so I’m going to go ahead and get started with uh the formal introductions here so first of all
welcome to Virginia Tech’s eighth Open Education symposium we are really really happy that you're
here and really thank you for joining us my name is Rachel Miles and I am the research
impact librarian at the university libraries here at Virginia Tech this is the first of the three
events at Virginia Tech’s Open Education symposium you can find more information uh here about
other events and I’ll let either Alex or Kayla or Anita copy and paste that into the chat thank you
there are a lot of in many international virtual events at openeducationweek.org so from
those outside of Virginia Tech this event is an extension of Virginia Tech’s Future Professoriate
Grad - Graduate Class so we do want to thank Dean DePauw for again asking the university libraries
to coordinate this event it really turns out to be an excellent discussion and event for
everyone so before we do get started I do want to read the formal land acknowledgement that has
been approved by Virginia Tech um I’m going to get the name wrong but it's basically the Native
American center here Virginia Tech um so just going to read that off so we can acknowledge our
um the people who were on this land before us so we acknowledge the Tutelo/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/Monacan nations and to their elders past present and emerging
I’m grateful to the American Indian and indigenous Community Center - that's the name - at Virginia
Tech for providing this land acknowledgement statement all right so today we are going to
be talking about open practices in higher education so that includes Open Education
Open Access and Open Data the three main kind of kind types of open all of it which relate
to instruction scholarship and publishing and which and which uh future professors should know
about as told by current professors and subject experts within the university libraries and beyond
presenters from the libraries will give a short overview of each of these areas
then we are going to anticipate that this will take about 20 minutes we welcome our
distinguished panelists faculty from around the university to join the conversation
after uh we give the introduction to those three opens I’m also going to give presentations about
why open matters and then it's going to be followed by some of the main barriers to
open all the different types of open so we'll get that wrapped up around 7 maybe 7 15 at the
latest then we'll have time for the discussion the formal discussion with the panelists and
then questions from the attendees afterwards all right so I’m going to go ahead and share
my screen and also let one of my helpers here uh share the link to the slides which is on almost
every single slide we have here just in case uh you join late and let me get my screen shared
so again this is the first event of the Open Education Symposium uh our the events that we
run for Open Education week here at Virginia Tech and so you can get more information that there
at that link open educate education week.org this is our event that we usually do every semester so
one is for Open Access week and the other is for Open Education Week Open Access Week is typically
the last week of October and there's the link to the slides all right so this is our agenda today
again I already kind of covered this the overview of the opens why open matters so go through kind
of textbooks educational Resources and the briefly covered research and scholarship barriers to open
the discussion with panelists and then the Q&A with attendees
here's our uh slides and if you're feeling very active you can just you know chat in the chat here
on the webinar but you can also put these hashtag tags up on twitter and #OEWeek will obviously be
for all of Open Education week but #pfpopened2021 will be specifically for tonight's event
all right so introducing the pan panelists Jonathan BrigantI unfortunately had an emergency
come up and he could not attend tonight uh he cannot present for us so we'll have
uh Kayla McNabb presenting his content we have his contact details available
for anybody who wants to reach out to him more about data he's a data bridge manager at the
university libraries a really excellent contact to have if you have any questions about data
Open Data reproducibility things like that Karen DePauw is always a panelist with us even though
she's not presenting but she's always our are known panelists for this event so she's the
dean of graduate schools I’m sure you all know most of you know if you are attending within the
class Kayla McNabb is the head of instructional content design and design at university libraries
and then I’m Rachel so research impact librarian and then we have our faculty members outside of
the library so Jactone Ogejo oh my gosh I’m gonna say it wrong uh okay he told me right
before this when I’m now I’m butchering it uh okay joe right yes yes he said yes okay great so he's
an associate professor and extension specialist within uh biological systems engineering we
have Thomas Tucker associate professor of creative technologies and then Mary Leigh Wolfe a professor
of biological systems engineering they've all been active in creating or adapting uh Open
Educational Resources and we'll get to hear more from them about those projects at the discussion
all right so we're going to start off with an overview of the opens I’m going to turn this over
to Kayla because we're going to start off with um open ed but just so you know there are different
types of open opens beyond the ones we're going to cover tonight Open Access we'll cover
Open Citations is a relatively new one so it has a lot to do with making sure
that we have the data available so we can do research analytics Open Data Open Education
open research kind of goes under that helm of Open Access
as does Open Science Open Source has a lot to do with software and code
all right and I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to Kayla and I will
try to move the slides along as she talks perfect thank you so much Rachel and thank you everybody
for being here this evening I’m checking out the the preliminary results if you haven't already
responded to the poll please go ahead and do that we'll be kind of checking in with that as we get
to the end of the presentations so it looks like we've got a pretty good mix of folks who have and
haven't heard of Open Educational Resources before so we'll go through this with that in mind um
if you could hit us one one ahead so what are OERs they are freely available and they're
typically online uh they may include some sort of cost though generally that's going to be
just if it's printed so printing and shipping things still cost money so that's what might incur
some sort of cost but they are going to be objects that are openly licensed and what does that mean
that allows for these r's so you are able to read reuse revise retain remix and redistribute them or
we'll look at kind of some specifics of that be a subset of those things
and they're created for educational purposes Open Educational Resources
are created for educational purposes but they could be in a variety of formats so
very typically we hear this in the context of open textbooks and we'll look at some examples of those
but also things like videos handouts software could be considered Open Educational Resources so
we can also think about this in kind of that broader context as well
uh next slide um so if we're using OER all of the licenses that we're about to talk about
um do fall under um still well excuse me they still allow for amount of fair use
for your teaching so if you're teaching and I saw that many of the folks who had already
responded to the survey are teaching or plan to teach so keep that in mind this is not kind of
separate from fair use these are all kind of in conversation with each other
you should make sure that you check any resource that you find to determine what its license
permits we'll look at those licenses here in a moment but that's something that you'll want
to check every time you go back to a resource know your 5rs so reuse revise retain remix redistribute
you really want if you create something you really want it to include all of those and if you find
something that you're going to be reusing for your class you want to make sure that it does
whatever you need it to do in your context if you're going to need to remix it then you
really want to make sure that that is included under the license that you found and ideally
less restrictive the better we'll look at these different licenses on a sliding scale here in a
moment and that's what we're shooting for we're shooting for the less restrictive the better
so let's get a sense of kind of the bigger umbrella of Open Access and then within that
Open Educational Resources um so OER starting with public domain or cc0 so public domain is
not um is not a license per se it's more of a characteristic but that's kind of you can use
that you don't have to attribute it it's something that is publicly available for use and similarly
with cc0 so that does not require attribution you'd be able to include that in something that
you were creating or that you were sharing with your students and could potentially make money
off of it and all of those kinds of things and if we take a step down into slightly more restrictive
then we get into Creative Commons attribution license and this means that you can take
the resource you can remix it you can put it into something else that you're going to sell for money
but you have to give attribution to where that original work came from next we have attribution
and share alike so this means that you have to provide that attribution like we were just talking
about if you're using a work that has this license but you also have to license your work the same
way so with that first license Creative Commons attribution if you find something that has that
uh then you could potentially apply a different license to your remixed work in this instance you
would not be able to do that you would have to use that share alike license next a little bit
more restrictive non-commercial so attribution and non-commercial means that someone would have
to cite give attribution for the original work and you wouldn't be able to make any money off
of it then we put all three of those together attribution non-commercial and sheer alike and
so this is the most restrictive license that we still really consider an Open Educational Resource
beyond this we get into kind of locking down some of the content more and that is really outside the
bounds or at the very most in a gray area with Open Educational Resources so attribution and no
derivatives means that so you could take this work you could um thank you if you want to follow along
with these slides and if you want to access these slides later that link will continue to be active
so with attribution and no derivatives you would have to give attribution say where you
got it from and also you can't make any changes to it but you could still make money off of it
uh you could still incorporate it into something that you're going to use for commercial purposes
and then the next one below that also rules that out so non-commercial and no derivatives
and you require attribution and then the final under something that is still Open
Access but is not an Open Educational Resource would be something that's under copyright but
is available for free online so you can't you don't have these other rights with that piece of
of work but you are able to access it freely and that would still be Open Access so if we go to the
next slide it puts this on that sort of sliding scale and gives you the icons that you will see
whenever you look for these Creative Commons works and these are kind of the standard icon set if
you're looking at Creative Commons works you will see something like this and there on the left hand
side we go from most open at cc0 to least open cc by nc in d um so to kind of give that a sum up
could go to the next slide where do you find OER so say you want to pull
some of these great resources that your colleagues have created into your class
