[Anita Walz] Good evening everyone. My name is Anita Walz and I have the
pleasure to introduce you to the fifth annual Open
Education Symposium here at Virginia Tech. Something is really loud with our sound
so it looks like Abram is turning it down. Thank you.
Thank you that's much better. Is that okay for everyone else? Great.
Okay I work here at the University Libraries and we've hosted
Open Education Week for five years now. This is our second symposium. We do this
every spring, and we are happy to welcome the future professoriate
class from the graduate school. So if you are
a student in the future professoriate class this is for you if you are not
this is also for you because it's part of the part of the symposium so
if if you are
yeah we'll just leave it at that this is for both groups so
the way we're going to run this discussion tonight
is we're going to have an introduction to three different open topics.
My colleague Dr. Nathaniel Porter correct? Brand new PhD,
is going to give us a five minute overview of open data.
How many of you have heard of open data before?
okay so many of you um but not all of you
my colleague Peter Potter is going to give us
a five minute overview of open access raise your hand
open access you've heard of open access okay and then I'm going to give
us a five minute overview if i can of OER. And how many of you have heard of
open educational resources? Great all right so after that I'll
invite our panelists who are sitting here on the front row
to come and join the panel as well as the three speakers.
They are from a range of different roles in the university, at Virginia Tech and
outside of Virginia Tech. They have expertise
in a wide range of disciplines from dairy science to humanities to data
science to engineering and probably others that
i don't know about and we'll we'll talk a little bit about
what does open mean in an academic career
and what does it uh how how did these people become involved in the open
themes that we're about to talk to talk about so i want to introduce
Nathaniel Porter. Nathaniel is of
the university libraries he's a social science data consultant
and the data education coordinator of the university library so welcome Nathaniel.
[Applause]
[Nathaniel Porter] all right thank you Anita uh i was gonna make slides and then i realized i was
gonna have like four words on them total and i figured that was unnecessary
um you'll see why also i was expecting to go third because data is usually the
afterthought especially when it comes to open
so uh some things may may sound a little odd but hopefully it will contribute to
the overall conversation so like educational resources and
scholarly publications data has the potential to change the
world particularly when it's combined creatively with other data types and
open resources to take one example
in 1854 jon snow combined data on cholera
incidents and municipal water sources to discover
how cholera spread we had no idea it was waterborne at the time
obviously our computational power our storage
the types of data we can collect have increased and multiplied
but we still have a complication complicated relationship with data
sharing for at least three reasons
imagination risk aversion and incentives so first many people don't
think of data as a research product at least not one
worth publishing so i worked in grad school at the
association of religion data archives it's a social science open access
data repository that archive was founded in 1997 not the distant past
because the founder had wanted to check and extend some analysis
of this multi-million dollar survey that had been done
and turned into a book and published he contacted the investigator
he was told and i think this is a direct quote oh i ran out of space on my hard
drive and i was done with the book so i
deleted it
thus an archive was born but this is still prevalent massive amounts of data
are being collected used and in fact sold and reused on a
daily basis but researchers and especially academic researchers often
are missing an imagination for how we might use it
and reuse it and what that might look like we think the book is done
who's going to want it
second there's a risk involved in data sharing a little more risk perhaps
than with some of the other opens because it's closer to the source
sometimes that's literally the software source right
the google and facebook algorithms are among the most valuable trade secrets in
the world and their user data is what powers those
algorithms and their advertising engines
the data i collect as a social science researcher
likewise has potential for risk people have been outed as lgbtq
because of inappropriate sharing of their survey
or interview data and had severe negative consequences
we talk in data science about the fact principles fairness
accuracy confidentiality and transparency
but data can be misused both on purpose for things like
social coercion like they're talking about in china now
or maybe not talking about on accident it's easier just to not
share than to make sure we do things and share
in a way that protects others third there are
limited incentives still in many cases for data sharing
yes if you get funding from a federal agency you have to do a data management
plan you have to say something about data but i work with a lot of
qualitative researchers for example who collect
interview data very few of them are sharing anonymized transcripts of those
interviews anywhere if anything they're sharing summary
tables of how many times people mention the 10 things they decided to code
that's not open data that doesn't allow other people to build off it in the same
way and it's only recently that transparency and data analysis has
become such a big deal as we deal with the consequences of
high-profile reversals like the study that
falsely linked and vaccines
there are lots of resources now to make that happen
virginia tech has our own data repository we have memberships and other
data repositories we've got great examples of data sharing
but even with the infrastructure in place we still have to get past these
three fundamental challenges to get data to open we have to get past
the imagination barrier so people see how data might be reused
risk aversion so people see the advantages and the incentives and it
will take a coalition of funders publishers researchers libraries and the
public to make that change real ten seconds left congratulations
thank you
we will hear more from nathaniel on the panel
let's see
okay great
oh i guess it's up there okay great all right hello everyone my name is peter
potter i'm i work here in the libraries uh
publishing director and i'm talking very quickly about
um open access what is it and why does it matter there are many
definitions of open access you can look at many of
these places and find various definitions there are
also different kinds some of you may be familiar with there's green
there's gold there's hybrid there are many different colors
uh green and gold are the two most um familiar ones here's the definition of
green oa and these slides will be available
afterwards for anyone who wants them gold oa so one is
green is you the author depositing it in a repository
and gold oa is is publisher deposited and hybrid is avert is a variation of
that um so what is open access
a very simple definition here by peter suber
it's digital online free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions a pretty good definition so why does it
matter it matters for access to your
work more eyeballs to see it there are lots of
reasons set forth here part of it is is access to publicly funded
research but as we get more and more information on open
access we're finding that it is it does increase readership but it's
also it also matters because the current
system is unsustainable this this little diagram here shows you the
cost that top one is the cost of journals that libraries
are paying and you can see it's going off the chart
and we're now paying billions of dollars to one or two
publishers to put that material in our
libraries
and that i want to put in the context of that scholarly publishing is a business
it's a 26 billion dollar business we sometimes think well we're not making
money off of it but somebody is and to give you a sense
of the how that compares to some other
industries
and it's controlled scholarly publishing is really controlled
by mostly by a handful of publishers five
five listed there elsevier springer wiley taylor and francis and sage
and we have to ask the question does it matter that
five publishers are controlling just about everything and when it comes time
for you to publish you will see that these are going to be
the major ones you're dealing with and it's a very profitable business you
can see that the two top selling or the top
profitable um businesses in this chart are scholarly publishers
37 um profit margin
and part of it the reason is that it's so successful
is because the workers don't get paid
um just as a quick example this this was uh from 2002 i believe
at the time a journal cost this one journal cost as much as a toyota corolla
and today any thoughts on what it would be what the difference would be today
well the toyota costs 19 000. so it hasn't gone up by that much
that single journal costs thirty five thousand dollars for
an annual subscription so that's what i say when i say
unsustainable so again the benefits of open access
but there are also issues and we can talk about this
that many people put forward about open access about
global equity money does it make the rich
richer there are lots of lots of uh concerns and i wanted to just mention
that there is if you haven't heard about this
there is a initiative in europe you started in europe called
plan s which is an attempt to move all
scholarly publishing all uh funded scholarly publishing to
open access by the year 2020 and there's been a lot of
pushback on that and you can see though some of the
funders who have signed on to this
but there's also been pushback this was the marcia mcnutt from the national
academy of sciences saying that they hadn't checked
with the researchers enough to make this big decision
but perhaps the tide is turning wiley just made a big deal
with some of the european publisher or european universities and just recently
here in the u.s the university california system this is
just a few days ago just cut its relationship with elsevier
and they the university of california system accounts for
about ten percent of the published research in the united states so that's
a big a big deal so
um just i'll end with a brief um pitch for
our open access subvention fund so you as graduate students
have access to if you're going to publish an article in an open access
journal you can apply for funding
that's the basic information 1500 per article
and gail mcmillan who's in this room you can talk to her later so
we're trying to support our graduate students and faculty
and getting published in open access
