Welcome everyone. Thank you for coming to
tonight's event. I think it's going to be a really good event. I’m Rachel Miles, and I’m going to be
heading up the event and moderating and Doing part of the presentations tonight, and we also have
some people joining us. I’m going to put the link to the presentation slides to everybody first,
And everyone can open those, and you can go through them yourselves,
or just feel free to follow along.
I’m going to go ahead and start sharing my screen. Um just a minute here. I want to go
over some housekeeping rules before we really get started though just to cover some basics
about how we're going to proceed in the event. If you do have questions for any of the panelists,
so that includes myself, or a presenter um just to put that in the Q&A function
rather than the chat. So we encourage you to write your questions as you come up with them, rather
than writing them at the end of a presentation, because otherwise they might suddenly populate um
and it might be more difficult to get to all the questions in that manner. So we - you might not
have your question answered immediately. We'll probably wait till the end of each section to
kind of go over some questions, but just to go ahead and write those in as you think of them.
You can still use the chat features, so it's going to be there mainly for two reasons: so if you want
to send a - if you're having any technical issue with zoom webinar - to just send a direct message
uh to Jordan Kuneyl, he's going to be our tech support during the webinar, so you should be
able to see him in the - if you click on the Drop down menu of uh where you - above where you typed
your message, you should see him listed there - and there - he just said hello to everyone.
All right and we might have some trouble with people logging in, so let's give everybody a
minute. I will go through some of these uh - the rest of the housekeeping rules, though uh you can
still use the chat to also talk amongst yourselves if you want to. I know that we don't get to have
that kind of chatty nature when we're um sitting on a webinar or a zoom event of some kind,
so feel free to use that well as well, but you can also use the hashtag if you want to discuss openly
on Twitter about things that you're listening to: #PFPOpen2020. Um the event is being recorded,
and we will send the link out to Karen uh to Doc- sorry to - Dean DePauw uh so that she can send it
to you all. It'll be uploaded to VTechWorks, Virginia Tech's institutional repository.
Um and we'd have somebody saying we cannot send a direct message to you. Jordan okay you can
send a question - can you send a question to all panelists. I’m assuming that might be an option,
and if that's the option, then go ahead and just send to all panelists, so apologize for that.
You should be able to send a question to all panelists, and Jordan will be able to take
care of that. And lastly we want uh we are starting to do things where we're given a
land acknowledgement when we hold a public event, and so this land acknowledgement was provided
by the American Indian and Indigenous Community Center at Virginia Tech,
and so this is a real brief statement: "we acknowledge the Tutelo and Monacan
people who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and live and
recognize their continuing connection to the land water and air that Virginia Tech consumes.
We pay respect to the Tutelo/Monican nations and to their elders past present and emerging."
Okay.
All right, so Dean DePauw, do you see most people logged in now?
Um yes um they're getting - it's getting close, um because I know there's some people who are
attending that aren't uh in my class as well. You might want to mention that the participants
are not video or audio. Oh yes, thank you, because that's - that's in the in the chat. Um
okay, thank you for putting that out. uh yeah so I’m - I’m having a couple other people monitor
the chat in the Q&A, since I’m Doing a lot of the moderating and presenting, so in case
I don't get to your question immediately that is probably why I’ll make sure this one of my
other panelists um gets to that for you and not the faculty panelists. So you don't have to have
that responsibility, so don't worry about that um we - if you do want to ask a question like
Dean DePauw said, you know use that Q&A function or talk amongst yourself in the chat. You will
since this is a zoom webinar and not a regular zoom meeting you won't be able to speak audio
or speak you know or show video, so make sure to just remember that and keep discussing things.
Okay, and we have them also watching email for any students that might have it be having issues
I keep saying the number of participants go up so that's also good yeah and Abram is monitoring it
so we're you know we're you know we're - we're pretty close. I think to um having just about
everybody, but and - and maybe you've said the q a and just remind people that that's at the bottom
across the and the questions are open answered and dismissed questions so they should put it in
if they have questions to put it in there or
chat but um we can keep track of them yeah in that way so okay
Okay so are there any questions before we do get started?
Just about any of those technical aspects or how to ask a question, when to ask questions,
which you can ask a question at any point. It just won't get answered right away.
Yes, and Jordan did say that be aware that if you need closed
captioning, it is available at the bottom so you should be able to toggle to the more,
and at the bottom and say “Show sub – subtitles,” I believe.
All right I will go ahead and pull out the slides and start sharing my screen
So I want to make sure -
Okay that's better.
All right, so again, this is Open Access Week, and this is in October every year,
so we're really happy to be able to share knowledge about what we know about Open
Access Week. We have a variety of people that are going to come here and talk about this, have a
really lively discussion. We usually always have a really liked lively discussion at these events.
So first off um - again you should have access to the slides. It's a bitly link,
so in case you missed that in the chat it's bitly slash pf open 2020.
We have a hashtag you can use for just tonight's event, so hashtag pfpopen2020 you
can also optionally use the OAWeek2020 hashtag, so that'll be for anything Open Access this week.
okay all right so agenda so we're going to do an overview of the opens we'll start with Open Access
that's kind of the the big one and it's synonymous with open research and open science a lot of times
and we're going to talk about Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Data, and then we'll move
on to why Open matters and sort of the barriers to open that still exist and then we'll do a guided
discussion with the panelists which will go about 20 minutes and then we'll do a more conversational
style q a as much as can be possible in a zoom webinar uh discussion and we hope that you will be
able to interact and feel free to interact and ask questions there's no such thing as a dumb question
or a bad question um there's things that some people might be wondering about that maybe they're
too afraid to ask so I do encourage you to ask questions as much as as possible okay there again
are the slides and the hashtags in case you missed them and they will have the slides linked up
on most of these slides as we go through do you want to take a minute to introduce some
of the panelists so we have Jonathan Briganti he's the data bridge manager in the library
and we have Karen DePauw she's the dean of the graduate school which I’m sure you all know
Kayla McNabb and I should say Jonathan is going to talk about open data Kayla McNabb is going to
talk about open education and she's the head of instructional content and design in the libraries
and then myself Rachel miles I’m the research impact librarian in the library and I’m going
to talk about Open Access and also why open matters and the barriers to open and I’m
going to talk about academic incentives and how this all rolls into it we also have our faculty
panelists and we're really grateful that they were able to come join us and give us some other time
tonight uh Derek Mueller or Moeller I’m sorry if I mispronounced that last name he's an associate
professor in the department of English and Siddhartha Roy and hopefully I got that name
right as well he's a postdoctoral associate in civil environmental engineering and finally Venkat
Sridhar who goes by Sri he's an associate professor in biological systems engineering
all right so let's begin with the overview of the opens now there are a lot of opens um
we have Open Access which I’m going to talk about here in a little bit
we also have something called open citations which I will briefly uh go over open data open ed
open research open science open source so you probably hear a lot of different opens and you're
probably scratching your head thinking what is the difference between all of these so we want
to kind of give you an overview so you understand some of the basic terminology and differences so
we're going to begin with Open Access so Open Access is often used in conjunction with open
research and open science Open Access can be Open Access to just about anything and it has a lot of
has a blanketed kind of meaning to what it means and what it entails and so different
people are going to give you different slightly different definitions open research is more
specific to research so Open Access can apply to other types of scholarship that wouldn't be
actually necessarily called research especially in the humanities and then open science obviously is
more specific to the sciences so um it just kind of depends on what field you're coming from and
what term might be more appropriate for your field but they are kind of used synonymously with each
other so this is a definition from Peter Suber he's kind of considered um the guru if you will
of Open Access he wrote a book in 2012 called Open Access and this is his definition it's digital
online free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions so anybody in the world
with an internet connection connection can access it the copyright restrictions restrictions and
licensing Kayla is going to talk about more in detail later but just to give you a quick little
uh snapshot of what that is is creative commons licenses you might may already know what these
are you may have already seen them this is the basic one I have an image of right there cc
by so that means that if you see that on a work any type of work it means that you only have to
give attribution to the creator or creators in order to use the work in any way you would like
and she'll give you some more details of that as we move through open ed
so why Open Access why do we have it why did it emerge in the first place
so one of the main problems with research and scholarship around the world is that many lack
access research so we are actually in a very privileged position in a research institution
especially in the developed nation uh in an institution that has you know comparably a lot of
resources compared to a lot of institutions around the world so especially colleagues internationally
in other countries don't always have access or they have access to very little taxpayers who may
want to use it for different reasons or perhaps to look up research for any type of disease or
ailment they might have and they want to look at the research on it and then they constantly hit
what are called pay walls can be very frustrating for them especially since taxpayer dollars go to
support the research done at public institutions we also have government policy makers who would
obviously need access to research in order to support the reasons why they are proposing policy
and non-governmental organizations for any number of reasons scholarly values uh this is sometimes
maybe a bit obvious to people but I think that this needs to be emphasized that
in order to build upon knowledge you know in any field you really need to have
access to past knowledge that has been created and shown and so forth
so this really helps us to more quickly advance any type of field or knowledge
and this does benefit authors in its own way when we especially when we think about
uh career advancement so for example Open Access has a citation advantage
and what's called alt metric advantage so with citations and with altmetrics which alt metrics
summarize you do a whole presentation just on them uh they are measuring the volume
of online attention to research so for example news media public policy documents
social media the open syllab syllabI project syllabus project um Wikipedia YouTube anytime
research gets cited in these non-academic outlets there's an attention uh that gets us
sorry attributed to it and part of the reason we believe we don't know for sure because
causation really hasn't been determined but we believe that there's these advantages is because
there's more visibility more people have access and so it's easier for them to cite it and read
it and so forth it also facilitates all sorts of other uses one of them being that you can do a lot
of text and data mining for example so a lot of people in my own field they're actually studying
the constructs of academic fields and they use a lot of text and data mining to understand
how these fields are constructed and understand how research advances
there's also reasons for using it for teaching and especially researchers and just instructors at
uh smaller institutions they don't have as much access to the subscription content that
we do at a large research institution such as Virginia Tech and they need to use these
articles and other research outputs to teach and a lot of times they don't have access
so there are some basic steps to how to make your work Open Access and if you do have questions
about this you can always reach out to me or somebody else on the panel we can always help you
with understanding how you can make this a reality in your own work so one way this is typically
sometimes described as gold Open Access there's different colors of Open Access that we that we
like to use to categorize the different types of Open Access and so you can publish Open Access
and that would could be in an Open Access journal could even be an open monograph that you publish
if you're in the humanities field uh one way to kind of vet uh an Open Access journal is to look
in one of these periodicals the directory of Open Access journals is probably the best source to
look at those you can also look at Ulrich’s it's a periodical directory but then you would also need
to limit it to peer-reviewed and then also put an Open Access filter on it because it looks at
journals across subscription and Open Access there's also a really useful tool called think
checks check submit that helps you go through the process of vetting an Open Access journal
now there are sometimes fees associated with Open Access publishing Open Access and they're called
article processing fees we do have an Open Access subvention fund at Virginia Tech and anybody who
is a Virginia Tech researcher can qualify for the fund to get an APC paid for of up to two
thousand dollars per year so for example if you publish something and then perhaps you want to
publish another one in the same year and there's another co-author who's also at Virginia Tech
you can potentially get two articles funded if you have those co-authors at Virginia Tech
there's also discounts that we have and you can click on that link to learn more about some of
those discounts sometimes uh researchers do get their APCs paid for by their grants
and sometimes they get them paid for by such funds that we that we run here at institutions
the next way to make your work Open Access is to do it yourself through archiving self-art