where do you go to do that and there are a lot of different places that you can
kind of start looking depending on your field there are different places that have a lot more
resources of one type or the other but a few places we can recommend that you start looking
OER commons learning objects lesson plans syllabi there are resources there in a variety of topics
Odyssey learning object repository is the learning object repository that folks in my group
maintain and we primarily put resources there that center around our digital literacies initiative
basics of doing research those kind of things and then MIT open courseware so mat has been doing
OER for a very long time and there are some great resources there to consider for incorporating into
into your courses or into your your own open resources potentially and then the
last two links there are two collections of open textbooks so OpenStax in the open textbook library
these are well established they the textbooks in these resources have been reviewed
oftentimes by many faculty there are actual faculty reviews in the open textbook library in
particular so it could really be beneficial to just go and see what's available in your field
but what if you want to make your own OER you can remix existing materials if the license allows an
example of that that we have is the fundamentals of business textbook um it is cc by nc sa
3.0 because there are some aspects of the textbook that the authors wanted to make sure
were not commercialized and they want the pieces to be shared alike so if someone does make a
change and wants to be able to share that out that's great but it needs to continue in that way
so it's free in digital or the cost of printing and shipping for students and that is let's see
I don't know I don't remember the number off the top of my head but it is widely used here and
it is also used at several other institutions around the commonwealth um and then as far as
other creations of OER that we um facilitate and support through the university libraries
we've collaborated with Vet Med to create some virtual learning models so there's a dog and
cow models in VR to better understand anatomy um and so these were created for students in the vet
school to be able to get a good sense of what does the inside of the animal look like what should it
look like how does it work before they're actually working with real animals so that's great for the
students and it's great for the animals and these are resources that are available for
anybody to be able to to leverage so if you have a VR headset you can check out a dog
let's see and we've got some resources in the notes section of that slide as well that we
could also post in the chat for some articles about those projects so we've talked a lot
about Open Educational Resources what about Open Education beyond OER this is Open Education week
there are a couple of different terms that might come up as you look into Open Education
one being open pedagogy so this is a set of practices that center around students taking part
in the creation of their learning experience and that can look like students sharing in
creating their own open resources so that first link is to a project management
for instructional designers textbook that was created in dan Wiley’s introduction
to project management class at Brigham young university in 2012 primarily with his students
work and then the second example there is students collecting cc0 literature and writing supporting
texts in robin DeRosa’s early American literature class so that's an anthology of early American
literature with supporting material that was written by students for students and then kind of
as a companion piece to open pedagogy we can think about Open Educational practices more broadly so
we want the education to be impactful and we want the assignments to be non-disposable
and what does that mean that means that the work is actually going to go somewhere and
impact somebody beyond the instructor so with that assignment in robin DeRosa’s class
those students submitted these kind of supporting texts for these pieces of early
American literature and people still read them out in the world and then it invites students to play
an active role in their learning so that can be about asking them to follow things that they're
curious about but it can also just be having them be a participant in deciding what's going
to be prioritized in the class and what's going to ultimately make it into something like an open
text that comes out of a class so a few different pieces to consider there there's also a link
that I can go ahead and share in the chat and is in the slides for the
Critical Open Pedagogy book by Rajiv Jhangiani it's a great resource for getting into that
and that is a link to him talking about that on a podcast last year teaching in higher ed
uh last piece tying this into some of these other opens if we hit the next slide for me please
there is significant overlap between OER and the other opens so you may wonder why
we're talking about the other opens during Open Education week there's a lot that these pieces
kind of work together OER is generally related to teaching and learning as you might expect
but OER are also often Open Access so you saw that in that graphic um where you can
kind of see that overlap um so kind of keep that in mind that there there is this inner
weaving there um and OER may leverage Open Data in order to support maybe activities in an open text
there are certainly different ways that you could leverage Open Data in Open Educational Resources
and if you want a little bit more guidance on kind of breaking down this intersection between
Open Access and Open Educational Resources our colleague Anita Walz made a great handout um
that you can find at this link and that is in the chat differentiating between Open Access
and Open Educational Resources and that kind of helps break that down a little bit more
but with that I will hand it over to Rachel to talk a little bit about Open Access
all right thank you Kayla
and be sure to put your questions in the Q&A function if you have any
and I’m going to get started talking about Open Access and again this is Open Access kind of has
a lot of a lot of different definitions out there so I’m going to cover kind of the main definition
that we rely on from Dr. Peter Suber a lot of people see him as the guru of Open Access he says
Open Access (OA) literature is digital online free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing
restrictions some people will argue about whether or not that's true or not it just needs to be free
and not necessarily openly licensed but peter super believes otherwise and he's uh
he's really a trailblazer in this area um so what Kayla just talked about regarding Creative Commons
Licenses there are other types of open licenses out there um the Creative Commons License are
probably the most well-known ones and um he kind of says that that that should be attached to the
literature as well so why Open Access uh many lack access so this includes
a lot of colleagues internationally so especially researchers in the developing world we also have
taxpayers who are paying to get to have this research um produced at these state universities
public institutions and they're not actually being able to access that research because they don't
have institutional affiliation government policymakers so you know in legislatures
lawmakers and that's kind of concerning also clinicians I don't have that listed here but
it's concerning that clinicians a lot of times don't have access to research and there
was a study done that showed that around 50 of clinicians are using Wikipedia as the main source
when they are looking up uh the most recent treatments and things of that nature
which Wikipedia is actually pretty accurate but at the same time um it is concerning they
don't have access to those primary sources of research and also you know in NGOs and
nonprofits and the like also lack access and they need access for a lot of different reasons
so scholarly values this aligns very well with scholarly values knowledge has to be available
in order to be built upon and and we'll get a little bit more down to that with the Open Data
presentation and how we have a reproducibility crisis in in science and academia it also does
benefit the authors so we have a couple different advantages here the citation advantage you have
more visibility some more people can find your work can access it can download it can cite it
there's also an altmetric advantage which has to do with online attention to research
so through news media public policy patents all sorts of you know social media lots of different
attention online uh there'll be a visibility as well so science communication uh benefit
um it facilitates a lot of other really great uses for research so those kinds of things are
text and data mining and for teaching so a lot more research can be used for teaching purposes
text and data mining really can't happen unless you have access to the full text
so how do you as a researcher yourself make your work openly available
so uh this is something I’m going to kind of blaze through here really quick I usually spend
like you know 20 minutes talking about this at my workshops but just to kind of
get you the quick answer here there's a few different places you can go the directory of
Open Access journals if you want to publish an Open Access journal is probably the best
resource for you to go to uh the criteria for them to get for journals to get indexed into
the DOAJ is pretty rigorous so you can trust that index Ulrich’s is a periodical directory
it's limited to peer-reviewed research and it also includes a lot of Open Access journals librarians
use it a lot just to get basic information about journals but it is also really useful
to see where your where journals are indexed if they're Open Access uh their peer review and
things like that think check submit is a really great resource if you're thinking about publishing
Open Access and you want to kind of make sure it's the right journal for you and that it has ethical
practices uh we have an Open Access subvention fund here at Virginia Tech we fund I believe
up to 1500 per author per year um and I know that our subvention manager is here tonight so she can
correct me if I’m wrong um and that helps to fund what are called article processing charges for
Open Access journal publication fees and that's really helpful for authors who are trying to
to publish Open Access but they don't have their own funds such as grant money or maybe they don't
have their grant money is already used up there's also discounts available for certain authors
especially authors in developing countries you can click on that link to learn more about those
and then the second type so the first type of Open Access making your work Open Access
is publishing the second kind is archiving and so what you can do is if you publish in this a
subscription journal it's more than likely you can still make that particular manuscript Open
Access and so you can check this database called SHERPA/RoMEO it's a publisher copyright database
it's really accurate for the most part although we do recommend that you still look at the
publisher's website just to make sure the policy is accurate on that database and the best thing
to do is always check your contract that's going to be more specific than the policy but the policy
is a good starting place especially if you haven't actually submitted your manuscript yet you can go
there and find out what you can actually submit so really the best way to archive your work make it
openly available is into an Open Access repository VTechWorks is the institutional repository at
Virginia Tech and any student faculty or staff can submit their work to Virginia Tech’s repository
and we also have a data repository called be VTechData, I believe and you'll get an identifier
assigned to it it gets preserved long term it has a lot of different benefits you can link to it
forever you'll never lose access to it so it's a really nice area or place to get it archived