journals yeah will you just raise your hand so
people know where you are
thank you talk to me we have about 50 000 left to spend um
okay i might need it help up here because my window has gone away
what did i do
okay
thank you thank you
okay so i'm going to tell you about open educational resources and oer
or oer and open education in five minutes which is terrifying to me
because there's a lot to tell you um open educational resources they are
free they are editable people can access them
they can use them without a fee they include a lot of different things
full courses course materials modules textbooks
streaming videos assessment tools software
all kinds of things that you you could use to support teaching and learning
things tools you can use tools that you might create as future faculty
for your students to use or even for your students to build
they are global they're available to people around the world
they're available in the languages that their creators make them in
so you may see that there are some in japanese and there are others
that are written in languages that you have never seen
so how is this possible this sounds a little bit too good to be true
um it's possible because authors and creators decided
that sharing is good and that they wanted to share
um that's the premise of of this movement there are two ways
um there there are essentially two ways that people have shared these
uh one is the materials are in the public domain
uh the second is that there are intellectual property licenses that
creators have applied to the work that allow them to be freely used and to
be repurposed by other people let's talk about the public domain how
many people think this means free online okay don't raise your hand it doesn't
um it means there's no copyright protection um
things that are ineligible for copyright protection
ideas facts names processes works of u.s government employees not
when they're on vacation but when they're at work
things that are really old so things that were published in the u.s before
1924 things donated to the public domain or
things where where the copyright has expired
what is this thing about intellectual property licenses
the most common are creative commons licenses please raise your hand if
you've heard of creative commons licenses before
okay creative commons licenses are made up
of four different types of icons that tell you as a reader what you can
do with someone else's work so an author applies these licenses
to their work they're in many different languages
and those works allow the author to communicate
to you the reader what you can do with their work
as a creator they allow you to more broadly share your work
they also allow you to incorporate those works made by other people in your
own work we build on the shoulders of other
people we use works that other people have created to
create what what we make but we of course infuse our
original ideas and we cite people cc licenses may extend your impact
may broaden your reach they might start a virtuous
sharing cycle which is the hope and they might save money for students and other
readers if you are using creative commons
licenses attribution is always required pick up
this brochure there is a link in here that is very
useful at the bottom that says best practices for attribution
if you are using creative commons licenses
or works that are created by other people that have cc licenses on them
you want to always attribute it's required
not all cc licenses are oer those that don't allow changes
are not open educational resources so we have sort of a stack of licenses
with public domain licenses being the most
open and at the very bottom licenses cc
licenses that are not oer um that do not allow derivatives
i'm sorry for the lack of detail i'm happy to talk with you afterwards
for more details so we have two different ways that something
becomes an open educational resource it's in the public domain
or it's released under an open license what can you do with these things well
you can retain you can revise you can reuse you can
remix you can create new things but what
can you really do with oer you can use open educational resources to benefit
other people everybody knows the textbooks are too
expensive as future faculty there are things that
you can do about this you can use oer to advance your
discipline or your profession for example if you create a really cool
figure and you don't want to turn your
copyright away to the publisher share it under an open license then you
can cite it yourself and other people can use it and you can
use it again extending if you're in the humanities
and you're extending the
knowledge in your field through through the practice of
recording oral history stories of people who
live in unique times of places
incorporating creative commons licenses in your
release forms can be a very helpful way of extending
access to resources in in your discipline or to building your
discipline those of you who will end up working on
professional development professional learning communities
some people are using oer as a way to build
capacity in their teacher communities oer can be a way to change a
relationship for example open pedagogy focuses on
bringing students more access more control in the classroom teaching
them to be more independent thinkers teaching them to explore
to to have agency and their courses
leverage changing the i see i'm running out of time on my own timer
um thank you
um some faculty have decided we're going to use these open licenses
as a way for students to learn how to build curriculum materials for courses
this is an example of a book that was created by graduate students at brigham
young university it was an adaptation of an existing
openly licensed text other faculty have said no let's
have students curate public domain materials
and create a reader for the course students and faculty
learn a lot through these things oer can be used to reach lots of people
for example khan academy khan academy reaches a lot of people
libra text is a upcoming large venue for um
for sharing openly licensed content oh we are africa
there are many projects around the world that reach many people
mit open courseware so you can use oer as a lever
in summary oer are free and editable they rely on public domain and open
licenses open licenses always require attribution
they do rely also on author sharing and they're almost any kind of content
so thank you
to come up now please
um
okay so i would like to introduce the people on this panel
and thank them for being here on my right uh you know dean depauw who
is
the vice president and dean for graduate education here at virginia tech
um benjamin corle is associate professor and interim department head for the
department of dairy science he was also uh influential in starting
the open access policy working group of the community research next to him we
have ellen plummer associate vice provost for academic
administration next to dr plummer we have m.j bishop
who was our keynote earlier today she is associate vice chancellor
and director of the william e kerwin center for academic innovation
of the university system of maryland well virginia
thank you next to her we have diana franco duran who is a doctoral
candidate in civil engineering diana was the open
pawn winner for fall 2018 with sent her to toronto
and next to her is peter potter i don't believe
peter told you he's the director of publishing strategy here at the
university libraries and nathaniel porter is social science
data consultant and data education coordinator here at the university
libraries my first question to each of you is
how did you first get started in open if you're doing open things how did you
first get started um let's start at the far end is that
okay nathaniel um please turn on your
microphone the light should be green
so i first got started on opening ernest sort of as being dumped into this data
archive i mentioned the association of the legend data archive
and so we would collect we wouldn't collect original data we collected
other data that we would go out and solicit data from other investigators
clean it up make it so everything was easily usable accessible public without
needing to sign in um and then we would take phone calls
which is the best part because people would and call and i say
hey i have this question i'm going to answer
can you do it with your data and that got me really excited about sharing
data and ideas helping people make sense with what we've already done
okay and i come from uh university press publishing been in
publishing for many years and so i was in a world of
of actually not commercial nonprofit book
but began to see the system kind of falling apart
and when i came to virginia tech i had an opportunity to work here
in developing a publishing program that is
open access based and so that's really been
moving here has been the images for me to get more involved in
open access publishing
well i guess i have two friends so one as a phd student
and second one as a instructor so when i basically in my phd i just
struggling so much when i was working on my research because
i'm trying to test like an algorithm and then i didn't have data to do that
so because of that struggle i decided to develop this kind of data so everyone
can use it and the second one is as instructor i
realized that the students had to pay like 120 for a book that
pretty much they don't read and it's very dense
at all because i tried to read that book and i didn't understand
so because i did at that time i didn't have time
to like try to develop like open educational
resources i tried to find another book cheaper that they can use actually i
found one for 30 dollars instead of 120 but then the problem that
i saw is that that not all the content that i
want to teach is in that book so at the end i have to
try to figure out different books in order to meet my teaching
approach so what i just started to do is try to develop like a content for the
book that i want to develop as an open educational resource so
that's the way i started okay we're going right down the line
some of you all heard me tell this story earlier
but i joined a center that oversees 12 of our four-year public higher ed
institutions across the state i started in 2013 in this job with absolutely no
clue what i was going to do or how the heck i was going to do this work
kind of staring at a blank sheet of paper
and had the great fortune of having the then system-wide student council
president come to my office and say hey we're thinking about making textbook
affordability our big project this year would you be interested in collaborating
i thought okay open oer what what the heck
but whatever great this is a project i get to work with students again
this would be perfect so um two two things they said to me at that time
was first they wanted to be sure we worked with community colleges as well
um which was precious in that you know now we're actually having