self-archiving and this is commonly referred to as green green Open Access and one of the things
that people do ask about a lot is well do I have the right to actually post or share my article
and typically you do around 82 percent of publishers allow some version of your manuscript
to be deposited into an Open Access repository or some other location so you want to check your
contract you want to find out what when and where um that's the best place to look for it you can
also check SHERPA/RoMEO which is a database just for publisher copyright con I’m sorry publisher
copyright policies and that will give you a lot of information about what you can and can't do
with your manuscript um so there's three different versions you have your submitted version you have
the accepted version after peer review and then you have that nicely formatted publisher's pdf uh
that you can the publisher typically doesn't allow that version to be archived but sometimes they do
and you can also negotiate so some people don't think that they can do this but this is something
you can definitely do I could done this before for when I’ve published in subscription access content
and basically uh made it so that the uh in what's called an embargo period wasn't as long
uh as they wanted it to be so the embargo period can be anywhere from six months to as long as 48
months uh just depending on the journal and the publisher and that embargo says that the full text
archive version is going to be locked down uh for a period of time until the embargo ends
uh we have also has an Open Access policy that is going to probably go into effect next fiscal
year starting July and that is actually going to expand and simplify Virginia Tech authors rights
um and we if you want more information I do have a video that I’ve created about how do you actually
share your work Open Access if it is published in a subscription access journal and I do see
a question on there that I will just briefly look at since it's my chat is open
we're looking at this style this green Open Access are you saying that the terms of some
non-Open Access publishers allow authors to post certain works on public aggregators
uncertain conditions um I think what you're asking is that do they allow them to post
the manuscript um under a certain kit yes that is correct sorry I had to read read that last
part again that's correct you publishers most publishers do allow the author to post some
version of the manuscript under certain conditions
and in a repository or some other location usually the repository is allowed because it's non-profit
so they'll have that language in there um let me just briefly go over hybrid journals and
then I’ll jump to I’m actually going to talk about about that next about those conditions
so this is a graph that I created by taking data out of the open APC initiative so
publishers and journals submit the APC amounts to this particular initiative and I pulled the data
out of it and compared what are called hybrid journals to fully Open Access journals so fully
Open Access journal is pretty straightforward everything in the journal is Open Access
immediately upon publication there might be an APC associated with it though and with hybrid
journals that means it's a subscription access journal but you can pay extra to make your article
Open Access in that subscription access journal so if somebody wants to find that article
they would and they didn't have access to that journal normally they would have access to your
article because you paid extra you paid this APC in this what is called a hybrid journal
um so we have we used to fund hybrid journals with our suspension fund but we no longer do that
and part of the reason for that is because uh well one you can see here just from this graph is that
the average APC in a hybrid journal is a lot higher than what it would be in an average
fully Open Access journal and the other reason is because the publishers who are Doing this
type of model are essentially what what libraries called double dipping so we are paying them for a
subscription and then we are also paying them for the Open Access fee and so they're getting a lot
of money for us for two different for access for everybody and also access just for the institution
and then talk a little bit about this Open Access journal investigation
uh thank you and he is posting some things in the chat for more information so again to qualify for
that subvention fund you have to it has to be in a fully Open Access journal and it must also
be indexed in the DOAJ the directory of Open Access journals or be a member of the OASPA the
Open Access scholarly publishing association or it has to comply with the OASPA code of contact
so there's three options there so if you don't find it that it's in the DOAJ there are some
other things that you can go through you can check to see if it's a member of OASPA then you could if
it's not then you could evaluate the journal based on their code of conduct and again if
you're really uncertain about this it does take a little bit of investigative work when you're going
through the journal's website you can always contact someone so they can help you out there
if the journal does not seem to be in compliance with the code of conduct you should probably move
on you can always reach out to us if you have questions but also just be on the lookout for
what are red flags uh when so-called predatory journals are trying to kind of spam your inbox uh
saying you have such great work you're a great fit I mean sometimes that is the case that they are
legitimate journals and they're interested in your work but a lot of times it's kind of predatory
in nature because they're trying to get an APC out of you and they'll publish almost anything
yes and thank you Anita everybody uh is eligible for the Open Access Subvention Fund.
so again where can you post your work after you publish it and you know that the journal does
allow for you to for example uh post the accepted manuscript and the accepted manuscript is that
version of your manuscript that goes through peer review and so it's gone through all the revisions
after the peer review process and you can take that that manuscript and you can post it somewhere
um so it's going to look kind of like a word document or a pdf that doesn't have a lot of
fancy formatting from the publisher and you can take that manuscript and you can
put it into VTechWorks that's our institutional repository uh you can register uh for an account
on VTechWorks and then you can email VTechWorks to get added to a community or a college collection
and then you can automatically start adding things to VTechWorks I should also emphasize
that you can also add things to VTechWorks that are not publications so for example I put my
presentation slides and VTechWorks after I present at a conference in my field it's really common to
do that in library science might not be as common in your field but you could still do it it could
also help you to build a portfolio and you know kind of showcase who you are and your career
you can also post them to disciplinary repositories and pre-print repositories
so here's some examples of some pre-print pre-print repositories archive.org was the first
pre-print repository it's been around for I think more than 20 years now more yeah than 25 years and
it was mainly a physics archive and it has a lot more disciplines in it now
you could also post it to your own website but I would just caution you that when you
put it on your website this is not a bad thing necessarily but it also means that it's not
going to get the preservation and everybody who works we have a whole team of people that work
at the library who helped to keep VTechWorks VTechWorks running smoothly and they preserve
the content they update the technology and they make sure it's preserved long term decades if not
even centuries your website's not going to do that for you I would say go ahead and you know
put it on your website or put a link to the repository item on your website uh but try
to put it into a repository as well if you put it on your website commercial quote repositories I I
don't really like to call these repositories but in a sense they kind of are because it is easy to
find them but they don't guarantee preservation digital preservation of your work and so they're
more like social academic networks ResearchGate and academia.edu are the most well-known ones
but your policy or your contract may say you can't post something on a commercial repository which
would include those two I uh those two entities so look for that language and you know put it on
a repository if you do use ResearchGate you could always link to the repository link and that would
also be okay in compliance with policy um some of the benefits of putting your work in a repository
is it has this visibility advantage so it's more likely to get picked up on google scholar
people will find it they'll be able to cite it and save it it also gets picked up on what's called
Unpaywall it's a nice little browser extension that you can install there's a link here to it and
when you're on a subscription article and there's an Open Access version it'll turn green and then
I’ll have a link to that Open Access article and this is kind of the formula that I’ve created for
talking about how do you get the most visibility for yourself and your work I just talked about
this piece today the sharing Open Access but you also want to look into getting an ORCID id
and your own uh different academic profiles like google scholar and the promoting that work in some
manner such as on social media and there's some other tools out there you can use so we kind of
uh shifted the question from how do I increase the impact of my work to how do I increase the
visibility visibility has an impact advantage and no matter how much visibility you have it still
has to be high quality in order to have an impact advantage so high quality high visibility um plus
some promotion plus some online profiles you know that's going to give you uh the the most for that
okay and we do have some questions so before we go on to OER I will see if there is
uh let's see somebody is asking why why is research gate considered commercial it's owned by
a company ResearchGate is a company so it's like it's basically kind of like Facebook or
twitter but for academics it's it's solely for academics so it's a profit company they
they sell your data and they use your data you don't have a lot of privacy on there
so there's issues with that um as well as it being a profit for-profit server they actually got
threatened to be sued by Elsevier and because of that they had to take down a lot of papers
and that's the other thing about ResearchGate and other platforms out there is they can take down
your work without notifying you because of you know copyright notices and things like that the
publisher can say this is in violation and they'll go through and just take down a bunch of work
and that's the only place you have it then it's just going to be gone
um is Virginia Tech blog a permanent platform for Virginia Tech students or removes the blogs
after the graduation no it is permanent so VTechWorks is permanent even after
you um graduate it will always be there forever the blog is different than v-tech works though
okay are you asking about v-tech works of the blog the VT open blog
you can put that in the chat if you'd
like open blog do you know Kayla I don't know too much about the open blog I don't believe
that access to that persists um but I would I would look into that uh it will if you put
something in the repository it will continue to be in the repository though okay thank you thank you
for clarifying gala sure okay and last question we have when you put a manuscript in an archive
is the citation for that manuscript the citation for the article published in the subscription
journal so if someone accesses your manuscript for free they can they still cite the official
version of New York the answer is yes so part of the um the metadata that's provided on b
tech works it'll provide a citation and it's the proper citation it links to the digital object
identifier the DOI and the other thing about it is that even if they do accidentally put the
um the repository handle rather than DOI is that the metrics actually merge together the DOI
and the handle um because of the way the metadata works they merge together and they get tracked
together so it doesn't matter how excited it will get counted I’m gonna turn it over
to Kayla uh thank you so much for listening to this portion awesome thank you very much
um so next we're gonna talk a little bit about open educational resources uh hit that slide
for me if you would Rachel um so there is significant overlap uh between these two um
there we go so OER is generally related to teaching and learning whereas Open Access is more
commonly related to research and research based activities we'll dive into that a little bit more
but OER are often Open Access so it's definitely understandable if there's a little bit of
confusion here right um so you can find out more about this if you would hit that last bullet point
for me um there is a handout that our colleague Anita walls created last year differentiating
between Open Access and open educational resources which is in our repository and you can use that
link on this slide to access that full handout and we'll talk a little bit about a few thank you and
Anita just shared it in the chat we'll talk a little bit about a few of the aspects of that
as we continue on here as well so what are OERs they're freely available and typically online
though they may include some cost so printing and shipping a physical object still costs money
uh so that would typically be the only cost associated with an OER they are openly licensed
however that's an important component and that allows for as much as possible of the read reuse
revise retain remix and redistribute all of the r's and we'll talk a little bit about those more
in a moment as we get into some of the aspects of the creative commons licensing that Rachel
mentioned a moment ago so these are created for educational purposes like I said so that
involves lots of different types of formats but it's all for supporting teaching and learning so
formats might include textbooks might include videos handouts might also include software
that could be used for supporting say quizzing or something like that so it kind of has a broad
sense of format there but really supporting those educational reasons and if we compare the two then
let's start with how they're dissimilar so oa materials are scholarly outputs
and I air quote that because there's still a lot of overlap but they're really there to
share some new knowledge continue a scholarly conversation within a field the goal of those
resources is that sort of continuation of the scholarly conversation so they're still similar
in that you have that availability question that we brought up a moment ago so they're always free
and they're accessible without any sort of restriction which means they're not behind a
paywall it doesn't require any sort of login to get access to either OER or Open Access
licensing which we'll dive into more in a moment could be public domain or cc0 so public domain
not actually a license but a more of a characteristic here but that means
that you would be able to use it as you saw fit without even giving any sort of attribution um
but most often I would think creative commons is the type of licensing that you'll see
and there are several different variations on that that we'll talk about next so
this seems like a lot we'll go through it step by step so public domain and cc0 like we just
talked about open educational resources and Open Access materials could have those permissions
or licensing level next is that creative commons attribution license that Rachel mentioned so that