whereas if you put it on a website or like some place like ResearchGate or Academia.edu
first of all the publisher policies are usually more strict on those types of commercial websites
but they also really recommend that um you put it in an archive even if you do share it on some
other place like that because it's not it's not guaranteed to be preserved and have an identifier
attached to it which means uh persistent access over long periods of time there I have a video
here that I’ve made I actually need to update this link because I’ve updated my video so I’ll get
that updated tonight after we get done with this but um this is a video on how to actually share
your subscription subscription access publications Open Access how to do it the legal way and kind of
go through each of those steps and and everybody can do it it's uh the SHERPA/RoMEO databases uh it
has um most journals I would say some of the more obscure ones it might not have but it 82%
of them allow some version of the manuscript so it could be the pre-print that you submitted to the
journal it could be the post print that already went through peer review but it hasn't gone
through copy editing and formatting yet uh very rarely they allow that final publishers version
but it's still a good idea to get some version of the manuscript Open Access and again you're
going to have that citation advantage altmetric advantage and it's good for the public as well
all right so I just talked a lot I do want to point out a difference between what's called
a hybrid journal and in gold fully Open Access journal so a fully Open Access journal some of
them charge article processing charges and some of them don't I’ve published in Open Access journals
in my field and typically mine don't charge APCs, so I haven't had to deal with it myself
but I’ve talked to a lot of people and I used to run a subvention fund at my previous institution
so I have a lot of familiarity with uh some of the fees and our subvention fund here at Virginia Tech
does not fund what's called a hybrid journal so a hybrid journal would be a subscription journal
that says if you pay us an APC we'll make your article Open Access and our otherwise subscription
journal we do not fund this because it's kind of considered what we call a double dipping business
practice among publishers so we're already paying them for the content and then they're
asking us to pay them again so that we can make your article Open Access and here's another thing
to point out is I took all the average APCs from hybrid and and fully Open Access journals and um
looked at them over time I do need to update this to get the past couple years in here but you can
tell that on average the hybrid APC is much higher than the fully Open Access journal APC
all right so I have a lot of I usually have a lot of questions about how do I investigate a
journal and you know I get an email from somebody and I they want me to publish in
their journal how do I know it's legitimate things like that now in order to qualify to
get to get money from the subvention fund it has to be either indexed in the DOAJ a member of the
Open Access scholarly publishing association or has to comply with the OASPA code of conduct so
you can go through and you can investigate look at see if it's on the DOAJ if it's not
check to see if the publisher or journal is on the OASPA and if it's not then you can still evaluate
the journal based on the code of conduct and I do I can help out with that if you do need help with
that uh but it's kind of just checking to see if they have their you know transparent about their
uh journal editors and boards and things of that nature
um all right and I think that I saw a question in the Q&A so I want to see oh did it get answered
we do have a question um and it was about
um the reputation of Open Access journals um are they well acknowledged in academia yeah
and I think Anita got a good answer in there um there's several different ways to publish articles
yeah so it it does depend on the field too I would say like the sciences the stem fields
probably have more advancement in Open Access than the humanities I don't want to say that
and then have people who are more um well versed in the humanities tell me otherwise
because the open monograph movement is moving pretty um I would say it's going pretty well
but for the most part I think there's more Open Access journals in the stem fields than
the social sciences and humanities and this has a lot to do with the fact that health sciences
were the ones that kind of started out this way and you need to have access to health
research you know the medical sciences so that this helps people to save lives like it's more
imminent right more there's something really big and large at stake here when you don't have access
to that research and I’ll kind of get to that when I get to the why open matters section of this um
but overall like that's why I’m talking about this Open Access journal investigation because they can
be just as legitimate and just as reputable as subscription journals in your field they're not
going to be as old so that means they're not going to have built up their reputation over decades and
centuries because Open Access is still relatively new it's only been around for 20 25 years and you
know that's still considered pretty new as far as academic journals go but that doesn't mean that
they're not well known and they're not respected in the field all right so if the journal doesn't
seem in compliance you should probably move on there's some red flags that kind of seem like
it's a little bit spammy I’m sure that if you've ever published any research at all
you're going to start getting these types of emails I’ve gotten them before um they kind of
don't like to leave me alone I mean they will I’ve actually got an email from somebody who's like
you should publish this in this you know book chapter or this journal and then I tell them
no and they're like can you please tell us why and do I have to explain this but um for the most part
it's it's not too bad it's just they they tend to want uh people to publish with them and to
be completely clear sometimes journals especially if they're developed by researchers in developing
countries they will make legitimate mistakes they're making honest mistakes sometimes and
they get labeled as quote unquote predatory and that can be really damaging to the reputation
when they were just making an honest mistake so try to evaluate them on a fairly on a fair basis
okay
all right so where can you post and to be really clear you don't have to just post your
published manuscript uh if you have conferences presentations abstract even conference abstracts
maybe you could post these on into VTechWorks I post all my presentations into VTechWorks I
do make sure they are accessible before I upload them that's something that's important so that
anybody can read them with a screen reader so you just have to go and register with be VTechWorks
excuse me you can also post disciplinary repositories and pre-print repositories
sorry about that so there are some examples of those archive was the first pre-print repository
it was established I think 1990 1991 so it's been around for a really long time
OSF preprints and preprints.org these are all legitimate ones you can also post on your website
like I said before post on your website is fine but make sure you also post to a repository of
some kind so it's in there permanently and you can always link to it from a portfolio LinkedIn a
profile like an ORCID iD things like that I don't have time to really talk about researcher profiles
today but if you ever want to talk to me about it just email me commercial repositories and um I
shouldn't call these conver I shouldn't call these repositories I should probably change that uh that
wording there ResearchGate academia.edu they don't really qualify as repositories they're social
academic networks and they're they're using and selling your data and they can pretty much shut
down at any point they can also take your work down at any point um because of a copyright notice
from the publisher even if it's not infringing so there's a lot of disadvantages there it's fine if
you want to use them for networking you know it's kind of like if you were going to put your photos
up on Facebook and that was the only place you were going to save them and then you deleted
all of them that would be really terrible like it should be somewhere else permanent
so watch for that non-commercial language and the journal policy if it says you can't put it on a
commercial server then that includes ResearchGate and academia.edu all right so here's an example
of somebody uh our repository manager actually published this article in an Elsevier journal
it's a subscription journal but he did put it the accepted manuscript or the post print into
the Tech works and so when you click on that all eight versions when you're on google scholar it'll
then show you those versions and one of those versions is VTechWorks that anybody can access it
anybody can download it there's also something called the Unpaywall browser extension I highly
recommend that you add this to your browser and you can click on it here and download it
so when you're on any article and it has an Open Access version available in a repository it'll
show up with this little green button here and you click on it it'll take you directly to the pdf
all right so I teach a lot about visibility and one of those things is Open Access but
it's also important to have ORCID to have other profile systems that you're maintaining
and then to promote that work as well and I see that we have a question here so I’m
going to look at this really quick can a journal prevent an author from archiving a pre-print copy
of a manuscript um yeah I would just check out like Anita said look at SHERPA/RoMEO database
that could rule you out if you are really active about posting on a pre-print repositories
and then you submit to the journal after you already put it on a pre-print repository
and they don't allow that then it would automatically rule you out for that journal so
check on that maybe before you post the prefix repository or maybe look for a different journal
so a lot of the questions I get are how do I increase the impact of my work but I’m trying to
change the conversation to increasing visibility so it's through those three main avenues
of sharing and publishing Open Access having online identities and profiles and then promoting
and networking as well which you can do through obviously things like academia.edu but you can
also do on twitter and at conferences through listservs there's other avenues to go through all
right so I’m going to turn this over to Kayla and hopefully click at the right time when I need to
we will all be in that together we learned earlier today that our colleague wouldn't be
able to join us so this is my first time giving this part of this presentation
um and like I said we're all in this together um I will address one question from the ch-
from the Q&A real quick because it refers back to the OER so do OER licenses expire
can a more restrictive OER license become less restrictive over time um so they don't expire
generally and it's something that you would want to think about you could in
theory open something up more over time but putting it back in the box is not going to be
possible because those versions that are already out in the world with that more kind of
latitude license are already marked as such so if folks use it under that previous license
then it does get a little bit dicey so I would start with as restrictive as you
prefer and then maybe open it up more but I would also invite you to interrogate why
you want it to be more restrictive and there are a lot of valid reasons um and and go from
there and we can talk about that more in the discussion with our excellent panelists
so for data um there's a lot of data that exists in the world um and we're considering
data very broadly defined um and its value has increased a lot over the last several decades
folks um for a variety of reasons in a variety of contexts are collecting kind