instructional materials conversations across transfer pathways which is really
exciting and then the second thing they said to
me was and we want to take a bill to annapolis forcing all faculty to adopt
where we are in the next two years and i said well that's ambitious but
i don't think we actually have to do that and it's not working so well in
other places instead let's take a look at the ways in which we can
encourage faculty to do this work which i think is so critically important
not just for affordability but as anita said a little bit ago
also for looking at the ways in which we can actually use these
the affordances of these these oers to improve the quality of instructional
materials that continuous quality improvement process
i'll leave it at that for now
all right it's good to be with you today um i
am not an expert in this matter at all i am here because anita
invited me and because i do believe that um i'm a bit of a
translator and my role in the provost's office here
at virginia tech is to straddle multiple worlds which means i need to have
a number of vocabularies and over the last couple of years colleagues
from the from the libraries and then most
recently anita have been bringing forward proposals and resolutions and
ideas around how to move our university further along this path
and really engage the various ways that this work
can really improve our scholarship and our commitment
to affordability and openness etc so i work with folks in the general
assembly and folks in richmond and our board of
visitors and our faculty and others and everyone has it's that
great um i guess it's a metaphor of the elephant
where everyone has a piece of a different piece of the elephant
right and they think they've got the elephant
so the general assembly their folks up there you know they feel very
strongly that this is all about affordable textbooks
they just want textbooks to be free because they're sick and tired of
hearing from their constituents that the coming here is too expensive and their
kids are spending hundreds and they only care about
undergraduates by the way i mean no offense
it's just a political reality um and then i've got other folks who are
who are engaged in this very robust and amazing work and so that's where the
translation comes in it's like okay we're going to do this
work here and that work there and we're going to massage it in the
middle and we're going to make it work and then the revolution happens
easy my my exposure to open access game actually
started the year before i was the chair of the commission on research here at
the university the commission on research is part of a
governance structure within the university and it's a
eclectic group with representatives from the colleges staff representative
academic ap faculty representative and our main charge is to review
policies but also try to promote the research mission
of the university and in the spring of 2016
julius spear representative from the library spoke with the commission
about open publishing and trying to increase the profile of the university
and the university's research mission through open publishing and
the off cited benefit citations and also to
try to increase our our footprint and get our
knowledge out into the world easier and so the year that i became
chair of the commission on research we made that one of our priorities every
year we assign certain things we're going to
work on and we learned more the commission
membership that year learned a lot more about
the publishing we started working group to develop a policy
which is slowly meandering to governance if that might be too strong
um but we've uh through the the commission
we're trying to advance the research mission at
university we see at least the representatives on the
commission see the opportunity the benefits
to make it easier for faculty and graduate students to
publish openly to get your work out to a broader audience
well i think you all can hear me i will project um i got into
i knew a little bit about open access and a little knowledge is dangerous
but i kind of knew the word um many years ago
and then the library started doing they had open
access speakers who were coming to campus and i would always get called
by the library because they wanted somebody to support
financially they bringing of
speakers to campus um which i was very happy to do in my role as vice president
and dean um and then i got to get more uh
gathered more knowledge about it and then that's when gail macmillan would
keep coming over to my office and say we have this sub subvention fund
and i've got to get that to grad students um
and and then uh peter came to tech and he
he we were talking about open access and so then he has organized
these sessions for uh sometimes only in the fall now fall
and spring for this class and so i have become very much a fan of open
access um i think it's really important um and
i think it's critical that grad students become
more aware of all the open movements whatever
they are and so i very much appreciate this opportunity to be here and for all
the work the library uh is doing and it was several years ago
now that i was introduced to the creative commons
and so on my presentations i will often
have that um and when when i do presentations around the world
then people want copies and i'm absolutely fine
to have them uh if it's open they can share it
by whatever i put on there so that's how i use it
and other than that then i am the deliverer of the
messages and engaging these folks in conversations
so in 2006 i was a librarian at the world bank
and i discovered that there was this thing called open access
and i thought this is going to be amazing for people
in other places of the world who don't have access to
uh journal articles that are extremely expensive
so my initial interest was hey it's free but my interest soon turned into hey
this is all from western countries what about the scholarship from other places
in the world and what about sharing that um around the
world not just exporting things from
from western countries to places that don't have as rich of infrastructure
in 2013 when i started working here i was hired with an understanding a more
rich understanding of open access but i knew nothing about
open educational resources and part of my job was to explore
what open educational resources are how they could be
implemented at the university and
that's what i've been doing for the last five years
so i'm very interested in
in encouraging
depth and breadth and creativity of faculty and students and sharing of
resources i think that there are
wonderful opportunities to extend one's reach
and to to expand the audience for your work if you
are willing to share under an open license
so that's how i got started our next question is about the
overlap between the different opens and i will throw this out to any of you
so we heard earlier about open data open access open education what do you see
as the common values between those three
and maybe i'll throw this open to the panel and if a couple people in the
audience also want to comment you're welcome just
raise your hand well i have a question okay um what is
open you said you were going to you know define that so what do you mean
by open specifically so i'm asking about the overlaps between
open access which has essentially at this point is essentially
defined as free online open education which means under an open
license and open data would you say in the public domain primarily
uh more or less so open data broadly would
include any data that's published in whole or in large
part for the purposes of transparency replication or reuse okay
and it's online
the overlap that i see between open publishing of scholarly works and then
also open data i think there is a lot of overlap
between the two in fact but the open data creates the
opportunity for new scholarly works as spontaneous
talking about with availability of data sets in my
field i'm a life scientist and
where we've seen of course a tremendous explosion and the volume of data
is things like deep sequencing
microarray type data a lot of dna rna metabolomics
these fields these data are voluminous from individual studies and
of course the availability making those data available oftentimes we're
focused on very discreet hypotheses but because
of the richness of the sample collection the richness of what comes out of the
analyses there's actually the opportunity to
analyze a lot of different hypotheses to test a lot of questions
and so much of this data and much of the
funding for that has come through nih in four years now they have required that
data sets become available in the public domain through
the pubmed website nih supports and of course then
publishing those works and now it's i think it took a little while to get
traction but now you can see someone in working with their own samples
and then going and interrogating the data from other people who are answering
a completely different question but with the treatments that are available and
the analyses that were completed are able to
augment their own research question and provide an
even stronger case and then through open publishing of that you actually
disseminate that even further so the availability of open data creates
an opportunity for researchers to go even further than they would have at
less expense because those analyses have already been completed and then the
availability of that publication subsequently creates opportunities for
other scientists especially as i see it in places where
finances are are not available for
extensive research having those data available
an opportunity to further train students to create
new information from existing data
so i'll jump in and say that for me i think what what's shared across these
variety of opens as you stated in the sent in the
question it's all about sharing i mean i think
all three of them are about sharing things sharing
information sharing data i'm not going to do it justice but if
you have a chance later to google david wiley education and sharing it's a
tedx talk he's incredibly articulate about
the mission of higher of all education being about
sharing for our students so so taking knowledge and making it
freely available either in the form of data or
our scholarly publishing or our instructional materials
um one one interesting conundrum he notes in that
in that talk is that right now the internet makes it possible for us to
distribute and communicate broadly but then when we combine that with
copyrighted materials we then get locked down again by the copyrighted
materials that when we combine the internet and the
communications capabilities that we have today with an
openly licensed environment whether it's data or
whatever open educational resources now we really are back into a mode where
we can share freely again so i i would characterize all three of
these initiatives and movements in that way that it's really about
sharing can i ask that i'm i'm not going to answer the question i'm