is kind of um if we if we can't have public domain or cc0 that's really our gold standard
all we have to do is say who made that original piece um next we have share alike so attribution
share alike that means you have to say who created that original piece but you also have to use the
same type of license so if I create something and release it with a cc by sa license and you
want to make changes to it and then share it as well you would also have to use that same license
the next one we have here is attribution non-commercial so in this instance it's most
important to the creator that that resource not be used for any sort of commercial means
where you might be able to make money off of it if you want to take it change it
build a whole new thing based on it you can do that as long as you're not
selling it and intending to make money off of it and then the last one here that still falls
within that open educational resources section is combining the share alike and the non-commercial
so that's where it's the least restrictive of these OER options but if you're very
if you're concerned with folks taking your work and adapting it in such a way that they would
make a lot of money off of it then it might be important to you to use that as the license as we
move into the last set here that are Open Access but are not strictly speaking open educational
resource uh license we've got no derivatives so no derivatives means you can't make a change to it um
so if we have a work that has this no derivatives I could make copies of it I could share it to my
heart's content but I can't make any changes to it and then the attribution non-commercial no
derivatives means I can't make changes to it and I can't make any money off of it um I don't uh
I don't know I guess the no derivatives you could sell potentially right there's a little
bit of wiggle room there um and so these last few those two and then something being under copyright
but being available for free online um are all still considered within the realm of Open Access
but because they don't give the user the options to remix and then depending on the other option
redistribute they are not going to fall within the realm of open educational resources even if
they're for educational purposes so that's a lot of information the next slide we have here kind
of sets up this as a sliding scale so we've got from the most open cc0 you don't even have to say
where you got it or who made it all the way down to attribution non-commercial and no derivatives
so to kind of visualize that and then these are those
icons that you'll see on the different works that you encounter as kind of a bit of a reference
so what about using OER so we've talked about kind of what's behind it um what if we want to use it
all of these licenses still allow for fair use for your teaching so I would definitely encourage
you to familiarize yourself with fair use a lot of times we have workshops and things like that
on fair use offered through the library throughout the year there's information about fair use
on our LibGuides so I really encourage you to think about that as you develop as an educator
but also check any resources that you find to determine what the license permits
so we talked about these cc licenses and all of them require attribution so you at least know that
you're going to need to do that but depending on those other variations you may have other things
that you need to keep in mind and you want to know your 5rs so reuse revise retain remix redistribute
are those kind of key components of OER if you can't do those things with whatever video or
book chapter or what have you then it's not actually adhering to OER and
like it says here less restrictive is better so we'll see in the examples I have here in a moment
on the platform that the library has for sharing teaching and learning resources
particularly related to the digital literacies initiative and Doing research at the university
we use the cc by license because that allows for the most flexibility so that's something to kind
of keep in mind as well finding OER there are lots and lots of resources but here are just a
few for you to get started for learning objects for lesson plans for syllabI that sort of thing
I’ve got links here to OER commons the odyssey learning object repository is that repository
that I was talking about that we um put things into from the library particularly related to
basics of Doing research and then things associated with the different components
of the digital literacy curriculum and then MIT Open Courseware so MIT Open Courseware
has been around for a long time they've been putting a lot of really diverse sets
of resources out there so that's a great place to go to look and see what OER can look like
and then we have a couple of options specifically for textbooks so textbooks are a really high
impact way to use OER OpenStacks in the open textbook library that we have listed here
give you a lot of different options you could go there and I would encourage you to see if
there are textbooks that are available within your discipline that you might be interested in
using or remixing as well we'll talk and talking about creating OER we'll talk about an instance
where that happened so there's a lot more details about this um available in the VT news
and available through some different things but remixing a textbook with business faculty was a
project that our colleague Anita took on several years ago at this point and it's been through
a few editions with a newly updated edition coming out this year it is cc by ncsa and it's
based um it's based on a textbook they remixed from um let's see I think about 50 the last I saw
is uh is remixed material so they took a lot of what was already there they made it
updated and better to fit the context and it is free in digital format or at the cost of printing
and shipping if someone wanted a physical copy and it's a book that's being used in a lot of
foundational classes on our campus but also across the country and throughout the world we have
really substantial download numbers on that which is very exciting
and then another example about creating OER is a collaboration with vetMed to create virtual
learning models so as folks are learning how to do veterinary medicine it's very helpful if they have
as much information as possible before they're in the room with the dog or the cow right and so
thinking through that and deciding that it would be really useful for them to be able to
visualize this led to a project where some folks have modeled a dog and a cow in vr and allowed
the students to um to view that to be able to kind of see the component parts before they
get in there with the live animals necessarily so just a couple of examples about creating
and to wrap this up I want to uh kind of through throw another couple of opens in the mix because
we didn't have enough opens already open education does reach beyond open educational resources
one thing that you may have heard one term open pedagogy
is kind of a foundational piece of teaching practice and a couple of key components I’ve
got listed here students take part in creating and sharing open resources so an example of that that
we've talked about before and then I’d be happy to answer questions more questions about is one
where there were some students in an instructional design class who contributed to project management
for instructional designers book so they went and they did this research they composed these pieces
and then another students collect cc0 literature and write supporting text so the open anthology
of early American literature was compiled by a class of a teacher on our campus in the English
department actually and having the students work with those original texts and have to create
that supporting material to knit these different pieces of cc zero literature together was helpful
for their learning process and also created a resource that others could use and then that's
related to this kind of broader concept as well of open educational practices so these are practices
that are impactful and they create non-disposable assignments so these are assignments that are
ideally something that's going to be shared beyond an instructor and will have some sort of impact
at the very least on the learner but also ideally on the world beyond them and they invite students
to play an active role in their learning so that could be um the directionality of it
that could be where they really find interest and where they want to dive in it could be
that they are pushing for investigating something so it's kind of more conceptual at that point
and with that I will pause for just a moment to see if there are any questions Anita is sharing
the resources about the fundamentals of business textbook that's a great article in the VT news
that I would really encourage you to look at if you want to learn more about that project
and press books yes there's a question about press books uh so press books is um
I guess we're in the process of rolling out broader access to press books
uh and pressbooks is a platform upon which you can build an open book so it could be a textbook
could be a workbook it could be a monograph but it is yes and Anita just shared the link to that
and I would I would certainly welcome any additional questions that we have about that
um as we get into that portion but that is something that we I believe
anticipate offering more kind of specific workshops on and things as the year continues
all right thank you so much Kayla and if you do think of a question for any of us
throughout and you are afraid to put it in the q a you can go ahead and put that in
throughout any time of this event it doesn't have to be while one of us is speaking so
with that I’m going to turn it over to Jonathan Briganti and he's going to talk about open data
all right hey everybody uh so I am a data scientist uh you can go to next slide Rachel
so to me data is everything there has been the prevailing opinion over the last couple of decades
that if you have data you should collect as much as you physically can store it as long
as possible and one day hope that it will become useful as the commercial applications for data and
the actual value that's been applied we have me seen more data than ever and human history being
collected on human behavior however that data is now spread across a lot of different entities in
a lot of different countries and that ends up with ownership that is really disparate which prevents
universally accessible data to outside entities so typically when you access data on the web
you can go next slide Rachel when you access our data you'll get that big caveat of of course you
can access the data download as much of it as you want however you have to promise that you'll
follow their exact rules which can be really archaic and hard to find and if any of those
rules change or you break it you are removed from the data so typically with non-open data we see
common restrictions uh the first and primary of being that because it is only available for
non-commercial use that means that you have to use your data for an academic or just personal
interest project and if you find any sort of correlation or trend or really cool algorithm
unfortunately you cannot push that data and try and make a company or business or sell whatever
you've discovered with it also you're infrequently allowed to share the data so if I download huge
amounts of google trends data and someone else wants to replicate results I’ve made with that
they are supposed to go back to google trends themselves and get a new download of that data
I cannot share what I have discovered from that company additionally we also see that there's
limited allowed uses and modified data meaning that we can only do specific things with different
companies data and that changes per company and we're almost always getting modified data
from the raw output now sometimes that's because they have sensitive information they're pulling
but primarily that's because they're trying to remove anything that they think is proprietary
information or pieces of information that might become commercially viable later
and as I mentioned earlier the rules are going to change really at any sort of time and you have to
be ready to quickly jump on that and change your process with it looking at twitter API
for an example if you had a research project where you or your pI wanted to access twitter
data you would have to start that project by reading through seven full legal documents
solely for developers alone and then 55 plus on most recent counting legal documents specifically
for the average twitter user so you can figure out if your research project falls within what
twitter allows you to do and also if you break a rule you're banned most recently the date
the twitter API regulation was changed in march but before that it was changed again
in November so this changes really frequently and then within this specific example of twitter
you cannot infer demographics store location data or the big one you can't connect it with outside
data assets that means you're taking this really small amount of data you're getting from twitter
and you can't do anything else with it I can't connect that with google or Facebook or YouTube
demographic information to try and pull things out and not being able to infer demographics
or store location data of a tweet means we can do basic analysis of twitter like the average
twitter user posts this many characters in a tweet they post this time a day about this type of topic
but I can't take that one next step further that would be extremely interesting like how does one
specific group of people feel about covet 19 if we have the super bowl how do we see uh tweets about
the super bowl break up by different demographics it's really limited and that limitation changes
per company and that's where Open Access data comes in the definition I like best is that
Open Access data is publicly available data that can be universally and readily accessed used and
redistributed free of charge it's structured for usability and computability in super short summary
that just means you can do whatever you want with the data no matter who you are and you can try and
sell it if you find something really interesting with it however there are some requirements to
make open data useful and actually make it so it can be accessed by the largest group the first of
which is it has to be legally open data that means that it must be reusable you can do whatever you
want you can modify it you can reproduce their results you can derive new data with it and
then you can take those and you can actually distribute it to the widest audience you want
so with open data you're allowed to distribute this uh Rachel next little pill thing uh you can
distribute your data and sell or share your work and selling is the real big thing here if you're
able to combine different data sets from different government agencies or different universities open
data portals and find a new correlation or trend or some really cool algorithm you can
package that together and actually sell it which introduces a lot of opportunities I’ll talk about
and finally open data has to have universal access that means there is no discrimination against a
specific group of people specific countries or fields of research or topic they can't tell you
you cannot use this data for so and so you can do whatever you want with it no matter who you are
most frequently we see cc0 as Kayla talked about earlier in smaller entities and research labs
which I just wanted to touch on that it's a really quick way you as a researcher you as
your research lab can really waive your copyrights and say this is as much in the public domain as I
can possibly put it I’m trying to make this as accessible as possible and it's it's a accepted