of as much data as possible in some cases and just hoping that it'll be useful later
um so with all of this data um if you click there we go um the ownership uh the storage um the
accessibility of this data to outside entities is a question um these vast stores of data are
owned by many different people sort in different ways making it impossible for outside entities to
work with this data and either derive some sort of information from them or use it to confirm
the findings of other folks so let's think about that a little bit more
if we're talking about accessing data some common restrictions that you might run into when you're
looking for or pulling data is that there may be non-commercial only restrictions on the data
so what this would mean is if you pull data from a source then you're not able to
process that data and make any sort of money off of it so if you through working with that data
find something that could be really economically beneficial you would not be able to
uh sell that no sharing so if say I pull down a lot of data and run some analyses on them and then
I share that broadly I can't also share a data set that limits sharing I would have to direct you to
the original source and they could change that they could change the data that's in that data
set it could be updated it could be removed so that makes that a little bit difficult as well
limited allowed uses so some data sets that you might access give very specific do's and don'ts
about what you're allowed to do with them and what you're not allowed to do with them which
can be difficult modified data so no original raw data this could be data that's been provided
with some cleaning already done to it or maybe some outliers already removed and if what you're
interested in testing would be substantially impacted by that change that could be a problem
oh and the rules change and they change frequently so the example that we have
on the other side of this slide is from last year about twitter's API so
when we were talking about this in October there had been an update
in uh November or there had been an update in march and there had been a previous update
the previous November so they were on about a six month or less cycle of updates to their policy
and in order to actually understand all of the requirements of their policy
at the time that we were talking about this last year there were several seven legal documents that
were designed for developers that you would need to review plus 55 over 55 general policy documents
that you would need to review to understand all the rules that you're not allowed to break and
if you break them then you're not allowed to use this data anymore so having all of that
all of those different gates that you have to get through in order to use this data makes it
really difficult for someone to look at your research and then come behind and make sure
that you know you did everything the way that you were supposed to that they can confirm what you
did so a few of the things you're not allowed to do based on twitter's API is infer demographics
uh store location data and connect that data with outside data sets so by not allowing those things
you know the ethics of data related to twitter is another conversation to have another time but not
being able to cross-reference outside data sources with the data that you would get from twitter
does really limit the work that you could do with that data right so um thinking about how
the rules of the data set that you're trying to pull are actually going to impact your work can
be really substantial so how do we address this we address this with Open Data and if
we can go to the next slide Open Data is publicly available data they can be universally and readily
accessed used and redistributed free of charge and is structured for usability and computability so
much like the um the Open Educational Resources that we were talking about before
this uh this transparency is really important and being able to actually interact with the data
is something that Open Data allows for so there are two different kind of components
of Open Data that we want to focus on we want the data to be legally open so that's the first
one we're going to look at and that means that um ideally if it can be in the public domain
that's excellent but we definitely want it to at least be reusable so whatever license is on it it
needs to allow for modification reproduction and derivation so you should be able to
um to take that and then run your analysis on it it also should allow for distribution so users can
sell share work and compile results with outside data so if I process run some sort of analysis on
a data set I should be able to share that data set so that other folks when they look at my paper can
also do that same analysis or do a similar analysis and then there should be universal
access no discrimination against specific groups fields or topics so this is um especially when
we're thinking about data sets that we want to be able to globally reproduce making sure that
there is this level of universal access is really important and so cc0 is the standard
practice to copyright data as open according to the handbook that's cited there at the bottom
so we've got that legally open side in our heads useful Open Data often also
has these characteristics so um and these depending on the data set are going to be in
different proportions that's why they're kind of presented this way this is kind of considered one
balance of these pieces so first must have a reason to exist there has to be a purpose
for the data and if there isn't a purpose then why is it being stored storage is not free so
that's one thing Open Data should be useful next there should be clear policies around the data
so indicators of success and so that is to be able to apply it across different
circumstances and across time having those clear policies is going to be really important
next partnerships so policies being clear and consistent also really connects to
having partnerships across institutions across fields that allow for more robust
and timely data to be collected and to be analyzed and then the final piece here is this public
infrastructure so usable site to access and advocate for things based on this data so can
a bunch of people go to that site and download the data at the same time or will it crash the site
what do we expect as the the traffic for that site so these are these are fundamental
questions if you're going to be sharing Open Data that you want to be able to answer
so we've talked about it being legally open what about technically so if you've got a
a set of data that is legally open you can use it um how do we make sure that it's technically open
it has an intended audience so it's got a clearly defined audience and use case
it's not just a bunch of data that's been collected with no kind of rhyme or reason
it is accessible so data is presented in the most useful way to that audience so
you could present the same data in many different ways depending on the context so it is accessible
based on the audience and then the last piece here is that it's not using proprietary file formats so
data presented in a Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet is not universally accessible you
do have to purchase a piece of software in order to access that data so you want to make sure that
the data is stored in a way that it can be opened and worked with on a lot of different platforms
so now we've got legally and technically Open Data what are the benefits of having that kind of data
so first it allows for citizen science to happen
it can empower citizens to be engaged with these questions that are meaningful to them
it allows for solving public problems so more folks are able to contribute to those public
problems and solving them it allows for improved governance better transparency for governments
and potentially better accountability and then it creates opportunities so folks are
able to see potential areas for growth or opportunities and take advantage of those
things like starting or expanding businesses and supporting local infrastructure
so a note on reproducibility as we wrap up this section and thank you very much for bearing with
me scientific validity of results stems from the ability to replicate work and produce comparable
results so we have to be able to go through this process in order to confirm or disprove
the results of other researchers in order to further these conversations so without
Open Data we just have to trust in good faith that the group presenting results did the work
the way we would expect it to be done and that the data that they're working with
is the data we expect them to be working with so Open Data increases
the transparency and the integrity of a project because we're able to verify so
Jonathan’s final kind of word on this is trust but verify so Open Data allows us to do that and it
allows us to avoid this black box of research as he said it um that makes the audience better able
to ensure appropriate steps are being taken in the collection the processing and the analysis of data
so if you have additional questions about Open Data which you very well may uh Jonathan Briganti
is fabulous in answering those questions and we would definitely encourage you to reach
out to him at his contact information here so any questions about data Open Data or reproducibility
please reach out to him I’ll hand it back over to Rachel to talk a little bit about why open matters
all right thank you very much I might have to breeze through all this pretty quickly
since we're almost to seven o'clock and I’ll let my colleagues stay on top of me for that
timing there I’m going to talk about why open matters so first we're going to
jump into the textbooks and educational resources being it is Open Education Week
um there is this report and from oh I’m just gonna see that we have a question over here really quick
uh do you have an example of assignment where students need to use Open Data I’m curious
about examples uh Juliet I’m not sure about the actual assignments that's a really good question
I do know that some journals do require you to deposit your data openly either
with their own repository or with a repository beforehand and provide the DOI
so Anita is going to be answering that as well so this report is a little bit dated
it came out in July 2005 so it was using data and we're talking about data again uh up to 2004
but I think it's important to know that it was definitely we're we're looking at
why course materials so expensive and it's gotten worse since 2005 so keep that in mind as I go
through some of this data uh which I do apologize is a little bit data dated but it is um probably
some of the best report we have out there so from 1986 to 2004 we're comparing these cost increases
uh college tuition and fees go up 240% college textbooks 186 percent overall inflation 72% so
this middle line here is college textbooks and this whole this top line here that's like a whole
other presentation that we're not going to get in today but uh you know something to think about
and then if we look at the average estimated cost of books and supplies it's very different
depending on what type of institution you go to if you're going to a four-year private nonprofit
college that equates to about eight percent of your tuition and fees the cost of your textbooks
if you're going to a four-year public institution such as Virginia Tech it accounts to about 26%
of your tuition and fees and if you're going to a two-year public institution which is where
you know students go who are low-income where tuition and fees is typically much lower
it accounts for 75% of your tuition and fees
so I think something else to consider here is it's very interesting the market in the us is very
different from uh markets in other countries so in developing countries there's other factors that
they have to put in considerations the publishers do when they're setting the cost of those
textbooks in those other countries so they're considerably lower in developing countries for
the same exact book but they have to consider the cost of living and the income levels otherwise the