going to ask you a question
sorry wow because you want to go first i just want to add something i agree with
you but also i think that what i think of all of this is that
it helps people you contribute to the community even if we are in social
science engineering by sharing we are
contributing to the research on other people
we are helping a student to understand so i think that the common
all of them is that we are contributing we are helping the community
uh i think that something that really makes me realize of that is that
when i was in opencom in toronto one of the panelists was a master's
student from canada and he
was trying to help his community back in german because they didn't have
internet so pretty much what he did in order to
help the students there to apply scholarships here in united
states and canada was trying to translate all the
material to for the gre for the toefl so they can really prepare for the exam
and because they didn't have internet he found a way to put
all of those materials without they having to access the internet in some
way so when i'm thinking about open i mean it's
just the contribution just to giving back to the community and
when i'm talking about communities students researchers everywhere so
everyone so that's what i think that we have in common is just contribute
and helping by sharing all kind of material
i'm curious i'm so i'm going to ask my colleagues here
especially ben because the this is all about sharing
and that's absolutely wonderful but there are
people who resist that um like they own the data the data are mine
um this article is mine my intellectual property um and i i would like
to hear that's why the proposal was slowly meandering through
the university but how do we take that on and convince
the resistors that there is value in it and i'm not losing
anything if i share
so i know that you're asking ben but let me tell you how publication
usually works the scholar writes the paper and they
give the copyright away to the publisher anyway you are already giving away
and you are not owning any more your intellectual property and then it's
stuck in a journal in some library that nobody ever reads
yes so but it is still the person is attached to it well they
still are with with openly licensed materials is the
attributions yes yeah exactly so but i agree that
there is resistance because people i think ben wants to tell
us about resistance do you like to tell us about resistance
let's talk about resistance so our graduate students and and so you're
you're a little bit on the cusp and certainly more educated about
this after what we've been here about 55
minutes than a lot of faculty on campus are and
so what everyone's alluding to is i was the
chair of the commission on research in 2016 2017 and at the
close of uh that season on a commission on research
we had what we thought was a pretty good policy
and we began what i i called with the working group
a campaign because i was at the time chair of the commission on research but
i had also been four years on the faculty staff here at the university
and i had seen many policies come before various entities on campus especially
the faculty senate and they're they're pretty much doa
dead on arrival um faculty are very um despite my learning colleague's
statement about how we transfer when we publish and transfer copyright to the
publisher that has been the standard and the norm
for a very long time and so
as progressive as many faculty think they are they are generally
fairly entrained to whatever they started with
and so open access was not a particularly positive topic
when we took it to the faculty center twice and in fact
you know the second time i was feeling fairly down drawn and run over
there's a certain resistance and it depends on your field
it really comes down the field as i mentioned earlier
if your funding agency requires open publishing
you're a fair amount more accepting of it because it's a requirement
but there were pockets or colleges i should say
at the university where there are specific
expectations and requirements for publishing and what is perceived to be
top-tier journals and there was a perception among the
faculty that if we gave them the opportunity to retain copyright through
university policy which at the time i think
50 or 60 other universities had actually already engaged in
that they would somehow be blocked from publishing in the journals that their
administrators wanted them to publish in and that was practically an
insurmountable stumbling block process
and i think i'm storytelling now depaul's question is saluting me
oh just the let me rephrase it too because there is resistance and i'm just
and and i'm sure from the the students in the in the class
that you may have questions about why one should do it um sharing is a
really good thing but yet do i lose in that and then the the role
models that that these folks um work with
they may have some of those attitudes so how did you come on board
how can we all want to get others on board
so i believe fairly strongly in the land-grant
which the spouse is trying to improve the world trying to
disseminate knowledge we are in the business of discovery but
especially in my college we're in the business of outreach
and so it is fairly natural for me to think about
trying to push knowledge out that as a land grant researcher
that i am available especially to the citizens of the commonwealth that the
work that i'm doing is trying to benefit them
the country the world and so any way that we can share and thereby
benefit our broadest sense constituencies that i see
great benefit of course as chair of the commission on
research into the the push was for improving the impact of
the university which president
is using the term global land grant trying to improve the world
and the only way to do that is to push knowledge out
and if it's behind a paywall there's a very limited opportunity for
your target audience to then access that but the resistance is very real there
was a perception and there's still a perception that this
these discoveries are the intellectual property of the
discoverer by the way when your faculty member your
faculty advisor is talking about the intellectual property
even though you might have done all the work they're generally thinking about
themselves so just keep that in mind
so it's there was a there was a fear about
um not being able to publish where people wanted to publish that by giving
up or retain allowing the university to actually
retain copyright was going to somehow hamstring them and
the resistance i think is still there i haven't got a mission now for
a year two year year or two years but i have not heard that the policy has
been enacted although i believe it is making the rounds
through the commissions and that will take
some time so i think yeah so i want to hear
if there are any comments from the panel and then i want to
open it up for a few minutes to the audience for questions
then i want to move us into a slightly different topic of how
change happens but first of all any responses to this conversation from the
campus i'm just going to observe it's kind of a
catch-22 right a mic oh sorry thank you thank you um
it's sort of a catch-22 right so so you know uh and i come out of a college
of education i was at lehigh university for 13 years
research intensive institution um you know your your promotion and tenure
committee is looking their primary fear is that
external review right you know they're guiding you along
the way and it's at the end of the day when you have
you're going up for tenure the external review committee
your external review folks are folks outside of your institution
who are intended to sort of be the gatekeepers of your discipline right
and they're the ones where you know they're the ones they're going to say
yes she's published in the top journals yes she you know the
research is meaningful in the field all those kinds of things
if we can get to a place where our disciplines will say okay
mj you don't have to publish an etr r d in order to
to demonstrate your worth you can publish in this open access journal
instead and that's that's going to be valid and get the
disciplines to actually develop those open access journals
then i think this becomes at least in education becomes a different kind of
conversation i realize in the sciences it can be a
little bit more difficult than that but for me at least i think you know that's
where we can begin really opening up this discussion where in my
mind you know as we work collaboratively
across institutions and across higher education
if we can start talking to those disciplinary societies we can start
making some interest in some of this exactly
these kinds of things
i was just going to add and it came up again um
the common theme across a lot of this what's the barrier
it's fear whatever it is whether it's fear of being
scooped or fear of um fear of not getting tenure because
your journal isn't good enough because it's
open access or in the case of data right fear
that um if i i talk to people all the time who say
i'd love to share my data but i said that i would destroy it in three years
when i did my informed consent people do that because they fear that
their participants might say no or their irv might say no
and so as we try and address and bring these together
i think the challenge to each of us and the bits and pieces all along the way is
to put together what are the fears that are blocking
this piece and how do we give confidence the infrastructure
the subtle shoves to get past those
what questions do you have at this point or observations if you want to
um i guess as open access open educational resources become
larger scope internationally what do you see kind of the
challenges that are going to occur sort of like supply demand
publishing costs getting higher or you know quality control and how do you
start kind of bringing that in
doesn't that be your question yes the peter question
computer
i think we're already trying to deal with that in terms of uh
of i think the more that the universities can take control
of publishing and put their imprimatur on what's published
and if it's published open access then that has that badge of authority behind
it we have to kind of work in that direction because there are
there are a lot of bad open access journals out there and you might have
heard of the term predatory journals i get them in my email all the time
um disreputable publishers saying if you'll pay
a thousand dollars we'll publish your article and it's not
it's not a legitimate journal but that has nothing to do
with open access open access if it's peer-reviewed
is a valid more of a publication just as much as
any kind of closed subscription publication
so we have to kind of move in that direction to get
more of the open access journals people used to that getting used to them
getting them out of the hands of commercial publishers and
focusing on that part of it rather than just