and standardized way to do that that people will understand what your cc0 means and it's it's not
that difficult to apply um and next slide please with universal Open Access data even if we have
it legally open we want it to actually be usable data I put this in the bubbly Venn diagram thing
because each Open Access data that you find is going to have a different contrib - distribution
of these and different focuses of what they think is important but one of the key features
that's necessary is having purpose towards your data we really don't want to see uh next little
thing Rachel please we need to see that data has a reason to exist and what we mean by that is we
don't want to see that people are just posting spreadsheet after spreadsheet of random data
that they think might be relevant without any clear reason for why that data is being uploaded
a purpose of what it's actually Doing or a problem it's trying to solve at that point we're just kind
of adding more noise and not actually making relevant data that researchers can access
and pull uh relevant pieces out with that we also need policies with our data so that covers
a wide gambit like data preservation policies data curation policies and frequency of uploading but
also metrics of success so whatever the government agency is or non-profit that's uploading this data
how frequently they must upload it what is or isn't considered good data how should that data
be structured and without these policies we see that data can get really messy and different
people can upload different ways of formatting the data and over time things can get more and more
difficult to parse together something that makes these policies a lot better is having partnerships
and these partnerships are different government agencies different non-profits or college
institutions that will actually help curate and post this data so Virginia Tech contributes a
lot of Open Access data there's the oceanic agency that helps uh publish a lot of weather data that's
available these partnerships help coal curate and collate this data to make it as accessible
as possible and also help make it more timely and remove some of the burden from the government
agencies that might be required to post this uh frequently and finally in my biggest old bubble
is the public infrastructure and by this I mean the website that it's being hosted on so if you
have universally accessible data that website better be available for anyone in the world
be able to download data at a pretty decent speed even if there's tons of users on it follow as many
accessibility guidelines as possible so it's not cut out if someone has a specific accessibility
concern as well but also with that advocacy towards this we really need open data champions
to continue to push why this is important and if we don't have that advocacy on that public
infrastructure for we need to keep spending money towards this we need to keep dedicating resources
we can lose interest in whatever the topic is and things can end up falling by the wayside
the final piece that you need to have open data is to be technically open now to start
understanding what technically open is you typically need to understand who your intended
audience for the data is so that's developing personas of who you expect to access this data
how you expect them to access it and what they're going to do with it you need to know that so you
can set up how accessible your data needs to be if we have data that's going to be a next little pill
thing whatever we call this cylinder with having data for as many audiences as possible we need
to understand what is our audience's familiarity with computers with programming with spreadsheets
and with analysis if we're intending this to be open data that's accessible to any citizen
in the world we're probably not going to want to put it in an API where they have to download
a relational database and then do python data cleaning processing that makes it no longer open
however if we're developing data solely for developers we think they're going to take
large streams of data that's constantly flowing in and connect it to their own tool at that point
we would want an API and that public tool where they're going to have graphs on the page and help
you filter through the data is now going to be a hindrance so you need to understand who your
audience is and what they're expecting out of your data finally to be technically open we want
non-proprietary files I cannot tell y'all how many times I’ve seen open data that is an excel file
which means the data is open for anyone in the world but you need to buy this Microsoft product
or some type of conversion tool where you're going to lose pieces of information about your data
we always want to make sure open data is using the most open source file type possible so that
people can actually access this using free tools that are available and we can go next slide we see
a lot of benefits of open data the first being that it empowers citizens it allows for citizen
science to happen the more data I have the more I can say oh I think that's a problem I’m seeing
in America and actually go through government agencies try and download that and see if there
is a problem that exists and start advocating towards that that pushes towards it helps us solve
these public problems that are really sticky and large and you need lots of data for that
and having this open data that allows us to connect multiple different sources allows us
to define patterns that might not be visible within just one or two different data sources
and get a lot more people tackling this problem and Rachel can you go two bullets down now
thank you and with this we also see improved governance so we see improved governance from the
side of the more transparent a government is the more likely they're going to be held accountable
for their action and where resources are being spent and problems as well but also as we push
for open data we just see more structure of the data we see more data management practices being
existed over multiple government agencies we see standardization of government practices
or data practices excuse me across and this all culminates together towards creating that economic
opportunity I’ve talked about so as we have all this data people can say I think there's a problem
and then verify that it exists and then they can say I think I can help solve that I can turn this
into a business opportunity but on the flip side of that coin it also allows existing businesses
to see should I go open up in a new area if I am uber where should I try and get all of
my new Uber drivers in where is the most traffic congestion that I can potentially clear up we want
to have all this data so people can do as much as they can to start their own companies their own
businesses and push forward in uh innovation and entrepreneurship towards that and finally I wanted
to touch on reproducibility as I mentioned at the beginning I am a data scientist so to me validity
of results often stem from my own ability to replicate the work I often see statistics or data
graphs that appear and say that's really cool but I want to do it myself just to check when I don't
have open data I now must trust the good faith of Rachel you can go next bullet I must now trust the
good faith of whoever is presented that they have reduced their biases as much as possible they've
used the correct analysis they have a big enough data set and without open data it really becomes
a black box of research where people put some data in that I don't really know what it is
and they did analysis and they tell us the analysis but we have to assume they actually
applied it correctly and then all we see are the outputs that may or may not be moderated
having open data allows us to increase the transparency and integrity of a project and
when I see open data that just instinctively gives me some more trust towards that researcher
they have put enough scientific validity in their project they feel comfortable sharing every single
aspect so I can go fact check them across the board and I’ll leave you with the statement we
give to our undergrads on a very regular basis whenever you have data you should trust the
source but you should always verify and open data makes that possible and with that I’ll hand it off
okay thank you Jonathan it's very informative and we do have one question in the q a um I’ll let you
answer that but it says which browsers priorities open data and search
uh so I don't exactly know which browsers would do that but one of the biggest benefits I’ve
seen towards an open data search tool is recently I believe it was within this year
google released the google data set search tool it is
I can send the exact URL in the chat I have it pulled up expecting this question uh this tool
exists so you can specifically search google for sources that have data sites uh data sets about
whatever your topic is and what's really nice about this tool is it does specifically have a
filter for Open Access data and Open Access data within a specific year or a specific
file type so this has been the easiest way I’ve been able to find Open Access data sources
all right thank you
all right I don't see any other questions so I’m going to move on to why open matters but again
just uh go ahead and put your questions in q a as they come up even if a question comes up that
from something you heard in the beginning of the presentation and we will be sure to answer
that at some point I use the q a function for questions and use the chat function to talk
amongst yourselves or to send a message directly to the panelists especially for technical issues
and you can also use the hashtag pfpopen2020 if you'd like to discuss more things on twitter
alright so I’m going to go and talk about why open matters there's a lot of content here
so I might be going a little bit fast through this a lot of this is storytelling about how we got to
where we are why it became a problem and kind of the and then I’ll go into the barriers and what we
can do about it so first we're going to talk about sort of the obvious reasons of why it matters
there's serious threats to human life and health and this kind of became apparent uh during the
zika virus outbreak in 2016. and okay sorry I was looking at the chat and so they basically mandated
um some of the main like the world health organization I believe they can't really mandate
anything but uh publishers did sign on and made anything that was published about zika results
they made Open Access now recently with the pandemic it's become even more of an issue where
we have a lot more researchers now immediately posting on preprint servers their results um you
know going just not going through peer review and of course there are issues with not going through
peer reviews you all know but in the middle of a crisis it becomes really important to get results
out fast and uh the verification can actually come from new research that pops up so we're kind of
going through peer review um in the moment really in a crisis so there's a lot more information in
that link and it's in the ch it's in the notes section of the slides if you'd like to check
out any of the links that I have some of these articles throughout the slides they're going to
be in that um some of the other issues I’m going to talk a little bit more about uh the the threats
to human life and this also goes for any type of climate change research too the faster we can get
those results and the more people that have access to those uh the better uh right for any type of um
issue that faces humanity uh the other thing we need to talk about is unsustainable scholarship
so this has to do with the subscription model the business model that we could we have today
and that is kind of we're kind of you know we're kind of stepping away from now but why did this
become an issue and how did it become an issue so first of all if you have to understand that
in the after world war two if you want to go really really far back is that we had a huge boom
in funding to research and then even more so after sputnik and so we had a lot of research dollars
pouring in and a lot of scientists getting there's a lot more scientists a lot more PhDs
and there was more competition and the more um specific disciplines that would arise out of
that so you have a lot more subfields and so a lot more journals emerging and things like that and so
uh that it then becomes this issue where there's consolidation of research and the
societies can't actually sustain it any longer there's just too much so we have what's called
this print based journal model that has been going on since the 40s and then to the 90s
with the internet coming around it starts to change but with the print based model it's on
a journal by journal basis so libraries would pay the same price for every single journal and
in some cases the larger libraries would actually pay for a package and so they would say we'll give
you all these journals for this price then the internet emerges and we have online journals
and so publisher business models start to change and we have electronic resource licensing emerging
and so this doesn't seem so bad on the surface because we have a lot of other things that help us
with these what's called the big deals emerging the problem with the big deals and with you with
licensing and uh the non-disclosure agreements which just basically means that libraries can't
actually share any kind of information about the contracts that they sign with publishers
so Virginia Tech has no idea uh what UNC chapel hill pays for their subscriptions even though
they're paying for the same content in a lot of these cases um e-resourcing also
means that we don't own the content they give us they're basically renting it to it renting
it to us so think about this being a huge Netflix subscription and it gives access to everybody
uh for all the content in Netflix right but it's all academic content and it's all or nothing
so it's similar to that tv cable package deal and you get all or nothing so previously
you didn't have access to a lot of these different journals then you have these
huge discounts applied when you get a package so it's very attractive at first
they become more accessible especially for smaller institutions so they're able to get more content
for about the same price that they would for getting journal by journal subscriptions so it
seems like a good deal at first um and so in 2014 there was a study done they were able to obtain
records using state freedom of information acts from 360 contracts and so those non-disclosure
agreements uh were pretty much didn't the freedom of information act basically uh overrode the
non-disclosure agreements you can see here what research one research two and masters institutions
were paying for their content uh based on these big deal contracts and Elsevier is the
largest and we'll talk a little bit more about sphere as we go through this
now to visualize this I took the same data and put it in a graph because I like graphs and
I bet you can tell it makes a big difference when you can actually visualize this and how
much more uh were paying for example Elsevier compared to some of the other uh publishers
so why did it become unsustainable it seems such like a such such a good deal at first there's
also no cost for dissemination there used to be you had to pay for the printing costs and
the mailing costs there's no more cost for that anymore it's free or low-cost labor the authors
the editors the peer reviewers usually they're not paid or if they are paid it's not very much
big deals are really attractive at first you have these huge discounts but here's the big
catch here is that they're going to increase five to seven percent per year and so for
example if you have a bundle that increased 5.5 percent every year between 1999 and 2012.