students won't buy their books and the government probably won't support them and they'll let allow
piracy to happen because they just don't see it to be sustainable but then they'll you'll go
look in places like Australia and the UK and other European countries and there's still considerably
less not as as low of a price as in the as in the uh developing nations but instructors in the UK
are actually this is what this is according to publishers but they're more likely to
recommend several textbooks for students to consider rather than requiring a specific
textbook so their instruction is considerably different there's also less demand for all the
supplemental or supplementary materials that publishers tack on to the textbooks
and higher education is highly subsidized in Europe so it's very different from here
um even when you go to a state university here you don't pay a lot of out of cost
of out-of-pocket costs when you're in European countries uh you're less likely to pay
high costs for those textbooks because you're just not used to paying out-of-pocket costs
uh in the UK and Europe Europe and Australia and New Zealand too so it's a very different
culture it's very different environment and so we have uh textbooks kind of skyrocketing in the US
so if we look at why there's an increased cost
there's a few different reasons uh if we look at the frequent editions that keep coming out
for textbooks currently on average it's every three to four years ten to twenty years ago it
was every four to five years and this is much more frequently with large first-year courses
and the publishers say this is because they are having to produce more content to keep
up to date with what the instructor wants and so on and so forth but this again is according
to publishers so this report uh did interview a lot of publishers and talked to them in depth
so the other thing that is a big cost is the textbooks are bundled with supplementary materials
especially things called access codes which I’m sure you all at this point are familiar with
it they cost money on top of that or they're bundled so students often cannot purchase the
supplementary materials separately and again this is a report from 2005 and I’m going to get to a
law pretty soon that actually made this not legal anymore and if they can purchase them separately
the cost of buying the used textbook with the supplementary material such as an access code
would be the same or maybe even more than just purchasing the bundled textbook and access code
so the discounts are available on bundles and they're often the selling point to instructors
so also instructors sometimes request publication of customized textbook which I think is very
interesting because pretty much what OER are are customized textbooks and educational resources
um and but they're not commercialized so what happened in 2008 we had something called the
higher education or the high education opportunity act as reported by the office of the university
registrar so the intent was to ensure that students have access to affordable course
materials they want to decrease the cost of students by enhancing uh transparency and
disclosure to respect to the selection purchase sale and use of course materials so that's in
the actual law but what does it actually require and how can faculty actually participate to make
this easier for their students so you should be aware of the unbundling of bundled course
materials publishers are now required to offer each item from a bundled course material packet
individually and individual prices and they're supposed to make instructors aware of this
this doesn't mean that it's going to be any cheaper if the student finds a used textbook
and then gets the access code somewhere else like I said before though they also have to ensure that
there's a substantial content revisions have been made to materials prior to ordering a new edition
so if they just make a few um content or you know additions to the text it's not very substantial
they they can't really they can do that but then they have to make you aware that that's what it is
so the instructor can choose not to assign that new edition publishers have to describe the major
differences between the revisions um uh editions of the textbook or the supplementary material
and then this is for our own institution but submit your textbook to order to the university
bookstore on time that helps with the deadline for submitting textbook orders um it's one week
prior to the opening of drop ad for the next term uh there's a the source there goes to the actual
law itself so then we have to ask okay so this happened in 2008 but we're pretty sure
that things have are pretty expensive still right what happened to the price for college textbooks
we have all this transparency but does it actually help so the law was enacted 2008 where you see the
orange arrow pointing on the left and you still see textbooks uh skyrocketing then there was
a disruption in 2017 and they actually started doing more regulation on this so
it's kind of hard to see this is a tiny little graph with all sorts of different
uh data points on here hospital services college tuition and fees and like I said before that is
in skyrocketing even more so than college textbooks
overall and then we have college textbooks and so on and so forth going down here so I mean you can
probably buy a tv more easily that you can buy your college textbooks nowadays a flat screen tv
all right so a lot of text on this screen I should have uh animated that sorry about that but factors
related to the cost of course materials uh 80 but 80 of the textbook industry is dominated by five
publishing companies and I’m gonna get into this with the scholarship and research area as well
commercial publisher practices are really centered on profit making not surprisingly not
so much student success um a lot of it is going more to digital versions they're really pushing
all digital things right now access codes supplementary content technological um you know
quizzes and things of that nature we also have a frequent release of the new editions which I
mentioned removal of the older edition and rentals purchases from the market
um it's also harder to buy use textbooks when you keep having additions renewed and the
instructors require them I know that when I was an undergrad I was using there was an art
history book that cost around six or seven hundred dollars and this was in 2007 2006 I think and um
I think that that was I couldn't afford it so I used my sister's book and she had gone to
school five years before me so I had the sixth edition and I think they were already on like
um the 10th edition of the book or something it was ridiculous and so like the instructor would be
like I could turn to this page and I would have to go to the index to find what he was talking about
because I had refused to buy the book and I still made it through the class with the b so I was okay
um so a lot of that kind of thing is happening uh we're utilizing these opt-out symptoms
systems rather than opt-in systems so they're not really giving us much of a choice on what we can
choose from what they're offering us there's also these very dubious terms of author agreements when
the faculty or the researchers or the instructors I mean are you know writing the textbooks
themselves and they then require their book to be purchased by their students which also shows a
conflict of interest they promise these royalties that will pay for your summer home kind of thing
and the neglect of less profitable areas and disciplines um I can't say for sure but if you
do get a grant from the education fund here it probably would be more profitable than uh some
of the royalties they promised you I mean I can't say for sure but I would I definitely I
did uh Open Education uh grant at my last institution and I actually spoke to somebody
who said that the grant was paid him better than the royalties he was promised when he
published seven previous textbooks with commercial publishers um authors lack a lot of awareness and
incentives and so that's related to the author agreements and they're not being familiar with
what they actually say in their contracts and also not knowing that there are Open Educational
Resources out there and there are other options for getting grants and so forth to develop them
selectors lack that accountability so they're not really required to you know provide
really high quality materials for low for something that's affordable to the students
I think most instructors would agree that they don't want their students paying a lot of money
for their for their textbooks and so forth readers do favor the lowest cost which is not surprising
so they usually do workarounds uh finding the used textbook going in and getting the checking it out
from the reserves at the library uh peer-to-peer sharing networks but because publishers are
abandoning this no this kind of model and they're going into access codes and textbook
rentals and you lose access after that expires after the electronic code expires it's really
really hurting students and making it more difficult for them to do these workarounds
so this is a tweet from this particular Open Education advocate he's a psychology professor
and he was on a phone with a CEO of a major commercial textbook publisher doesn't say who
after he spoke about OER he opened openly acknowledged that quote we have been gouging
students for 100 years point blank without pause hesitation or qualification without shame so
some of the trends that have been happening and are continuing to happening is publishers are
repositioning themselves as software companies trying to say they're more top-tier they're not
just producing this textbook these print materials so you have to acquire all these software tools
and usually these things expire after a period of time you're also forcing the digital versions
which can't be reshared they're licensed they're restricted you can't download them and so on
there's also this thing called direct billing rental programs some of you may have experienced
this before they eliminate those options for students uh it's all digital you
can't get the print version at all they aim to establish this monopoly this licensing monopoly
a guaranteed revenue stream and debts and campa on campus uh department sorry departments on campus
uh additional fees required to keep the materials so you usually students will pay the the you know
the smaller fee to get the material because you know we're all living on budgets as students most
the time and then that expires after a period of time you also have questionable practices around
privacy monetization and the use of student data with these types of licensing e-resources
they're also really facing out those print books and moving to digital only
which isn't too surprising given what I’ve already discussed here
publishers then prohibit eBook sales so you can't resell the book and student safety nets to
libraries this really restricts what libraries can do to help students such as checking out e-reserve
or uh course reserve materials uh through print reserves and uh this this doesn't help
so student responses to these types of high q these material costs you have people going
peer-to-peer networks obtaining international additions go without and looking for material
elsewhere homework software in-class engagement they complete all their assignments during the
first two weeks of the semester when the homework software trial appear during that trial period
so they pay up or they borrow more money or get another job so I know a lot of people take out
their full amount of student loans even if they don't want to just so they can pay for this
these types of educational materials so how do prices actually go down you have to eliminate the
retained course materials these temporary access these rentals no fees to submit homework take
exam quizzes you should do use of inc in canvas quizzes or some other learning management system
faculty adoption of previous editions alternatives to or no textbooks instructor use customization
and Open Educational Resources so that's probably the best option but there are other options out