the cost of publication
so in response to your question i would say that
with regard to oer we need to figure out how to more clearly value
other people's work if you write something and release it under an open
license and i decide okay it's under an open license i'm
going to adapt it how do i give you credit for the parts
that you wrote and how do i give myself credit for the
parts that i wrote how do i display that so that someone
else knows who the who to cite in that work
so we need to figure that out quality peer review those things are very much
issues that i think will plague us unless we
develop some standards of how to ensure that
that the work that we're producing is really um
excellent i think there was someone over there
right um so in my work with my department we've been using open source
code for years and it's highly encouraged
um the codex emotes has millions of lines
written by thousands of people and that is
looked at very well if you use a code you modify it
for your own purposes um however we everyone in my department pretty much
tells me do not publish open access and the key difference i see is that the
one thing that the steam shop pronounces of open source or open education
is that you have to pay offer education resources required for free common
licenses to put on work out there for free
but in the open access you have to pay to check
um so they see that as raising quality issues and
people has actually worked there for your money
so my question is is open access really like all the other opens
if you have to pay for it can i ask gail to please comment on that you do
not always have to wait microphone
you do not always have to pay for open access the directory of open access
journals is something like 60
chart of the journals charge and open an article processing fee and the other 40
do not charge so it's not true that you have to
pay for open access
can i mention one other thing that we haven't brought up yet
and that is there have been various studies that have been done
that show that if you publish in open access journals
you will get cited more i mean it just makes sense doesn't it if your
if your article is hidden behind the pay wall and not very many people can read
it then not many people can cite it but and that's something i think speaks
to what ben was talking about the land ground mission that we have
here to make our research publicly available and publicly accessible
so we're meeting the land grant mission and
we're we're doing the right thing for the world
what other questions do people have or things that you want to bring up
anything
so you talked about open access directory of percent charge
forty percent of attorney where do you find this information
i believe gail is talking about something called d-o-a-j
the directory of open access journals you can also contact the librarian for
your department and say tell me more um
what what are my options what do they look like there's someone behind you as
a question
so along the lines of you said 60 like 60 charge 40 don't charge
up those like 40 that don't charge how many of those are peer-reviewed though
i know you mentioned like earlier that there's a lot of like craft journals out
there that are quote unquote open access but they're just
crap journals does that make sense
so the director of open access journals are all peer-reviewed and don't quote me
on the 60-40 there are many journals that don't charge open
article processing fees but they are peer-reviewed journals and it's very
difficult to get listed in the directory of all the access journals because they
have a long list of important criteria that the journals
have to meet they are quality journals
can i add something i would just say though that
um it's possible that in in there are many fields where the the
journals you need to publish in your society journals
are not open access and so we aren't at the point yet where
everybody has the freedom to choose between
an open access and a closed access journal
and i'd also make the point that because just because a journal doesn't charge a
fee that sometimes i think that's misleading
because a lot of journals in the medical
sciences and the in the art sciences it costs a lot of
money to publish those journals so um they in most cases aren't going to be
free and we're still trying to figure out how
to pay for how to make it equitable so that
you're not just having to pay out of your budget or out of a
research budget whatever and it's and if there are
issues of global equity we have access to more research funds than other places
do so it's a it's a thorny issue right now
journals that foreign not charge anything if there are still some charges
for themselves i think if they want to publish something they need some storage
over the internet they need some people to do peer review
some edits or something and also their website
actually knew some charts so where did that where does that money
come from they do not charge anyone and also what is the incentive behind
this and the alerting is time besides the
money is time it takes a lot of time from many people
to sacrifice the time that they should lose over their job and other things so
what is the incentive for them
i would just say that um it comes from a number of places it's in
a lot of cases it's it's work that dedicated scholars do
we have journals that are edited by faculty members here and elsewhere they
do not get paid to do their work the reviewers don't get paid we support
the library supports those publications by providing the platform for them to
publish on we provide technical support but
there's a lot of unpaid work there and like i said earlier about
commercial publishers living off of unpaid labor
this is for the public good and nobody's making money off of it
commercial publishers however are making a 37
profit off of that unpaid labor and that's that's where the
real inequity comes in but i think you raised a really
important point it's true also for open educational resources you know it's
we're now taking what students use to pay for the textbooks and transferring
some of that cost back to the institution in terms of
maintaining these resources updating them
vetting them for digital rights compliance vetting them for
accessibility we're going to need to figure out
internal models business models within our institutions in order to be able to
sustain those things and as i was talking about
earlier i think the more that our higher ed institutions are
collaborating on that and looking for efficiencies in doing that and sharing
once again as we're sharing among each other the things that we're working on
i think we can we can overcome at least a certain amount of those
expenses back to the institution
are there any questions from people online
i think we might have a couple people online please if you are online and you
have questions please put them in the chat
and look like we have anything else okay i have a question um so
i've seen that some of the bigger classical journals like nature
for example have created open access options or kind of journals
what do you think about those and yeah supporting something like that not
actually helping the overall move towards open access
do you think that it's it's half-hearted at best i would say at this point i know
i know springer well because i just finished being uh editor for
a springer journal and they have something called
first something that where they'll publish things
you know openly in in but it's not openly licensed
it's still copyrighted materials but it's freely available there
they've done a couple of open access journals but i i don't know that they're
really that they're really investing in those
in big ways well if you look at now the uh the
largest the most uh published articles open
access are published by the big commercial
publishers so as we're we're getting access to
more research but we're still keeping the money in the hands of the big
commercial publishers so they they figured out okay if we need
to go open access we'll go up in access but we're still going to control the
rights and we're still going to make our 37 profit and so that's why
their part processing charges that they charge
you as the author to publish with them are so high
because they have to make a big profit
add on to that first tech earlier it was said
that open access builds on open data open data also builds on open
access and this matters with these hybrid journals because
i have people come to me and they say i want to use the information on all these
journal articles look at the patterns of citations or to look at the
change in the language that's used over time a lot of these hybrid journals
there's no way to access that data programmatically for example to
pull it out with an api to do that kind of analysis
or we have to pay them a whole bunch of money for the privilege of doing that so
we've had to do that we've negotiated with publishers on that kind of thing
and it's not cheap um to get that access even when we already subscribed to the
drone
so so question about like so like if a journal were transitioned into
being an open access journal then what would happen to
all previously published articles in that journal
because like i'm thinking of like journals in my field that are you know
like 50 years old or something like that have hundreds upon hundreds of articles
published but what happened to those articles
can i answer that go ahead please there are there are cases
there's a classic case in the field of linguistics
where a journal that was owned by a particular publisher
flipped to being open access the editorial board was able to convince
their colleagues in that field please withdraw your
papers from the old one and apply to the new one
the all of the rights the copyright resides the name of the old journal is
still owned by the previous publisher so all of the past content is owned by
the previous publisher there are ways to provide access to that
publishers will often allow you to archive a preprint which is the version
that you submitted before they made all of the copy edits and
adding changes a lot of people don't don't retain those
so there is a large body of content that is
owned by a very small number of people a very
small number of companies that
would remain that way so yeah at one point so i mentioned the
university of california system just opting out of a new deal with
elsevier what's important to understand is that
means not going forward you will not be able to access
new elsevier if you're in the uc system new
articles and journals everything behind that that date
the library paid for so they had perpetual acts then paid for perpetual
access to that content now i don't know that
that's the case with every single university but in the
case of the uc system they're not losing access to all of the
previously published articles but sorry i'm still thinking about that
like still thinking about that thing you
should just opted out of like this elsevier contract
