my promotion dossier.
And I ended up, you know,
I glossed over some stuff
without even thinking they didn't
know what goes into adapting an open resource.
And then now it's like
a five page explanation.
And then I did this. And then
I corrected this, you know?
And I think he... once he received it,
the committee said, Okay,
yes, that counts, you know?
So it varies department to department.
[Aimée Surprenant] Right. And the type
of appointment, as well, right?
So for instructor, absolutely,
those educational resources are the currency-
[Laura Neser] Exactly. [Aimée Surprenant] that you should be...
[Laura Neser] I was banking on it being
a very big part of my promotion,
dossier because it did take
months and months and months, you know?
[Aimée Surprenant] I mean, the cool thing about a promotion,
dossier is that it can
be as long as you want to make it.
And so you can just throw
every damn thing in there.
Every poster should be in there.
Every talk, every darn thing.
Your talk tonight, right?
You put that on your CV, this panel. [Laura Neser] Yeah.
[Aimée Surprenant] There you go. [Corinne Guimont] The other thing
I'll just add in terms of
that is you can put the download numbers.
[Aimée Surprenant] Yeah, absolutely. [Tyler Walters] Oh yeah. People do that.
[Laura Neser] That's my introduction. Opening statement.
And having an idea
of where your work is deposited.
You can have it in multiple places
[unintelligible] same book.
This has been downloaded about 160,000? [Laura Neser] 180,000.
That's the first edition.
[Anita Walz] Anything we missed? Anyone?
[Kayla McNabb] Can I plug the one thing that was in
Brandie's slides that
I'm sure they would want us to
make sure we mentioned is GRAD 5024.
So that is a one credit pass fail course
that really focuses on
best data management practices.
So that is a really
great opportunity for you to be able to
have some kind of
dedicated class time to
be able to engage with data management.
So check that out. [Corinne Guimont] And this slide
also has the link to the data reepository.
[Aimée Surprenant] And if it's not already in
the list, [unintelligible] grad...
No. You can definitely use that
for the future professoriate
certificate if you want.
It's not on the list, but it should be.
Library Research Skills is on there.
[Edward Lener] The 5024 is a newer course, so because of that...
[Aimée Surprenant] All right. Yeah. We'll put it on that list.
[Edward Lener] It's designed to be kind of companion as well.
[Aimée Surprenant] Okay, cool.
[Steve Tatum] If I could just- The question
about physical collections.
Data Services doesn't handle that,
but digital libraries and preservation does.
If you can provide photographs and metadata,
we can work with you on how to do that.
It's a different department.
Pretty straightforward,
but you need to provide the...
you need to ride
the personnel to do the work.
Thanks.
[Aimée Surprenant] Okay, cool.
[Corinne Guimont] At the risk of making everybody motion sick,
I'll just skip ahead to the next slide.
[Aimée Surprenant] Do you think VT's
open access policy will
effect promotion and tenure
reviews and the list
of acceptable journals to publish in?
So as far as I know,
the only college that
does acceptable journals is business,
and they are doing it on
the basis not of open access versus,
but on the basis of the rankings
of the journals in their [unintelligible].
They do all these analyses
and they publish their rankings,
so it's got really
not much to do with open access,
just has to do with the prestige of
the journals. So I
don't think that the open access
really will have an effect
on that one way or the other.
[Corinne Guimont] And the open access policy
does allow you to put that author
accepted manuscript in, regardless of
whatever journal you publish in, to the repository.
[Tyler Walters] Yeah, that's the main point of the policy
is it protects you,
the researcher, that you're able
to deposit that author accepted
manuscript prior to anything
you sign with a publisher.
And the University reserves
the right on your behalf to do that.
So it's really about protection.
There are a lot of tenure groups.
It's not about open access versus not, right?
I think anybody going through that process,
they're going talk to your committee,
talk to your department head, and
understand what's critical to them.
But I think it's still going to come
down to a lot of it's about
peer review and this external validation
of your scholarship.
And if it's an open journal,
you can describe their processes
and that they're of high quality,
then hopefully that's just a non issue.
One of the bigger publishers and
open journals is PLOS,
the Public Library of Science,
And they're getting quoted.
Their articles are getting quoted
all over the place these days.
I mean, CNN quotes from them,
NPR quotes from them.
And I literally have talked
to some people working with
other publishers that said they've
got to figure out how to do
an open journal well, because
PLOS is taking a lot of our business.
So, it's still a business out there.
[Aimée Surprenant] Well, thank you all very much.
We really appreciate you taking
the time to do this.
And Philip says that
research shows it increases
citations, too, so there you go.
Which is something you can put in your CV.
So, thank you very much.
[Edward Lener] Sure. And we've got the slide with the other events.
[Aimée Surprenant] The other events on it? [Edward Lener] Yeah. Take advantage.
[Aimée Surprenant] You can take advantage of it.
Great. Thank you, everyone.