there if there's for example if you're a faculty member who doesn't have the time or resources to
develop something there are other alternatives that sometimes are available through the library
for example but usually OER is one of the best options out there since it can be customized and
redistributed remixed over and over again so is it focused on cost of focusing on the wrong
topic for the most part yes cost is a barrier for students the goal is to advance learning
so this is more of a question about pedagogy you want to leverage this student-centric pedagogies
and creating using adaptable resources so that instructors may be more effective in facilitating
instigating and encouraging student learning students can be more engaged when they are
really focused on what they select for those classes all right so I’m going to try to breeze
through research and scholarships so since I know it is Open Education week um this is more of my
expertise area and I will try to get through some of this as much as quickly as possible so
one of the things about research and scholarship is when it is made openly available there's
a pretty obvious cost I mean sorry there's an obvious benefit uh when you make it open
there's a lot of threats to human life and health when zika virus became an epidemic in 2016
there was actually a huge crisis with access to research and data during that time and they um
I believe the who although I might be wrong it could have been some other international groups
urged publishers to make it Open Access make all the research Open Access which eventually they
did it they didn't do it immediately but they eventually did make all zika research uh openly
available and this was without researchers paying APCs um obviously with COVID we've seen a huge
increase in the amount of Open Access research uh with coveted research especially being research
being posted on preprint servers rather than researchers waiting to try and get their articles
into prestigious journals which they might still be trying to do but they're getting into pre-print
servers first and they're also looking more to Open Access options such as Open Access
journals overall it's unsustainable to kind of do it this way print-based journal subscriptions
go back before the 1990s um they were by a journal by journal basis so it was a different kind of
business model libraries have with publishers all libraries paid exactly the same price for
the same content and larger libraries paid for larger packages so it was a little bit
different and then the online journals emerged which was something to be celebrated we all
thought that the price was going down but these publisher business models actually changed
to adapt to that model and for their own benefit
so electronic resource licensing emerges you can see a trend here the publishers are doing
licensing to kind of keep control over their content you have these non-disclosure agreements
which means the library contracts cannot be shared with other institutions so we can't actually say
how much we pay for our content uh we can't do these studies where we really see the comparison
and what's called the big deal emerges and at first this seemed really like a great thing
like we're gonna get all this content on one it's really similar to getting a tv cable package but
you can't say no to some of the content and yes to some of the content you have to say yes to
all of it or know to all of it it offers this huge discounts on all these journals with the packages
especially for large research institutions this is a great idea at first so scholarly journals
become more accessible for smaller institutions with these package deals at least initially
but then you see a huge increase in price because you have these increases in price from five to
seven percent uh it's going up exponentially every year so in a research one Elsevier is the largest
academic publisher uh you have on average the mean bundle this is an estimate of uh
one around 1.2 million dollars just for Elsevier and obviously for each of each institution it's
a little bit less so uh r2 would be less and the master's level would be like an r3 would be less
so this is the estimated in a graph form so the blue bar is research r1s and then r2 and then r3
and this is by the publisher so the big five here
are Elsevier springer Wiley Taylor Francis and sage
oops we have something that over time is what we call publishing oligopoly and so if you go
and you look at the data most publishers are going from small to big publishers so they're basically
going from these small society journals where people pay you know a fee and they manage their
journal subscriptions all on their own it can be very pricey and expensive for them and it's also
kind of burdensome so it's very attractive at first to have this sold off to the publisher
and to have them manage it and then to sell it back to the libraries the institutions themselves
but as you can tell this is getting really really um I don't want to I mean out of hand is my first
thought but it's it's definitely becoming more of a trend as we get into the 90s into the 2000s
if you look at this by discipline uh chemistry is was always more of a uh in the couple
of commercial publishers side so around 40 in the 1970s and then it goes up to
around 70 70 to 80 percent and the 2010s and then these are the other stem disciplines but
they're all increasing over time if you look at the social sciences and the arts and humanities
um this is kind of something related to what I said before the arts and humanities have always
kind of had more control over their content in general and they usually don't have as
many journals so that's part of the reason you see such a a small number here because
they're more focused on books and other types of non-traditional outputs especially in the
arts but you see this still increasing over time and of course these other disciplines if you look
from I think psychology had the greatest increase over that 40-year period or so
this is showing expenditure trends at association of research libraries um so if you look at the
top bar that's the e-resources the license re resources that we are buying from publishers
um yeah and we also have the total expenditures here and total library expenditures here but
overall we see the the salary expenditures they've kind of leveled off since about 2006 2007.
and the e-resources have really basically forced us into having a budget that's only focused on
e-resources most of the budget goes to e-resources licensed e-resources so the big deal I’m just
going to quickly cover this you have a university of California tin campus system Virginia Tech
Virginia’s seven research universities which uh manage their subscriptions through that
uh pretty similar price for their big deals uh 50 million dollars over five years 46 million
dollars over five years and our deal expires at the end of 2021.
it's a big business so 26 million dollars annual worldwide revenue if you compare this to other
industries such as apple and music and the box office sales just to get an idea of how big that
is and also keeping in mind that these five uh publishers control fifty percent of the market
it's also very profitable business it has some of the largest uh profit margins of any other
industry any other company in the world and this is partly because they do not
um they don't have to pay their workers just put it that way
the authors the editors the peer reviewers they don't get paid another example here
this is the 2002 price of a journal of Applied Polymer Science and Toyota Corolla was 12 500
and then in 2018 the journal went up to almost 36 000 and the Toyota Corolla went up to 19 000.
uh we do see that the tide is starting to turn a little bit if the plan s this is in the EU
was launched in September 2018 it took effect at the beginning of this year so it's required that
all publicly funded research in the EU has to be Open Access there's some controversy
over it since it does also allow hybrid journals which means publishers are still kind of taking
control of the market funders have signed on to public Plan S so this is pretty notable
and we also have a lot of other publish a lot of other countries and universities around
the world that are cancelling their subscription especially with Elsevier
which is the the largest subscription for most institutions I would say probably all institutions
so MIT is cancelled uh based on its Open Access principles university of California cancelled uh
two years ago yeah just two years ago and they still haven't renewed haven't entered
renegotiations India is pushing up one nation one subscription so always all the research would be
open to their entire uh citizen base uh well anybody living there and then Sweden cancelled
with Elsevier there's there's more examples of this um we still have a long way to go so if you
look here biomedical research not surprisingly has the most Open Access research here it's around 60
and then if you look around these other disciplines um I don't think the humanities
is actually covered here but it would probably be the the smallest amount uh would be showing the
Open Access content and these colors here just a really quick thing green Open Access is uh
author archiving so when you put your manuscript
uh in an Open Access repository or it could be the publisher doing that on your behalf if
the um for example the NIH or some other research agency requires that they'll do it on your behalf
so that's the green Open Access gold is via the publisher then hybrid and bronze and then closed
for more graphs and info on this please see these slides um I think that we're coming to time here
because we need to get moving on to the discussion panel I really do encourage you to check out the
barriers to open I don't have time to cover it I’m really sorry my timing was just not great
on this this has a lot to do with academic incentives and a lot to do with publishing in
prestigious journals and how that's awarded in academia there's been a lot of studies on this and
the tide is turning um so we're gonna just just gonna click through these things to get to the
um other parts of this you can check out good arts law it's really interesting to see
how we are incentivizing certain types of you know publications and you can see the average
number of pages per publication has gone down over time because we have a lot of people what we call
salami slicing their publications so they can get more publications out they can be rewarded for
that and also the um the younger the researcher the more papers they publish quickly which is
showing the trend in that and the number of papers with no citations other than self-citations after
five years has dramatically decreased the average age uh in top journals so this is showing kind of
this trend of good old boys club within journals has also increased over time and we've also seen
with fractional counting which means we're just looking at the number of pages and the number
of authors per publication uh even though the number of publications has dramatically
increased we actually do not see an increase in productivity over time when we fractional
rationalize it all right I don't have time to go over all this there's some good things happening
though these are three major international initiatives for a responsible research assessment
um there's another one here's another one and there's another one and this is just to kind
of promote another our kind of keynotes our feature presentation this week uh Dr. Volker
Sorge I believe his name is pronounced that way and he's going to be talking about weather
accessibility and usability issues for scientific online content so I really encourage you to check
him out if you'd like to learn more about that all right sorry I had to rush through all that uh we
need to get to panelists introduction so I’m going to go around and talk to all the panelists here uh
let's see we'll start with Mary Leigh Wolfe. Dr. Wolfe if you would like to introduce yourself
tell us your department and maybe how you got started with open okay thank you and I appreciate