it's going to uh go up uh double double that so compare that to consumer price index which was 38
38 in the same period it's a huge difference 200 to 38 so this is basically what has been
come to known in library library science as the oligopoly of academic publishing you do need a
definition there's one right there and here we have again the five biggest so they're often
referred to as the five big and the the darker blue at the top and there's 15 others these are
the largest scholarly publishers and you often see them their brand on the websites now to visualize
what this looks like in terms of data you can see here that for the most part besides this orange
bar here so the top one is at the top of all the graphs in case uh you have accessibility needs um
they are basically the ones that are tran - are going from big publishers to small publishers
so it's the minority it's a very small percentage of all journals are going from big to small most
are going from small to big in both the social sciences humanities natural and medical sciences
and here we can see that trend over time so we're looking at the percentage of the papers
published by the five major publishers so each line represents a different publisher and by the
arts are not different publisher it represents when they're going to
a major uh publisher rather than a um a small publisher a non-profit society
so we see the in chemistry has the largest percentage almost 80 percent and around 2006 2007
and almost eighty percent of their research was owned by uh the big five publishers
and in the social sciences we actually see an even sharper increase uh with psychology around seventy
percent of the research is owned by the big five and the humanities have actually uh been able to
maintain control over most of their research by the uh nonprofits and the societies
and when we look at the cost for citations so that's per paper um we're looking at
Elsevier and they actually seem to have a better deal compared to the others but
there's a huge catch a caveat to that is that they own 20 of all the world's research
whereas with the average non-profit it's it's still a lot less than uh most of the others
so what has happened we have starting in 98 things are you know we were spending more on electronic
resources than other things uh but not not to the extent we are today right with those five
to seven percent increases it's just tends to shoot up and up and up and over time so this has
stifled our spending on other things like books uh different materials programming even salaries
this is a huge problem and uh not even the wealthiest academic library in the world
which is Harvard can afford these big bundles anymore
so it is not it's always referred to as the big deal at least in the library world
and to give you some numbers so you can kind of let this sink in the University of California
is a 10 campus system it spent 50 million dollars on electronic resources over five years
Virginia's seven research universities spent around the same so 46 million over five years
our deal expires at the end of this year and we are still in negotiations with Elsevier uh now
so this is a quote from a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University
saying that publishing is so profitable because the workers don't get paid
and to give you an idea of why it's such a big business or how it's such a big business
we have 26 billion dollars annual worldwide revenue by comparison the us box office had
11 billion in sales the us music industry 13 billion and apple had 53 billion
so does it matter that these five publishers these companies control 50 percent of the academic
publishing market that's more of a thing to think about on your own so these profit margins are from
2015 uh they might be larger now because their increases to contracts uh made them very very
profitable profit margins are what they take home after they've spent all their money for the year
so compared to apple and google their profit margins are huge and this kind of goes back to
that quote from that professor is that one of the reasons we see these huge profit margins is
because they're not paying their editors they're peer reviewers they're authors right they're the
authors and the editors and the peer reviewers they're they're doing this for a different reason
which I’ll get into later which you probably already have some idea of being academics yourself
okay so if you need an example think about this this is the 2002 price for the journal of applied
polymer science and the Toyota Corolla so around 12 and a half thousand dollars now can anybody
guess what it was in 2018 I have 2018 prices don't have the the new price up but you can probably
guess that it is it is worse so it has gone up to 35 000 for the applied polymer science and around
19 000 for the Toyota Corolla so we just see how how incredibly dramatic this inflation is
but we're kind of seeing perhaps the tightest turning
so for example if any of you have heard of plan s it's a part of an initiative in Europe
it was launched in September 2018 so two years ago it was supposed to take into effect this
year but it got delayed it basically calls for all publicly funded research
to be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms it does take effect next year
there are more details to plan s and there's a lot of argument and debate and discussion
over plan s in my own field um you can read a lot more about it if you want to look it up I would
recommend going to the website especially if you want to get a job in Europe or
you are from Europe or something like that to check out plan s because it will affect you if
you end up living there or working there um as an academic or if you do research with somebody
who works over there that could that would also affect you okay so funders that have signed on
we have a lot of funders uh obviously in Europe that have signed on to plan s but we also have a
couple that in the us such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that has signed on to plan us so
they are going to take the same uh policies within that plan and apply it to their own uh foundation
so anything that's funded by Bill and Melinda Gates has to also follow the tenants Atlantis
so we also see that a lot of uh institutions and even countries are you know either canceling their
contracts with Elsevier or they're looking at different models so
Sweden canceled its agreement with Elsevier uh two years ago MIT canceled their uh their
Elsevier contract this year and they are guided by Open Access principles and looking to do
something different and India is pushing for something called a one nation one subscription
so they would India would pay the publishers and everybody in the country would have access
this is a quote from a article about Sweden and Germany canceling Elsevier and so they talked
to one of the researchers about it and what he thought about it and he basically said as annoying
as it is to not be able to get journal articles I think reaching a new way of Doing publishing
is more important than my level of annoyance uh we also see a lot of other universities and
countries Doing what are called Open Access deals so they're they're actually signing
deals with publishers that make they're paying the publishers and they're making research all
available to the public everybody in the world with an internet connection so in the University
of California recently boycotts the this was last year the publishing giant Elsevier over
external costs and really its increase of journal costs and its Open Access policies
they cut off access to them following that decision and after that the uc faculty
basically stopped Elsevier so there's a lot of faculty at Elsevier that
are editors for that publisher or they have a lot of journals and they said restart or negotiate
some negotiations or else and I believe they're kind of in a standstill with them
uh we also have a lot of uh public repositories so we've talked about institutional repositories
disciplinary repositories pre-print repositories uh there's also policies uh for publicly funded
research within in the united states so the national institutes of health
and the national science foundation have these mandates to say if you're funded by us you have
to publish your research Open Access um and so there's there's uh publishers that comply
with those policies and if they comply even though there's subscription access
you can actually still publish with them and the publisher deposits the article
on your behalf and so PubMed is a hugely growing repository of NIH funded
research um yeah we've come we see the tide turning but we have a long way to go
so the gray bar represents research that is still closed
access uh biomedical research is making the most headway um we can see the top in chemistry still
seems to have a long way to go they have less than 20 percent of their research Open Access
okay so now I’m going to jump into some barriers to open I
want to see if we have any questions really quick
okay so we have some questions that I think might get answered by the barriers to open do you
uh let me see I’m gonna answer Abram’s question I think do you think the trend of
journals moving from small to large publishers is motivated by the journal's internal desires
or that large publishers are actively trying to gather as much of the scholarly publication
market share as possible that's probably going to be related to the latter I’m going to cover this a
little bit but it basically became a difficult for small societies to sustain themselves especially
in the 40s and 50s and 60s we saw a lot of journals switching over to these publishers
there's an article that's linked in here I believe it's um yes it's this slide here so this might
help you understand uh this this article here was an investigative piece done by a journalist uh
Stephen Burani and it's the staggering profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science
he talks about the history of it so I highly recommend reading that piece it's a long article
but it's really worth the read um and it's you know it's written by journalists so it's anybody
can read it it's not technical language that he's using but I think that this statement is really
important to understand under today's system the father of genetic sequencing Fred Sanger
who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes may well
have found himself out of a job in today's system right so let's talk about how that came to be
so first I want to talk about the academic incentives and and this is
this is a long story I’m going to try to summarize it as much as pro as possible
um citations and journal prestige that's the real academic currency rather than getting paid
academics are getting paid with citations and prestige which advances their careers
so you could say in the long term it does pay them money but I think the the uh the career
advancement is more important to them and the recognition right so that's the currency for
academics and kind of what we see is is this can be somewhat of a vulnerability for academics and
publishers have you know somewhat taken advantage of this over the past several decades
so the journal impact factor I want to talk about this because it's a very well-known metric but
it's a very poorly understood metric and it's also misused and even abused in a lot of situations
so first off if you don't understand what this is it's the average citation count for
quote and citable item in a journal so uh the Clarivate Analytics, the company that
owns the metric that calculates the metric for the journals in its index
decides what items are citable in that journal okay but it also gets to decide how it calculates
it and it's problematic for a few different reasons it's really just skewed distribution
so we see here in this graph the impact factor for nature is 38.1 for this particular year
and that's due to a few very highly cited papers and we see the impact factor for plus is 3.1 um
so if he it would be probably more prudent to use the median but it uses the mean to distribute it
so one of the biggest disadvantages for the journal impact factor and people are trying to
publish uh with journals and high impact factors or maybe they're required to or are encouraged to
for promotion tenure advancement evaluation so on and so forth is that we see these newer journals
disadvantaged and newer journals are often interdisciplinary they're also usually some niche
field that's uh that's just popped up um they're also Open Access journals so Open Access journals
it takes a long time to establish yourself as a journal to get recognition to get more submissions
to get more citations and so on uh so you can publish your research in any type of journal
and it can have a lot of impact and it might be in a low low impact or even a high impact journal it
doesn't seem to affect as much what gets cited because a lot of people are turning to sources
like google scholar which pretty much has its eyes on everything not just uh the high impact research
so smaller fields are also disadvantaged and that's because they just have
fewer readers fewer people that are interested in their scholarship
if you're looking at some very complex mathematical journal it's not going to get
as much visibility it's not going to get as many citations it's definitely not going to get news
press and things like that and it's just going to seem like it's not as important as some other
fields like the health sciences and and things of that nature so there's something called the
Matthew Effect and so Matthew Effect says that uh success begets more success and the opposite
is also true so it's the reason the sociologists say that the poor gets poorer it's a very basic
theory but it does have a lot to do with you see somebody with success you give them more success
and it's the same with academic publishing uh another thing that's important is journal prestige
so prestige is kind of this like this journal is the best and it's prestigious and you will be
it'll be great it's kind of like you know getting a blockbuster publication so to speak and it's
also very cultural and discipline specific obviously science and nature probably have
the some of the most prestigious uh perception in in a lot of fields and it relies on these really
really old ideas about scientific esteem you could even say it goes back centuries because the
first journals were really published in the 17th century and I kind of was looking at well what
universities and authors do these universities have that are publishing such and such papers
so publishers are capitalizing on this cultural norm within science and within academia
we see the rise of prestige journal publishing with the publication of cell and so cell became