i know there's a lot of i'm thinking of journals in my field that have
you know that are part of elsevier doesn't something like that in a
farming student department end up harming this whole
idea of like sharing knowledge kind of or is that a different
discussion for a different day no it's a good it's a very good question
i'd be interested what maybe ben thinks of that
yes i think i think you're right it's hard to predict the future
you know a system i don't have a full appreciation and you said
uc system accounts for 10
elsevier can't lose 10 percent of its public installers
which is essentially what we're talking about here
it's i think that somebody didn't step out to chester yeah somebody needed
to step out and take a stand and it's nice that
the uc system did that and it'd be nice if other systems
would be able to engage in that as well because i think elsevier and a number of
the other publishers they control so much of the market that
they've sort of been able to bully us essentially i mean
it's funny to sit here and think about the last two peer reviews i did
for free and that one took almost a whole day
which i'm glad the taxpayers in virginia don't realize that
it's you know it's it's a system that's more and more if you if you consider it
objectively as abusive
so i i think that you're right in the short term
uh students in the uc system can't get a paper published in 2019
they'll either have to contact an author for a reprint or
some other system but i'm hoping that that's a short short-term
problem that the abusive relationship that we seem to be in with publishers
will maybe begin to flip that change and perhaps everybody in uc system
unlike some other universities will say well gosh why don't we just start
publishing open access and go to those other
journals i mean there's plenty of reputable
journals plus one was up there across biology the public library of science
journals they don't have one i don't think they
have one dedicated agriculture but a number of my colleagues are publishing
in that journal one of the things that makes this much
more in my opinion
makes a lot of this possible is the fact that we all use databases to search for
papers you don't have to be in your field
specific journal for someone to keyword search and find your words it used to be
you subscribe to the hard copy of the
journal when i was in graduate school there were still a lot of faculty in my
department that got giant journal every month in their
mailbox and they would flip through and that's
how they kept current with the literature i have automatic searches
for all the keywords that i want to search for related to my research
and i can find papers
the power of that that search ability the computational
vulnerability that we've talked about previously just changes that dynamic
so i think that i think it's positive in the uc systems are going to stand
i'm hopeful that others will as well but i'm not
necessarily honest and if you go to the uh it's interesting if you go to the
university california system website they've created a
i actually meant to show this and i didn't get to it in time they have a
graphic that says okay here's how you get access
to elsevier scholarship now and one of the things they're planning to do is
ramp up their interlibrary loan system and they're gonna i think run it seven
days a week so they've been thinking about this for
a long time and that the little handout that we gave
you with it mentions different ways to access
articles they include a bunch of those in their
graphic as well so like the open access button um
there are different ways to be able to act find out if there is
if an article you're looking for is openly available you can find
out and the instructions are in that booklet
but in addition uc system is is ramping up to be able to provide quick
access to basically photocopy copies of
articles um germany and
sweden yes so they they are resisting elsewhere yeah the entire so if you are
in a university in germany or in sweden right now you don't have access to
elsphere because the in europe it's top down
um the the deals with the publishers are made by the governments and the
governments of germany and sweden just said we're
not doing this anymore we don't have that luxury here because
we don't have a top-down system but the closest thing we have to it is the
uc system which is why that was such a big important
statement to make because they do control so much
of the public scholarship peter are you able to help these folks
understand the expense that institutions are
have occurred as a result i mean you you all saw the graph you showed but i mean
literally even when i we were talking about this in the car earlier it's been
a while since i was at lehigh but i was on the
library users group there and the huge amount of expensive percentage of
the overall budget for the institution was
outrageous just for these subscriptions
i think i think we pay is it 10 10 million i think it's 10 million
that we pay the library budget is 10 million 8
million journals okay so the library budget is
10 million and eight million is for yeah so that's eight million dollars not
going back into other things
so sorry last question so i know there's probably like thousands of journals then
that that eight million dollars then goes to pay for do you guys happen to
know like if there are journals in that that
aren't just used or like or i don't know if you guys know like
the percentage of the number of journals that we use
we regularly cut journals that do not get enough usage
so you guys just don't keep dead journals around that people aren't using
it okay but then then we get into the real
interesting challenge of the um humanities and mostly the humanities
where one or two faculty members so it
wouldn't be enough use but yet i've heard it for
years don't cut that journal because that is
the one scholar that really needs to have it
so interesting balance
so one of you mentioned um archiving preference and that's a common practice
that is in my field so i was wondering what your
thoughts are putting because your blueprints are
basically the exact same final product but without the logo
or the publisher and then you put that for free on
archive and then you put it for free again on research
page um what's your thought on that practice
that it depends on what the publisher allows uh the publisher there's a site
called sherpa romeo which is where you can look
up each journal's terms of use it will tell you is it green oa that
means that you can archive a pre-print is it gold that
means help me out peter that means the gold oa
means the publisher will deposit the printed version the final publisher
the version of record in a it will help they will deposit the
published version of record in pubmed central or wherever it needs
to go to be accounted as an open access publication
so it's when it's when it's allowed it's
definitely a practice that helps distribute
the content faster and discriminate distribute it
more broadly in in terms of it being public
there's another place where you should put your if you're allowed to archive
your pre-prints don't just put them on researchgate
because researchgate is commercial we have no idea what will happen to it in
the future put them in the the university's
institutional repository it's called the tech works
you can find information about it in here
but that will that's a preservation structure
um that's not a commercial entity and it's a
a good place where your terms with of the journal allow you to do that it's a
great place to put things so at that point it's basically open
access and you're putting a version that's almost identical to the final one
in the probably available archive so what would be the advantage for going
for real open access as opposed to traditional journals
archive users i'm thinking
i'd say one thing to that is that um
from the person who's the author's end it may look open accesses in the
consumer's end it may still look open access but if we
if the journal is still paid and closed access then that means that
if musicians are still paying for access to that
journal because they might not want just that piece of content
that's open access
yeah it's also not uniform so you're the person who wrote the article that's
in the pages before you or after you might not have
done the same and so there's a lot of randomness if not everyone is
depositing i guess that's a quick question about
why do journals allow this that's the whole business model why would they
allow you to put your footprints in publicly available archives um
okay peter because they've been pressured into it
the pressure that faculty and and associations have
been putting on them so this has been their kind of
slow response to the move towards open access
and it's why we have to continue to put pressure on them
so i want to move us on sort of backward but forward
to the question or the comment that nathaniel made about
becoming more open what does it look like in the university
why don't we do it talking i i really like what you said about we don't do
this because we are afraid of what might happen or what
you know we're afraid of um maybe what we don't know um
i would love to hear from any of you um because i think we're
reflecting on my own journey of oh it's free to
know i'm going to put an open license on my things because
i want people to use them if they find them helpful
how have you overcome those fears as individuals
so this is how do we um how does change happen in
small ways at the university and then i want us to talk about how does change
happen in really large more dramatic or more sort of policy
ways of the university so first um do you have any stories you
want to share about sort of your analysis of going more open
instead of not i just have one point that i would make in response to
that and it's something it took me a long time to get my head around it
we've talked a lot about openly licensing something and we've talked
about copyright and it's important to make the
distinction between the two that because you openly license
something doesn't mean you're giving away your copyright
and that was a hard thing for me to when you publish
with a journal and that journal requires you to sign over there
your copyright to them they own your work
if you decide not to do that and you want to license something openly
you still own the copyright that is your work you're not giving away
your intellectual property you're just telling people
what they can do with it they so that they don't have to ask you
or ask permission from you they they know from the type of license you're
using what rights they have to use that
material and for me that was a big that took me a long time to kind of get
my head around and that's a really important
distinction i think
i mean i'm thinking about open education and i see that i mean
the fear is greater when we are talking about
open research open data but when i think about open education i