the chance to come and talk with you all and I just learned a lot and I learned I don't know
so much about all this stuff as you all just talked about so my name is Mary Leigh well
from a faculty member in the department of biological systems engineering here at Tech
I got involved in the open thing really started about 10 years ago I was involved with a project
that was it's uh called a um project between the US and the European union departments in
um the us and departments in the European union in biological systems engineering joined together
part of the one major focus was so students could do student exchange across the Atlantic
but then the significant part for us was curriculum development efforts as well
and so as we worked through that some of the outcomes from that that led us into the open
world there was that we developed the ideas for having an introductory course
in our discipline and then also trying to make things available to people we said oh we could
put together a database of shared materials that then would be openly available since that time
clearly we've learned a lot more and we'll tell you more about that as we go on today
but that's really how it started is we wanted to internationalize our curriculum so thank you
okay um okay uh Jactone would you Dr. Ogejo which I’m sorry if I say your name wrong again
could you take it from here yes uh you know thank you very very much Rachel like you know Mary Leigh
I also learned a lot so you know by name um Jactone Ogejo Rachel you said that correctly
I’m also on faculty in biological systems engineering
I joined or I started with this open uh I think uh right after merely and uh you know
other team members had started but I was much more you know interested in the aspect of the
you know digital library that will be uh you know uh you know mentioned in in um
you know the speech depth and uh uh really you know having seen uh you know what access you know
other parts of you know the world have to you know resources uh when they're going to school I felt
that uh you know it could make a difference in uh you know making contributions to you know
this database that would make these materials available to others without any charge so
all right thank you and finally Thomas uh Dr. Tucker hI I’m I’m from the school of visual
arts department here at Virginia Tech and part of what I teach is creative technology so the
project that uh that I’ve been working on at the beginning origins of it was back in 2017 and you
mentioned a little bit earlier uh is creating a virtual reality dog so this kind of was a need for
the vet school here at Virginia Tech to have this as part of their clinical uh discussion on
where the organs are on the body of the dog and they wanted to do it in a safe and ethical way
and so uh that's where I came in to help out with the CT data that we had acquired almost a
decade before that so we're reusing some old data sets from CT and using pipelines that I helped
develop into organs and 3d objects so you could wear this virtual reality
goggles and you could have an interface design and learn where these different parts of the dog are
so it was a part of a large transdisciplinary team and also had some funding from
the Open Education faculty initiative grant program here at Virginia Tech so
that was part of what I did part of what the project was all right thank you Dr. Tucker
so a lot of you have already mentioned your projects your OER projects that you worked
on um but if you want to delve into it more and just tell us about your role in that project maybe
how you developed it maybe even some of the challenges that came up with it uh so we'll
just go back around again and start with Dr. wolf hey thank you so the first project that we did
um was developing a textbook for an intro called introduction to biosystems engineering
um and originally as we were developing the idea for the textbook um we our group our lead group of
people which included me and Jactone and then two colleagues from university college Dublin
in Ireland the four of us wrote a proposal to our professional society the American
society of agricultural and biological engineers ASABE and we propose these to do the textbook
and the digital library and so we got funding some funding from them for helping to develop this
and then as we were working further on the textbook and I call it is a textbook but it's
a compilation of chapters in the different um technical areas of our discipline each chapter
is written by a different group of authors or a single author or group of authors and they come
from all over the world and our role as the four kind of the league team there the editors in chief
we got all the different parts done set out the a lot of the requirements for the or the
layouts of the chapters etc. and then as we were starting work on this after ASABE gave us the go
ahead kind of thing and the support then I think jack tone probably had the first conversation
with Anita Walz here at Tech and then we both went and spoke with her and that's really by talking
with Anita and the rest of VTPublishing and we got connected then with the open um source the open
source textbook kind of thing or open textbooks so that really was a boon and so our textbook was
just published uh posted online in January um we noticed today I think there's already been 6 500
downloads of the textbook but one of the key things about it is that each of the chapters
is downloadable separately as well so one of the big things there was that now introduction to be
courses around the world or however they're structured in the different disciplines or excuse
me different departments in our discipline can just select their do the kind of customizing thing
and pick what they want to use but again it's free and so that that part is really exciting to us
so I will leave that on the textbook and turn it over to jack tone to talk maybe jack tony want to
talk more about the biosystems engineering digital library and what we're doing to develop that
yep and um and thank you and merely even you know back to the book I think the the
other thing that I really you know liked about uh you know what we did with it was
you know the structure I know you mentioned it where you know we wanted this in a form
that when if somebody is going to be using it then at least you know there are some concepts
that have been you know are introduced then you know you need to show the applications and then
you know some examples so we have we were really big on that in in terms of making this uh to be
you know of use to I think the others you know elsewhere because of you know different teaching
styles and different teaching uh you know preferences and uh you know just uh you know
to segue into whatever the digital um you know library aspect of this is so not everything that
you know we use for for teaching uh you know is it's written you know there are videos
there are pictures and people do have experiences elsewhere so in the spirit of internationalizing
you know our curriculum so that somebody in Australia somebody in South Africa somebody in
India somebody in uh you know japan uh undertaking you know the same you know course I does not have
to travel to some of those places to experience uh or to even learn or know how or what uh examples
uh you know when you talk of donation what does donation look like in in in Australia what does
donation look like in in South Africa so we wanted um a place where we could share these experiences
and therefore you know the digital library do you have a picture can you describe that picture
you know what it is and how somebody can use it in the classroom you have a video that I could use to
teach you know bioprocessing in America you have you know some some data somewhere that describes
you know that you know are collected from a process that I can use in my class without my
students having to come to your location to learn that so we have this you know digital I think
database where we are going to put you know these resources we have sent out you know calls for for
uh you know collaborators or people to work to host it and you know to update or download
material and you know uh use it as you know they they they feel those foods their circumstances
I can go on and on but uh I think I’ll I’ll stop there we still work
in progress we're still in the process of you know completing that uh part of our work
well that sounds wonderful and thank you both for sharing um about the that project and the
ongoing work that's good that keeps going into it and let's see uh Dr. Tucker do you want to
talk about the VR dog and some of your roles and some of the challenges in that project
uh I was writing here on the on the side I I guess I love a challenge and this was a
a high bar challenge uh for this project is how do you take a CT data which is basically digital
slices and create objects out of it and also have a realism as part of that so again like I
said this is a kind of transdisciplinary research so I had to kind of reach out
to people that had software that could extract this data and we reached out to Sterling Nesbit
he's in geosciences to kind of use some of his software so we didn't have to purchase it but
again reaching out to other departments to help solve this we also worked with bonnie smith and
we actually went through a process of a dissection of a dog so we get imagery so we can lay over that
those textures onto these organs and also to help adjust these models are not always
clean we had to clean them up uh adjust them so they looked realistic because the data was so
kind of disoriented because of the CT scan so it was a big challenge it was not just a just one
person's role but it was a interdisciplinary team working together to kind of push like
Thomas you got the heart backwards I think that was the first one that I screwed up on
so working with a team and solving kind of a kind of a new uh product for education uh so that was
one of the the challenges is just developing this team and working on the first prototype
and we went through several iterative processes I call it back door uh programming we only had one
VR headset and one uh VR pc tower and literally uh Michael Napier would meet me at the back door
and let me in and I’d bring in the equipment to set up for the class and so we went through
several classes to see what were the students getting through this VR experience what were we
getting right what were we getting wrong we were constantly getting their feedback on this design
so uh and so it was a challenging all the way through and also challenging like how do we
disseminate this information also how do we get it out to other vet schools that was a challenge
also and I Anita walls was amazing on trying to figure that all out because that was another uh
this is basically what this forum is about but it was a very challenging to kind of figure out what
how to do that this is a whole new software package it's not a publication it's a totally
different thing so multiple challenges but again a great transdisciplinary team and
how that all kind of gelled together was exciting and also kind of a like I said I love a challenge
all right thank you all of you for sharing um let's go on to our next
question I think we have three more questions so what do you believe are
the most significant aspects of the projects you worked on
and I’ll let whoever wants to go first go first on this in case anybody has a brilliant idea pop up
well I’ll start um so as I think about this what pops for me are um you know being freely available
to all potential users is of course an enormous aspect of the project and then a couple of the
other one or a few of the other ones from me are that both of these parts the the textbook and
the digital library are both designed to be global and in terms of that the users the contributors
and the content itself are all international and global and um that's a big one another is that
they both are designed to be dynamic that they'll continue to change over time and be kept current
the way we have the though we call it a textbook you know we always say not in the traditional