this really really important uh journal in the 70s and it became really important to see not just
what you were publishing but where you were publishing so researchers used to be more focused
on the research they did and then they would worry about finding an outlet after the fact
but now researchers are beginning to change their behavior so they're looking at the journal first
and then they're trying to decide how they can make their research fit into that journal and then
um it just changes their behavior in their research patterns quite a bit and there's a lot of
research on this and it's very complicated um but I’m not going to get too much into that right now
so then the impact factor back in the 70s and 80s really starts to quote mary prestige
it was the to give you history the impact factor was invented
to more easily make decisions about what to index and include in the science citation
index the first bibliographic index which is now known as web of science
and then it was later used by librarians to make collection development decisions
and the publishers now use it to advertise their journals and basically their advertising prestige
it is definitely subject to the Matthew Effect
and to give you an idea of the Matthew Effect negative results receive far more negative
peer reviews and more editorial rejections than positive results do and it doesn't matter how good
the research is and how good the methodology is so we have something called publication bias emerging
so interesting results are much more likely to be published and even results with
interesting titles are more likely to be published which distort our impression of reality there's
been a lot of research on this and we are starting to see some emergence of journals that just report
negative results but they have a lot a long way to go in terms of getting visibility and recognition
within academic publishing okay finally I’m going to talk about good hearts law before I wrap up
about how this is going to be you know solved in the long term and good heart's law basically
states that when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure
because if you tell somebody they're going to be measured on the number of nails they make and they
might make thousands of tiny nails manager might get frustrated and tell you that I’m going to
now measure you on the weight of the nails mate then you'll get a few giant heavy nails so this
also happens in academic publishing so there was a study done called the over optimization
of academic publishing metrics observing good hearts law in action this just came out last year
I’m just going to share a few of the graphs with you so they show that over the past few decades
we see that that the average length of a paper has sharply decreased over time
we also see that the average age of I’m sorry the average number of papers
published by academics has uh risen over time so the the darker the the line uh the more papers
they're publishing is going on this very sharp trajectory right so you would think okay that's
a good thing we're Doing more publications more productivity this sounds like a good improvement
however we see that even though the number of publications has gone up we see
that we have short-term impact so the citations are coming in maybe two three years
you know and then after that they decrease and a lot of times this is uh kind of a
short-term impact right and so we like to see long-term impact because we want to see
how those papers do um you know and become seminal papers so we're much less likely to see seminal
seminal papers in academia of course it still happens though so the number the percentage of
papers with no citations other than self-citations after five years has also sharply decreased
and we also see something that is kind of referred to as these good old boy club
and where we're seeing and this is true with funding as well as academic publishing it used
to be that authors mainly publish alphabetically and now they publish more for recognition purposes
and so the first author and last author is typically where you see the most recognition
and that means they have the most contribution to the paper
and we see the sharp increase in the academics age over time so meaning that
the same authors are getting published in the same journals over and over again and it makes
it very difficult for younger researchers to get published and get that recognition
okay and there was another study done where it was looking at the productivity
of researchers over time and if we just look at the number of publications it
looks like a very sharp increase however this researcher who's a biblical nutrition
uh looked at the fractional counting of those papers so basically they're they're dividing the
total number of papers by the average number of co-authors so each co-author only gets a fraction
of that count if there's 10 co-authors and they only get one-tenth of the publication count
and we can see over centuries of time oh sorry just over a century of time that the
productivity level when we divide it by the number of co-authors is the same
so to summarize they really have some good recommendations in this paper for how we can
we can change uh their targets have undesirable effects we have the number of papers with limited
impact has sharply increased there's a lot with self-citations and the old boys that I mentioned
we also have this recommendation from the author saying that data science tools and this is kind
of what Jonathan talked about should be used to release new and open data sets and promote this
uh with unbiased measures right and we want to raise awareness of the shortcomings
of commonly used measures such as number of citations the h index and the impact factor
certain metrics are proposed and new metrics will always always emerge but the key is to be wise
and careful when you evaluate these measures and when you use them and so to kind of be
educated about them so these uh three initiatives have popped up over the past eight years
the first one was DORA, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
which came from a group of cell biologists at their meeting in 2012 and they said the impact
factor that was the first tenant really that got it started the impact factor should not be used to
evaluate individual researchers or individual papers after that the widened manifesto came
out which has 10 principles for evaluating research the the authors are bibliometrician
and research evaluation experts and the metric tied out of the uk also came out
this initiative here is basically looking at um they were frustrated with the current ecosystem
and scholarly communication and with rankings and so they're basically looking at um creating a
ranking system that would try to incentivize colleges and universities to operate open and
equitably uh this is a new paper that came out looking at actually evaluating the methodology of
um uh rankings university rankings and this is some guidance on organizations that apply that uh
have to go through the welcome trust and how they comply with that and the policy there and
finally I just want to point out that everything I’ve talked about tonight um I am on a committee
that is focused on bibliometrics the chair of the committee is Dr. Elizabeth Gadd, and she's going
to be getting a keynote talk tomorrow at 10 a.m. it's called: “Counting what counts in recruitment,
promotion and tenure,” so if you're able to attend, I highly highly recommend that
you come and I know that we're getting short on time so I this is it uh thank you for listening
to all of this we are going to transition to the discussion and I do see one question in the
in the q a it says I know why but I am trying to understand how to peer review process become free
how did this very profitable idea come about um I hope that I was able to kind of clarify some
of that in the the second half of my presentation but I think that peer review because of the way
societies functioned back before world war iI they were non-profit and everything they did
you know writing papers Doing peer review editing it was always free and the publishers
used their model and you know kind of said why don't you come over to us and we'll do
kind of the the formatting and the printing and things like that so you don't have to worry about
that and they just continued with their model after that so I hope that answers that question
all right and we have to get onto the discussion so um my panelists are here my faculty panelists
I’m really really grateful that they were able to join us um I just want to start out and I’ll kind
of maybe I’ll tag each of you and as I see you on my screen to introduce yourself describe your
experience with oa publishing or oa research and any other experience you might have with the other
opens so we can get an idea of what this is like on more of the faculty researchers side of things
so how about we start out with Siddhartha is that is that okay or um can you guys hear me okay
yeah okay perfect um so my name is Sid Roy I’m a post doc in civil environmental engineering
I’ve been at VT for about eight years started as a graduate student got my PhD and then stuck around
for a post doc and a lot of the work we do is is very public in that it involves
public participation for example working with communities testing water samples for example so
we worked on Flint, Michigan if you guys heard about it and there the our experience in terms
of like open data was you know it felt like it was an ethical obligation to get that data out
as soon as possible because it appeared people's you know health could be at risk similar to what
you're seeing with covet but just you know on a on a lower scale it was it wasn't just
just people brushing papers out because they wanted to make a name for themselves it was more
it appears that there is a lead contamination problem you know what can be developed that was
open data and in terms of open research there are two things I guess we work a lot with government
data so you know before government agencies health departments environmental agencies to
look at uh indicators of for example you know blood lead exposure in children and you know
how that could be related to water supply so we do rely on public sources of data and we try to find
uh reliable sources including governments uh to get our you know do our research and and offer
explanations to what could be going on in cities and communities and finally we with my advisor
Dr. Marc Edwards we wrote a paper in 2017 called, “Perverse incentives in research academia,” you
know how to make sure we still do good research considering it's getting a good heart's laws in
play we all want to score you know get into the big league published great papers and high impact
factor journals it's like u.s news and world report where every university is trying to gain
the algorithm what's the equation what's the right uh you know balance of teachers and students in
classes of how to get into the top hundred same with research wrote a paper about it uh highly
influential in the past three years so happy to talk more but uh that's that's who I am
great thank you and if any of you have a chance I I will try to pull up the paper but
uh Siddhartha's research actually that's how I found out about him and uh he did that research
with Dr. Marc Edwards and and they are um on perverse incentives it's a really good paper
I would recommend it um let's go ahead and turn over to Derek and he's um has been more of the
humanities background so he might have a different experience sure thank you hI everyone I’m Derek
Mueller and I’m associate professor in English and I also direct Virginia Tech's composition program
so my my background and experience um has for as long as I can remember um
really spotlighted in in in intentionally valued um Open Access oriented work so during my doctoral
program of study at Syracuse there's a lot of encouragement to take some of the projects I
was working on then related to journal metadata in in my subfield of English studies um really trying
to learn what was what was possible to republish um uh that that wasn't in other words bound by
uh copyright law from uh collections of journals and so to begin to do metadata analysis a kind of
uh um at the time mid 2000s um some visualization and patterning related to the brute fact elements
of journals that we could we could um aggregate and uh and sort of treat for patterns with um the
aid of computational processes so so that work in the mid-2000s I think um really just stuck
with me I I took seriously that I was uh after Syracuse I I’ve always worked in universities that
uh where I’ve considered myself a public employee um first in the state of michigan and now in the
state of Virginia in the commonwealth of Virginia um and that's just meant for me kind of keeping
fresh that that that um principle if you will of um my work my research needing to be as um widely
circulating as possible available for uptake not just locally and not just through all of these
kept sort of tightly kept gates but really more broadly than that I think what scholarship wants
most of all is to be taken up and Open Access has always been a way for me to sort of realize that
I also do a lot of uh work with visuals and so if we have time out I can share a little story about
um a piece that I that I published as an article in 2012 and the journal editor at the time read
back to me she said that one of these images that I was attempting to reuse it was it was
jaggy so it needed to be redrawn essentially but I actually I had to pay conde nast 750
um to to reDr.aw their image because it was in wired magazine where it first appeared it was too
janky so I couldn't get a high quality image of it I had to reDr.aw it in adobe illustrator pay 750
dollars to use it in my own article and then in my book which came out in 2018 I also used that same
image and guess what I had to do again for conde nast I had to provide them with another seven
hunDr.ed and fifty dollars to um use that image a second time with a different publisher in an Open
Access published venue for that book so that's the short version of it I’m happy to talk more about
it and and to feel whatever questions things come up for you all thank you for sharing that story
I think that's a really good example and makes me want to talk about fair use too but I will resist
talking about that even though I think that you probably uh had to do that for for publication
um but let's turn it over to uh Dr. Venkat so Sri if that's that's okay to call you
everybody's okay with first names I just made assumptions um uh Sri are you there yeah I’m here