think that is a lack of time because
faculty they don't have time to develop this material or even they don't know at
least in myself i don't think that any professor in my
program is thinking about open education or creating this kind of resource
they don't know and even if they know they don't have the time
to do it because i think that this is not like a research product for them
so they are not going to spend time with that that
the other thing is that maybe it's really
hard to try to engage faculty to do that and it's because they haven't seen the
benefit that they kind of think like that because i have been working with
two professors we have we are the instructor
of the same course but we have three different sections
and it's really powerful just like working all together all the great
things that we can do but they don't realize what they can
actually do by working together by sharing the material but
collaborating that's the thing i think that in order to
be able to develop open educational resources we need to start
trying to redesign the courses in a way that students can help to develop
this kind of material by incorporating open engage
open pedagogy as you mentioned at the beginning so i think that is
if we want to avoid like having to do a lot of work
we need to rethink the way how we are teaching the courses and
that way we can just take advantage of that
so i have two bits of good news there are two people that we're talking to and
you're that are interested in doing this kind
of thing i'll tell you more about that i would just add to that and i agree
with everything you said um there's also a whole lot of material
that's already been created and i think we make the mistake as
faculty you know going straight to the oh i've
got to create it myself or else i'm not really teaching mentality and i
think we also need that culture shift where you know just like with textbooks
it's okay for me to adopt other oers that are out there and there
are a lot of already completely curated courses
that i can bring into my lms and tweak you know that's a lot lighter lift than
me
so i think in partial answer to your question anita you know when we can
and we're doing some of this in maryland when we can help faculty see this can be
incremental you don't have to begin tomorrow working
on your fall semester course all for the rest of the summer creating
stuff from scratch here's a course that's already been done
you may like some things you may hate some things you may want to pull in some
of your other things but it's a lot less work
than trying to develop from scratch i just wanted to mention also that the
academy for teaching excellence the graduate academy has
a repository for teaching resources specifically for grad
students here
um
regarding the journals there is the journal suspension open access journal
suspension fund students faculty staff anyone at the
university can get 15 up to 1500 to publish in an open access
journal there's an application process so that
is an incentive you wouldn't have to pay for that
otherwise incentives for open educational
resources include the work that peter and i do
to provide technical support to predominantly faculty that are
interested in creating learning resources so peter and
i work on books and then i work with a lot of
other people on other kinds of projects
for example a virtual reality dog that we developed
this past year for with the college of veterinary medicine
so we have small grants in the amount of up to three thousand dollars
for those projects what's more important than the money i think
is the process that we go through to connect the people with the ideas to
other people that can help them make it happen
and to talk about licensing and to help them work through
a plan of a schedule for developing their project a way to
distribute it so the way i look at it is that my goal
is to build a safety net or a nest sometimes i call it
underneath the person whose project it is it's not
just a grant program it's really a professional networking program and a
professional support program so um there are a lot of other things that
we would like to see as incentives for faculty and we'll let other people
in the panel talk about that talk about the business
the book the open book um what about it no just share it okay
so on the back table there is a book uh that we we've worked on a few
different books and um there's a book called fundamentals of
business it is the adaptation of an existing openly
licensed textbook it's used in our first year introduction to business
course uh it's used by our students in the fall
and a course of around 725 students in nine
sections or something like that it's used in at least
11 other institutions of higher education
it's been downloaded upwards of 350 000 times around the world
since august of 2016. so um it's something we're really proud of
having adapted and been able to share with the
world there's a canadian edition now someone
else took it and and made it canadian it changed all
of the u.s data it's the canadian data and
changed the spelling and the word color yes
yes yes
the pictures are canadian examples so um i i forget what your question was but
tell us about this yeah i wanted you to talk about that
because knowing the impact and all of that is
incentive to some of the faculty members who actually take this on
rather than going through a traditional publisher and a book that then is sold
in the bookstore but this then they can reach and it's
going gangbusters we've also had the opportunity i was
able to get a grant this winter and we had the opportunity to bring in
nine faculty from virginia tech and other
institutions in the region to create test bank
questions for um for that in a day and a half long
test bank sprint and we had a lot of fun and we wrote a
lot of great questions and it it was a very rewarding
activity we hope to do that again how much does the current version cost
the print version the newest boy do i know
the color color version is unfortunately forty four dollars
um the black and white version i think is
eight plus shipping is that right but that's the color with the u right
yeah
on the data side um one of the biggest incentives
is curatorial support so both from us and the repositories we belong to if
you're interested in depositing open data either at vtec data or one of the
other repositories we can help clean your data organizers
get it ready for publishing and believe it or not you might want to
use that data later and two or three years or 10 years down the road
if you look at your code book the way it was when you collected it i guarantee
you you will not remember what you did and you will spend hours and hours
banging your head knowing what what's going on also
working it so the many of the data sets the artist that we republished some of
those were already published elsewhere that you could get with as much as just
signing up for an account and logging in but we would get
thousands of citations to our versions of those data sets because
they were a little bit cleaner and because there were no barriers
right so even removing that little barrier of assigning sometimes is enough
to make a huge difference in how much you're getting used and cited and those
doi numbers and things those are research products that people are citing
and then go on your 10 your resume and so on
so my my other question would be to the panel and maybe to ellen
specifically and maybe to mj and then
what kind of
what do you see as the role of institutions and saying yes we want to
we want to do this what does that look like in its various forms
at a system or university level did she start with you she said
i'll let you work it out between the two there's just three or four of you
actually well um
particularly american higher education we are not known for being super nimble
i know that's a shock to all of you and the change in higher ed
to a more progressive open need in the word open strikes fear
in the hearts of scholars right and that's because our cultural
traditions which we imported from western countries
and europe in particular um is the notion is that it's the lone
scholar that the scholar sits on his or her usually his bottom
um in an ivory tower that's right sitting on the hill all right so so the
the the notion of sharing the notion of quote giving away one's own work
has to do with one's identity as a scholar with one's
professional trajectory if you get tenure in traditional
in the traditional institutions like virginia tech
you're you're there's a tremendous amount of
of identity and years of investment in this notion that you are the expert
in this particular niche it's your gig it belongs to you
nobody can take it um you get other folks to help you
including your graduate students to help you advance that agenda
so from in a very environment plus person
space the change around shifting this requires a lot of
education it takes time over time it takes scholars who are
championing the cause to lift up some of the more commonly held values we
have like working at a land grant is a choice
that's a political statement that we're making when we commit
to working in a place like this as a scholar as an administrator
and change takes time and you need a strategy you need a matrix
approach um and karen is an expert at nature's
approaches to change um a role model of mine and of others of
us taking personal stands political stands
engaging the institutions leadership
and it take it down it takes a lot of pieces to make it happen
the i think the immediate challenge for us um and then your story i was actually
sitting on the commission not sitting but i support the commission on faculty
affairs um when philip was was trying to champion the cause right
um so for those of us who are wranglers of
the governance process and i consider myself one of
those wranglers it really is is a matter of
aligning the proper stories with the proper incentives
with the proper invitation to be bigger and beyond oneself and
that's not an easy thing because we're pretty focused on
us and what's in it for me the threads if we were to try to tackle this whole
thing i think it could be overwhelming and it
would be we could potentially get immobilized because just based on the
conversation tonight open a true embracing of this movement
and of this way of being in scholarship and in partnership with
one another would require a dramatic shift
of promotion and tenure of disciplinary uh culture culture is plural
um it's no surprise to any of us that our disciplines if you're you know if
you're an english major and you're an engineering major
you've got completely different epistemological frames
around what counts as knowledge and who gets to tell you that your knowledge is
worthy and who doesn't from whom can you learn
do you have patents or do you have copyright do you write
books or do you write journals are you co-authoring
stuff or do you have to be a single author