good evening to all of you and uh thank you for the wonderful presentation by all the speakers
the panelists you know for their thoughts on this topic that's wonderful I learned a lot actually
listening to all these topics it's fascinating and I think it's one of the fast developing uh
you know interest or field of you know you know anxiety I would say but at the same time you
know learning opportunity for everybody to know where we are talking about me my name
is Venkat Sridhar I go by Sri uh I’m a faculty member in the department of biological systems
engineering I’m an associate prof I actually um I’m working in different topics in different
places around the world currently my focus is on hydrology water resources and climate change
in southeast asia particularly south Asia and southeast Asia I’ve also worked extensively in
the western us so relatively new only in the last seven or eight years I’ve been working
on the east coast projects and topics the work I do is about information or gathering data on
water management water resources and disseminating that to stakeholders and the public in general
uh very specifically on Dr.ought modeling and flood forecasting and these are really ongoing
crisis you know around the world and also within the u.s coast to coast you know you have you name
it any region anywhere you have these problems so the challenge comes with respect to publishing how
to make this widely accessible not only within the us but also some other techniques or tools
that we develop can be useful for others outside of this place for example in south southeast Asia
that you know I have quite a bit of interest they are also trying to follow some of these
techniques and procedures to implement where Open Access publications become really useful when I’m
talking about Open Access I really appreciate the efforts and the support by the library initiatives
OASF I’m one of the significant beneficiaries of that resource and um it's amazing actually to see
how that is developing so quickly uh with so many journals and the topics that you covered on lcvr
is very close to my heart because uh the double dipping part that you mentioned
is exactly the same thing they were charging as charging as authors as well as you know when I
was trying to request for OASF I realized that of course you know that's how I learned about this
double dipping thing so I think I was not aware of it until recently when that happened
so it's pretty clear that of course we have to be smart we have to be thinking about how to you know
conserve our resources I went to my college I um asked for support in addition to OASF because of
some recent publications that I made that was not even within my number range that I could actually
budget within my existing projects but Open Access through the library resources was very helpful in
that regard the journals that I publish mostly are you know Elsevier until recently and I hope
that is holding good uh you know with all your negotiations that you're actually talking about
2021 um and that's beneficial and I’m keen to look at the outcome of that I’m also following all the
other news across the world or within the US many universities are negotiating or renegotiating and
I think that's a good strategy but I don't know where it's going to go but I’m curious I’m anxious
to really see if it benefits the researchers when it comes to the difficulty or the benefits
of publishing in Open Access of course like I said you also eloquently mentioned where you know
many regions around the world don't have access to all these journal articles but publishing in MDPI
or some reasonable ones that are not below the rank but reasonable enough for them to really
access is really a middle ground for us but again I think you know DOAJ I think is the one that you
mentioned I’m curious I’m also going to see how some of these journals that we publish is ranked
you know within those resources that's about my Open Access you know initial statement sorry I
may have taken more time than other panelists but I’ll come back again if you have more questions
no that's that's great thank you for sharing and giving us the background and we're so glad you're
using the suspension fund uh that always makes us happy to to be able to give people money you know
um thank you I think that one thing that came up from from Sri talking about you know
we're publishing Open Access so it's kind of like either the user pays
when it's the subscription access or the author page and so the author pane can be a barrier
to researchers in the developing world so they're either having the barrier of no access or they're
having the barrier of I can't publish Open Access because I can't afford to pay this
APC and sometimes they do waive the APC for for researchers in certain countries but it's still
a barrier for sure um I do want to address one question that we had in in the q a or in the chat
I believe and somebody was asking about how does this and I think he's talking about the oligopoly
affect researchers ability to cite the literature that is relevant to the work that they are Doing
seems for sure that this oligopoly contributes to low quality literature reviews that's an
interesting question and there might be other people on the call that might have a better
answer I think that lower quality literature reviews if you're seeing a lot of those um
that can be more on the researchers in and not so much the publishers the publishers just want to
publish it so they can keep selling it right they don't have an incentive to make it good
work even though a lot of them are established journals um but they do uh want to publish it
and I I think that the subscription journals have a lot longer to establish themselves as high
quality and so forth um but literature reviews and and whether or not those are are good reviews
and are they actually citing the literature they should be citing that's almost a library question
uh we have a really great uh librarian here she's called an evidence synthesis library and she helps
people with scoping reviews systematic reviews um and rapid reviews and she's just really excellent
at saying like this is how you actually find the literature that is relevant in your field
to cite and you do it systematically um so I’m not sure if that answers your question I’m not
sure if that really contributes to the oligopoly I I think that they publish a lot of research that
this isn't necessarily high quality libraries are finding out that there's a lot of journals that we
subscribe to that just aren't used and they're not cited and so we are that's why we're starting to
drop Elsevier big deal because we feel confident enough with the data that we do have access to
that we don't need all of it we don't need the whole case quote cable package
all right um let's see Jordan has a question how do diamond OA journals play here
can you tell me what you mean by diamonds I don't think I’ve ever heard that before
he might be typing but I’ll let the uh the panelists uh go to the next question
here so this is kind of the concern with incentives that we've talked about and
I kind of want to hear uh from Dr. Roy sid about this because he has this whole paper on it
um oh okay Jordan says to a mean journal with no fee for publishing and no fee for reading
um so a lot of times the diamond journals uh that you're talking about they don't have any fee for
access or for re or for publishing or reading I actually published in
journals like that myself I published them two Open Access journals that don't have APC
um it's probably more common in the social sciences um but some of the more well-known so
I think the the bigger the journal becomes the the harder it becomes to you know basically fund it to
keep circulating and keep working and the costs become higher so then the bigger the journal gets
the more likely they are to charge an APC now whether or not that APC is unreasonable nature
communications I think has the highest APC it's something like ridiculous like five thousand
dollars um that's a whole other argument but you know like the subvention fund only funds up to
two thousand dollars so we've made a stance on like we're not gonna pay outrageous APC's right
uh but there's still scholarship and there's still a lot of them are still indexed on major
search engines and databases so they still have visibility um and then we have this other from uh
lara I meant that when researchers cannot access articles they need to include and cite in their
work because of lack of access this could lead to a lower quality of literature review uh that's
that could be true I I don't know of any research on that particular question so it's something that
I would have to investigate but that's a that's a good question it could be that uh like I was
saying before I think that Open Access content in general gets cited more but it still has to
be high quality they've actually investigated this so in general you have this visibility
advantage but you still have to have good work for it to to get more citations so
it might play a bit of a role but I think for the most part if you see a bad literature review it
might be on the researcher more than in the system oh oh Gail said the OASF is a max of 1500 due to
budget cuts so thank you for for uh letting me know okay sorry about that uh we're gonna go
back over to the questions here and I’ll turn it over to Sid about about the question on the screen
uh well very quickly I think I’ve been both encouraged and discouraged so the discouraged
part is easier everyone can I just identify with it there is a very respected journal in my field
water research Elsevier again high impact factor but also you know it's it has rep it has a good
reputation for a good reason and you know you want to publish in it because you want your work
that is where you go if you want to publish good water quality research so you know we submitted
and it got accepted and then I found out the OSF - OSF only does like fully Open Access they don't do
hybrid which is which is what my journal is was so um you know we went ahead you know paid paid the
money using our own funds but the point is again you know the reputation of a journal still carries
value and while there are other water journals that are Open Access it would not have had that
much of an impact if it wasn't for you know it had to be this journal so anyway that was the obvious
one despite having written an entire article on purpose incentives and and how they drive
you know what we do I you know I’m a victim of it I went after the prestigious journal with high
impact factor for my work the encouragement came again from the osf funds believe it or not there's
a a fresh journal that came out that publishes citizen science stuff and we wanted to publish
something in there and the the incentives aligned in that there was funding from the
school from the library and a journal willing to look at our work and so those two came together
and you know we were able to support the Open Access mandate and publish something in a fully
Open Access journal so I think it's a mixed bag experience which is believe true for most of us
I think you said I am going to ask I’ll just go in the same order as before so uh Derek or
Dr. Mueller sure I think I guess I would only add I’ve I’ve only felt encouraged I mean to
the extent that I’ve been discouraged before it's it's always this overture of the prestige or the
status or the quality of the work coming from the publisher or coming from the name of the journal
that to me is upside down the the quality of the work comes from the quality of the research the
quality of the writing that goes with the research and so if you're Doing good work you can actually
publish to my experience at least in a mid-tier lesser-known journal and by Doing great work
I’ve had the good fortune of getting that work anthologized from mid-tier journals so it gets
picked up it gets recirculated that way or with my book which the case just happened to be I was very
fortunate to win two awards with it and so even though I’d make the choice to put publish Open
Access against the grain of commonplace wisdom which is always choose the prestigious press
it's like well no actually I chose the Open Access press I got the work into a lot more people's
hands it was taken up in more grad seminars as such accordingly because it was free right it
was read globally or picked up at least accessed globally um that for me was more important than
some game of chase to the top by going for some some sort of notable noteworthy academic press
so uh I don't know if that encouragement is just my own
foolish foolish boldness about the whole thing but it's like I felt like those risks those risks were
worth taking when the alternative was to till the line so to speak thank you for that uh oh yes and
Anita did link to Dr. Mueller's book network sense methods for visualizing a discipline
um so that looks uh like a very interesting read and let's turn it over to Sri okay
yeah I I actually feel um mostly encouraged but um the overwhelming part of on the discourage
side basically is um the information you know basically you get you know both spam emails or you
know good invitations so sifting through them and finding out what is really a good one to really
take you know to your advantage is the question that I still have um on the encouragement side
um I think you know accessibility you know like I said before barriers uh you know for accessing
from other parts of the world I think is really uh the one so I was able to quickly disseminate
that information you know the topics that I partic particularly work on uh is current and evolving
and it needs to be shared quickly so that way I think Open Access is really an encouragement
for me um on the you know information side also I think um if we have a filter like
what I’m learning from you today if we can apply those and be able to really decide between the
journals I think that should really avoid on the inside generally you know with respect to the
concerns um I mean citations number of citations makes a big difference but at the same time
um you know you know our promotion tenure or you know any of our you know career progression
is actually reviewed by the technical experts first within the department or within the college
and then of course across the university um so they know they know the you know the
quality of the journals and the publication and the strength and so that way I think um
this fast developing uh field of Open Access is kind of getting to everybody's radar so that's
in a good way so I think I feel encouraged and you know if I look at five years ago some journals
were not even known to many of uh you know my own you know friends and colleagues but now I
think it's becoming more and more popular because of the accessibility aspect you know and that's
really helpful and so I have a mixed feeling but I think I would say mostly on the positive side
thank you Sri that's a really interesting great answer and I love to hear the different
everybody seems to have really different experiences and I think different disciplines have
different cultures too so and even sub disciplines because we have two people from engineering
and you're both in different fields of engineering too so I think that's really interesting
um we're going to skip this one because we're getting really short on time
but we want to talk about the concerns over quality of works published in Open Access journals
which we you kind of already touched on um so if you could briefly say have you ever been had you
know colleagues or evaluators raised this issue with you about the quality of Open Access journals
which might be obviously a real concern if it's that kind of predatory journal but
I would like to hear your yeah I mean uh we have to have the you know self-assessment of you know
whether or not to go for a particular publication beforehand you know before even thinking about
you know what others would think uh it is your self-assessment in my own case you know when I
I think I’ll have to take uh the quote from you I think in one of the slides now I think one of the
earlier speaker mentioned something about how um you know the researchers are actually modifying
based on the journals their work you know that kind of thing that you mentioned um that does
not directly apply to me for example even I teach how to write journal articles in my graduate class
where I actually mention the first thing that they look at is their results you know regardless of
you know the journal they're going to actually see what kind of results they got
and they will discuss within themselves or with the advisor or with others and see how to
present the work and that actually makes the case for deciding the journal so
so in this process what happens is if the quality of the explanation comes out to
be good even if it is negative if they're able to really communicate that effectively
that goes to a good quality journal compared to some other you know mediocre journals so that was
my filter personally to my own grad students or post docs and I think that first filter actually
allows me to avoid any problem with quality on the second thing um you know we are like I mentioned
before you have a self-assessment on this um we are reporting our journal you know the name
the publication the impact factors and citations everything you know for all the publications that
we make for our own career progression and um you know it's you know a constantly evolving
debate within ourself like hey I can have a range you know for example one would be of medium range
impact factor one would be of high range but ultimately of course we are showing the
diversity of topics and the journals that we publish so it depends on how you really
look at the topic and the quality of work and then of course how you present your work to
others so all of those three combinations really help me to address the concerns on the quality
thank you Sri for for that and I know it's eight o'clock um I guess if if any if the um Sid and
Derek want to answer uh this last question if anybody wants to stay a little bit longer
um I think this might be an important question because this really ties into all the opens
and how do you do open from the beginning and this can be really important especially for open
data because you have to think about it at the very beginning and what especially for
the graduate class that is here tonight you know what should these new researchers be focusing on
before even beginning their projects so I will go back to Sid and we'll cycle through and if
others have to leave the call that's completely fine I want to be uh be respectful in this time
but if people want to hear their answers they are welcome to stay for a few more minutes
well I think uh you know I’ll answer this on a philosophical level in terms of if you're a new
graduate student you know I was one two years ago or five years ago starting out um you want
to as you're learning to do science and you know publishing this this material you want to open
yourself and you woke up to scrutiny the idea is you know you this encourages publishing Open
Access in terms of your data is available your methods your code is available for people to
look at and you know run this actually first off encourages you know you'll try you'll work
doubly hard to make sure everything is accurate before you submit and second because it's open
to everyone to look at they can actually catch and correct errors so there's a big incentive
because at the end of the day you want to share the most accurate science possible you know as
you go through your research career especially for us you know we work in a public domain so it's it
also gets political so we get routinely attacked on social media and in the press even sometimes
uh so you know to be to be able to defend everything you've done I love the fact that even
thankfully we have funds to publish all our papers all our data and make it available to anyone and
everyone because we want to make sure that our work is defensible to the you know to the fullest
and that should be your approach that you know you want to publish the best science possible
and that means opening yourself up to scrutiny and so if you go into publishing with that mindset
if you go into Doing your research with the with the notion that everyone anyone might look at it
now or 10 years from now and might find things you'll work doubly hard plus you know if there
are errors those will be corrected quickly and the best science will you know hopefully
be out there and help others and you know you did your job right so thanks thank you
and I think that kind of reminds me after we move on to derrick uh that the humanities kind of I see
the humanities kind of using blogs a little bit more not that other researchers don't but I see
a lot of uh folks in the humanities using blogs as a kind of open outlet for their ideas they get
scrutinized and then they actually improve upon it I don't know if that has anything to do with
your field derrick but uh you can just answer the question or you can speak to that if you'd like
sure it does I mean it was actually a big part of my my graduate experience was in the mid-2000s
Doing a lot of blogging and I always thought of that as kind of like writing for a small public
so so it wasn't it wasn't the same sort of like keepers of the so-called epistemic court as like
journal editors or anonymous reviewers um but it was a chance to actually sort of parlay a bit
with other people who were semi-familiar to me or who were only semi-familiar with my ideas and
so who I needed to kind of write through some of the explanation of what were what were challenging
aspects of my work it was also really exciting at the time to see fairly prominent academics
and also pop press writers blogging books in progress so Doing that kind of incremental
serialized writing of 600 to 1000 words a day over over many months taking pauses to re
reframe a chapter but then ultimately publishing the book after and and having those books be
successful because they've been in a way they'd been generated organically with a lot of a lot
of input so um they were they were oddly kind of co-authored with their audiences in many respects
um for me the question you've posed here though about the beginning is sort of well where do we
locate the beginning of the project um I think for me my advice to grad students generally is
uh where what are you reading and why so how are you how are you finding the things that
you're reading connected to the work you're Doing um and how much of that is Open Access
so are you are you if you're going to attempt an Open Access project I think there's some wisdom
to be underscored in in uh you're in familiarizing yourself with what are some of these Open Access
publishing venues what are the sorts of things they're publishing there and how much connection
is there between the the design and and sort of the shape of those projects and publications
as maybe relates or bears resemblance to or perhaps departs from the work you are Doing
um I think there's there's a lot to be gained from that reading process but that
might I don't know that that's sort of before the beginning perhaps but um important nevertheless
okay thank you very much um I’m so glad to hear that you're using blogs like that
um let's uh last and finally last but not least Sri can you uh speak to the open from the outset
uh give me a warning if I’m talking too much you know so that I can speak just for two or three
minutes and stop it's okay interesting question for me that I want to really tell a lot about this
you know publication is a buyer's market I mean this is especially meant for new researchers that
I’m actually trying to convey this um you know publication is still a buyer's market you know you
are really you know joining the team um you know regardless you know local international everybody
is going to look at so you should be ready for reviews expert feedback and criticism you know
that is the number one thing that they should be really open with and of course publication
is also um publishing is a skill you know not everybody is published so that means of course
you need to work towards it and then um you know when it comes to getting the feedback uh
it makes it really interesting for uh people to you know take that positively and think about a
couple of things number one they're going to add to the existing body of knowledge or literature
by their work and of course if they want to really join that bandwagon of existing line of research
and researchers of course their work needs to be attractive enough for people to appreciate
so these are the things that they need to be thinking about from the get go in terms of um
how to really think about performing research and it's not that they can do something and publish
it's not possible now it's such an open you know in a society or a condition where we really need
to think about thousand eyes looking at what we do all the time so that kind of conscience you
know inner consciousness I think will really help and of course you know to legitimize the research
you know what we are trying to do here um of course you know in academics or you know many of
our fields you know the only recognition that we have on pat on the back is basically recognition
of what you do and to get that legitimization through the process of course your work needs
to be really good and of course independent independent verification of what you do
um through this media is going to be really helpful and open is actually really helping
to do that in a quicker way basically you don't have to really wait you know in my field
one of the you know top class journals normally takes even today nine months to a year and that's
a long wait time but these Open Access journals have really cut down that time you know that's one
of their selling point you know they say six weeks to eight weeks max and that's really a good um you
know time period for people to really realize what they have done if the work is good it gets really
accepted in the first second round of revisions so Doing good work and thinking about how to really
make sure that it reaches a wider audience and those are the two things that people should be
thinking about from the beginning and of course you know open open really facilitates this process
yeah that's a really good point and I think that there was a comment in the
chat here that really speaks to that point too Abrahm so there's um an argument in this question
for participatory research trying to do work that is motivated and will benefit a larger audience
and being open from the outset you should be trying to do something that is meaningful to
an audience beyond yourself and in fact we do see through survey research that uh more researchers
are interested in reaching uh individuals beyond their field not necessarily always in the public
because it depends on your research right if you're in some very um you know opaque area
that most the public wouldn't be interested in that that might not be applying to you
but most people are interested in reaching people beyond their discipline because they're that with
interdisciplinary research this is becoming an a huge research area people are realizing that you
have breakthroughs when you do interdisciplinary transdisciplinary multidisciplinary research
actually the impact is higher but it takes longer so there's a risk that you take because those
journals typically don't have high impact factors and you're taking a risk with your career by Doing
it a lot of times um and over the long term it does have more more impact and those those end
up producing what are called seminal works in your fields so um just something to to think about and
shoe over if you ever think about collaborating with somebody outside your field or your subfield
and confirming the mission confirming the mission of the university as a public good a good
sorry or it's public good yes thank you dean DePauw uh that's a really good note to conclude
on um if you have additional questions um you can go ahead and quickly put them in the q a
or in the chat I don't see any um you can also email into paw if you want to get in contact with
any of us um or email me um and I’ll try to get you into contact with anybody here you can easily
find us we're listed on the university website uh dean DePauw did you have any closing remarks
simply to say thank you to um all of the panelists and the organizers and the hosts of this uh
webinar very very rich I look forward to making sure that we have your slides so we can have them
uh in class so I’ll just end and there but thank you very much and you know give you a a virtual
you know clap or whatever however that goes it doesn't go well in in the webinar but thank you
thank you and there's the thank you with the link to the guide for oa week there's more
events including the one tomorrow morning I also put the link in the chat um oh I didn't put it
um I put it in there privately I’m sorry uh yes but please check us out if you want to
hear more about Open Access there's more events this week and thank you everybody for coming
thanks all again it was great thank you thank you thanks for having us yep we'll do it again
well that went very well thank you I’m telling Ashley I mean Abby
ah right that was amazing I learned so much you did yes
also we are still recording if that matters to anyone oh let me stop