all of those rules as you all are learning especially those of us who are
graduate students really have implications and would need
interventions and adjustments so institutionally my experience here at
virginia tech is that our change we're we are very
conservative we have a very traditional governance
model that not everyone agrees is optimal
but it's what we've got and what we love about governance
um is that everyone is at the table or invited to
be at the table not everyone has an equal vote that's a whole other
conversation for another day but there are ways to advance
and move forward institutional change in the form in the formal pathways of
governance what we hate about governance is that
everybody gets a voice everybody has an opportunity to chew on
the problem everybody has an opportunity to
contribute their next best idea and iteration we fight over words there
are lots of great stories about that um and and so it takes a long time i've
also seen it really work for us um it's a tool it is not the bl and end
all but governance can those bodies the
commissioner research the commission on faculty affairs
all report up to our university council which is chaired by the president
and very little goes to the board of visitors which is our board of trustees
without having it get vetted through all of these
channels that gives our leadership water to carry it's much
easier for the president to go to the board of visitors and say
oh my god they stormed the castle my people
are freaking out we i really need your help y'all you need to pass this
resolution for me because i'm gonna get eaten for lunch if you don't
right i'm exaggerating to make my point but that
is the helpful side um of governance so there we have changed
policy at this institution in multiple ways
um and usually it takes it's a matrix approach
you need the stories you need the policy shifts you need the champions
you need the water carriers you need the folks who are willing to stand up there
and be completely reasonable and look nuts
because then the rest of us who don't look nuts say the exact same thing
but you know all of us need to partner in terms of getting that kind of thing
done and it's frustratingly slow it is very slow and as i said before you
know there's so many tendrils to which this
this project is associated the textbooks piece which as i mentioned
before is is all the general assembly cares about
um the uh the promotions promotion to tenure the commitments
we've made institutionally that we still are evolving into fully embracing
to really embrace cross trans
multi-disciplinary work whatever all the other flavors are that we want to do
i mean this this open access work is a pillar could really i mean is
phenomenal in terms of the integration of disciplinary work and scholarship
across um all different kinds of disciplines so
it's not easy we can do it we have practice at this
institution we have experience in making significant institutional change
and sustaining it um and it it takes a while and it takes policy
programs services education champions it takes all of it
um to make it work and it takes cultural shift
because we're we're inviting ourselves to think of ourselves as
scholars in a completely counter-intuitive way
we grow ourselves you understand that right we we train ourselves as graduate
students and as faculty members to be acculturated to this very siloed
um oh you're not really a psychologist because you're really hanging out with
those economists and oh man we can't have that right
we do this to ourselves um and then we institutionalize it in
promotion and tenure and rewards and who gets to publish in what journal
and how many points does it count and all that business
um i think it's undoable i really do i do think this can be
um blown up i think you are going to be the beneficiaries of your hard work
and your commitment to to openness broadly okay
i'm done preaching for now so you said you feel like it's undoable
what do you what is undoable like it can't be done or it
no i think it can be uh uh what's the word i'm looking for deconstruction
how's that for the protectiveness yeah
thank you yes
i know we can there is that did i reframe that properly
thank you and i wonder about i'll be uh that was how do you follow that but i
would just add one other quick thing to that i wonder too again getting back to
this idea of kind of incremental change somebody
earlier i don't know if you said it directly or not said something about
maybe oer sort of the easier route i think
that may be sort of true i think you know particularly at our
research intensive institutions that feels a little less threatening you
know let's have this conversation first you write about the amount of the
lunatics but if we can start to plant the seed
i'm i'm sneaky right this is what they hired
me to do right i'm not leaving her in maryland um
although this is making me feel like i'm back at lehigh this conversation
um you know i i like to look for ways we can hide the broccoli in the mashed
potatoes and you know this is one of those things
i think if we can begin the discussion at the oer level that may
open up some other opportunities i would agree completely
and what the what the creating materials
uh for again i'm i'm attuned for better and for worse
to our public officials in enrichment right which is to whom our board of
visitors our trustees are are focused in that direction for
better and for worse right so the that group of people can be an
ally inadvertent as they may be they don't
they don't really fully embrace the revolution don't kid yourselves for one
second but they do want textbooks to be as free
as possible for our undergraduate students
so awesome reel them in use the legislation that's getting
passed that the governor might sign all of this as a total hold
in moving things forward so it is super incremental um i
the there was legislation that was passed a year ago
the general assembly session that basically reiterated a policy that's in
the code of region in the laws of virginia that's been there forever
well not ever but a long time there was about
how faculty do textbooks and if you needed to look at it look it up it's in
the faculty handbook chapter first and they made an addition
to it they gave the institutions autonomy
to create their own to create and adopt their own guidelines this is huge
because usually they prefer to tell us what to do
and how to do it i'm serious about that this is not so i read those three words
in that code of virginia and i'm like awesome we don't have to take that to
the board we don't have to take that back to the
general assembly they're not going to approve
how we choose to embrace what anina wants all of us to do
and so the question is a shaping of the strategy
getting the correct people and projects and stories
aligned around the ultimate goal and i absolutely think that can happen i'm
champing at the bit can you tell me anita has converted me over here so we
have we have four minutes and um
i'd love to hear from i guess all of you students um audience panel
um any final comments
well let me start by expressing my gratitude and
thankfulness for all of your efforting from being open access
um because i'm an international student uh
and i graduated i did my bachelor's and master's from institution and we did not
have journal access so i remember using
one of google game so um so if the open access thing
is um possible then i cannot imagine how tremendous the benefit is
going to be for students like me who came from other
parts of the world so it's not just paying the fee to the journal by
publishing my articles but it's just again helping
everyone ah and what i was just wanting to say
is more like a comment and it's about research data
so in my discipline which is agricultural economics
we when we publish our research paper in a journal
or something in journal so we also have data set that we
use and also the coding uh soft coding for the softwares that we use
um so that makes sense and i definitely i would like to do that but
um how i get the data is by doing a survey
and to contact the on the one-year survey
we had to spend uh fourteen thousand dollars and
it's excluding my uh travel expenses and uh exp uh portal and other uh
living expenses in that place so i'm using three years of data and two other
students has collected that data so it will be more
like at least 30 000 or more than that so that's expensive i did not pay a
single dollar so i'm happy to share the data but if my
professor does not want to do that then that kind of makes sense as an
economist i understand
okay there is another thing so i'm working on a project with one of the
professors so we are using publicly available nih
data and then um we are merging it with
medicare data so those are publicly they so we are paying lots of money for
that and according to them we need to
properly store the data and we will be able to share with the public because
they have sensitive data even though they don't have the names of
the individuals they can
get some information when they access the particular service provider and
those kinds of things so even if we want we will only be able
to publish the article not the data so i mean in that
case it's not about really not being in in sharing the data
but rather it's about the policies and those kinds of
things
thank you
um i mean on the last comment yes that's a problem and it will always exist
because right we respect our research and
privacy and we want to put that first and foremost
as far as the economics of sharing data when it could be
shared though i i always go back to like you spent so much time and money
collecting this data don't you want it to be as valuable as
possible and for it to be as valuable as possible
more people need to use it and there are so many questions that could
be asked with a rich data set the odds of someone scooping the exact one you're
answering are so low that
that it becomes moved very often well if i were to take the decision i
would have been happy to share the data because more people are going to say oh
she has done some work and that will make me very happy
but i don't have the authority to make the decisions
you will someday though yes we're counting on you
while you're in this class you will be the change
that's right no pressure
everybody along those lines uh but i think
something that i said depending on the funding agency are sensitive some are
not sensitive so i think we need to take considerations
okay thank you for your participation all of you all of you who've asked
questions and given comments and and raised issues
thank you um to each of the panelists for being
here um this is really interesting and i think this is a really
fruitful thought-provoking kind of conversation so
please please reach out to us if you want to talk further
we're here because we value learning and we value scholarship
and we'd love to talk with you so this concludes our event and we just
want to say thank you to the panelists and i'll send you
you