sense of the term because we're going to continue to add chapters we actually have three new ones
underway now with new um authors so we're going to continue to add chapters periodically we will also
then publish compilations of new chapters continue to update old ones so that dynamic kind of
feel for it is good and then the last part that I’d like to mention is that the way it's set up
we have the opportunity for contributors to contribute kind of a little nobody has
to write a whole book people can write a chapter they're only 8 000 to 9 000 words
long they're they're short and they're focused um and then also to the digital library they can add
just one you know one photo with metadata so it can involve a lot
of people can be contributors and benefit from it both directions so I’ll stop there
I’ll equal the same and just say that I think you know the fact that this is available and and I
I’ll use you know one of the contributing authors words that it is you know free to the student
is is really you know significant it it makes me happy to see that
I guess uh on on my end the most significant aspect I know number one I wrote down is that
ethical issues we didn't want to harm the animals at all and uh this is a challenging thing like
when you're doing a clinical step part of being a vet and you're trying to find out where those
organs are and all you have to do is press down on the skin and try to figure out is that the liver
or is that the large intestine and so uh just watching uh the students put on that VR headset
and you can actually hear them say oh that's where it is that was like really monumental
and second to be able to make that free for other vet schools uh to utilize is really part of the
the significant part of the the project is watching that be just not disseminated here at
Virginia Tech but other institutions and one of our our goals was also not just having a software
that can download and put on a VR headset but also open source the code so they could actually
copy paste it do or push it to a whole other level maybe a different guI design or hud
design for it or even take the objects themselves and do something else maybe an AR
or a mixed reality with it so uh I think the significant aspects are still growing
each day I think we're finding new ways of taking this data sets in different directions
but again number one was the ethical uh issues uh that we were trying to resolve
that's really interesting thank you for sharing about that I didn't even think about the ethical
issues of that okay so quality and value of your OER so a lot of you have already answered this in
the other questions but what do you see in that value or quality compared to commercial items
so maybe a commercial item already exists or maybe it doesn't exist and what maybe theoretically what
would a commercial item look like if it did exist so think about it in that in that way and I’ll
also let you go ahead and choose who wants to go first since I know sometimes uh you might stall
I could go ahead and start I I kind of wrote down uh a lot of gaming design that you see that you
would play on you know typical gaming console is typically done by a triple a game company
and there's a lot of funding maybe a half a million dollars or more a part of that and so
we didn't have that type of budget we did have a little bit of funding which was great to hire
out for students and so forth but we did look at some VR and AR apps that you could download
mostly I think it was augmented reality apps that you could get from the apple store
and uh they're quite expensive and you could imagine a student trying to pay 30 to 100 for
the anatomy of a frog that has a pretty cool one for a frog so um if you do go into the commercial
venue uh there is a cost and the students are already especially the vet school the students
are already coming out of that school with uh quite a bit of uh you know you know of debt and
so we were trying to figure out how do we cut that down so uh definitely commercial is great you get
a great product but it's also you come out with a great cost and this stuff is takes a lot of work
obviously and I don't know how you can you know for us it was about hands-on learning for our
students so there were several students involved with this project so hands-on learning is really
valuable for you know a research institute and letting them see how they can work with
a large team like this so uh I’m not sure if I answer the question but there is a definitely a
difference in a commercial item versus what we created or totally uh two different scenarios
and I see uh really if you don't mind I’ll just say one one or two things and then yeah I do see
uh you know like the products the book and the digital library that we're building
actually is uh in some cases even you know better than commercial if it existed the one thing
and you know the value is you know equivalent you know and sometimes even more because when
you look at some of these individual chapters actually some of the information if you look at
what we are you know putting out there it's something that's very very you know specific
and applicable uh to uh that uh you know you cannot just find in any any other book
so uh you know the value of that I think may be much much more than
in a commercial book that you know it may not even exist in at all so we are adding valley to
where you know it may not even be existing in you know commercial circumstances so
I’ll I’ll leave it there and one thing that I would add is I feel like um with the OER
that we can really focus on the content the the educational parts the information and not so much
with the on the commercial sometimes it's about the business side of things and you know about
not just the the value of that content and the information so I see that as a difference
that is appealing to some of us and that's why we want to you know want to do that
all right we do have a question from a participant so looking back on your OER creations
is there anything you would do differently if you did it again
anybody want to go first
oh I I was kind of chuckling it's just uh watching uh you know this started like summer
of 2017 I think and uh the challenging with technology is it's always evolving
as always uh you finish a product or project and it's almost already obsolete or like I know with
the VR we had we had the vibe headset and you had like basically it was a three thousand dollar
setup you had to have a pc tower that was powerful enough to run it then you had to have a vibe set
that was like seven or eight hundred dollars and then who has that at a lab for the vet school
so um that was a challenge but now we fast forward to 2021 you can buy oculus rift headset for
and so it's it's exciting but it's also frustrating uh watching this evolution
of prices and uh you know VR is really starting to take off so it's starting to
you know see a product from 20 you know start of a project in 2017 and seeing how it evolved so
um yeah those are a little bit information yeah I think this makes me think that I’m saying about
it if I knew that you know if we knew then what we know now you know it's like what would we do
differently um related to the textbook and the writing and all um we had part of the challenges
there were of course working with a whole lot of different people with the we had authors we had
for each of the different technical areas we had section editors and then we had the
four of us as the overall editors and so that people management part of it
is always going to be there whether it's open or not so that part obviously we learn more
about that thing but we also learned a lot more about how the production of the thing of the book
is really going to work all the different people involved from there's edit I don't even have all
the right vocabulary I’m sure Anita is shaking her head but you have just all those different
people involved and so we've learned a lot about it and I and I’m actually quite relieved frankly
that we designed this to be a dynamic book so that we are going to have more chapters written
so that everything we've learned up to now I think we'll make production of the next chapters
a whole lot more straightforward because we know a lot more about what to do there so
yep uh eternally agreement really and uh what I will add to that just for the laughs
is just uh I would go and take yoga classes
yoga I would encourage a lot of that and you know so that you just because you have to
persist you have to hang in there there's going to be lots of challenges and if you
are going to go to the end some some days may be very difficult to go through so
that's why I was throwing that out there for the loves and I just like to add like Dr.
Tucker was talking about with the equipment and all of that changing over time with the digital
library and when we started talking about this we were talking about a quote database
then we talked to some computer scientists and they told us no it's called a digital library
oh okay so we get that and now as we've talked to librarians across the country essentially
now we're told that's different and then watching the presentation here today
about these different what OER commons and the odyssey learning object object repository there's
these tools are changing so rapidly that that's that's a challenge too so figuring
out how to stay up to date with that stuff for the particular thing you're working on I think
is a challenge it's an exciting challenge though because progress is being made so that's cool
well if you came up with all the library terminology as well as the acronyms
then you get like a medal or something
okay so this oh sorry this is our last question and uh you know what guidance
or advice would you share with future professors who might want to do this kind of work
and also if Dean DePauw has any questions for the panelists uh you can you can go
ahead and ask them too that might pertain to your own students but
I’ll let you think about that while we get an answer from our panelists on this question
and again anybody can go first who wants to go first um because I know sometimes people
get that idea in their head faster than others I I guess I’ll go ahead and start um I just wrote
down it's a it's a really a labor of love right because uh it's uh it's a lot of work
um involved with this you know uh and also number two uh work with a great team
you know uh I was lucky enough to work with a great transdisciplinary team that were all
very encouraging exciting about what we were doing I mean it was cutting edge and it was
multiple multiple challenges across the project and number two or three uh just be patient
uh like I said this started 2017 and it's you know it's kind of it's kind of grown it's gone from
a bow vine and now I think they're working on a horse and so I know uh that's exciting so this uh
if you're passionate about you have a great team just just be patient with it and just
keep working through with it and be get used to working on a shoestring budget
and learning how to stretch it as much as possible and love conquers all with all that
I think depending on what discipline you are in as a as a faculty member or in a professor of
whatever sort is there's going to be different um attitudes about doing this and so as Dr. Tucker
said you know I kind of thought of it going in with the quote right attitude and motivation that
you're doing this for the the kind of greater good the educational good and it's not about
royalties um depending on the area you're in some authors do get a lot of royalties
off of textbooks that are widely used not not a lot as Rachel pointed out but there are some
so I think that part and then the other one I would the other advice I would give is
to try to work out as many of the details up front as you can I I would suggest not
blindly creating materials and then going and looking for an outlet for them
um but work out as much as you can obviously as we've all three said things change over time and
you're going to make adjustments but still go in with your eyes open a bit so yep and
you know with all that you know being patient and accommodating I will I will reiterate that it's um
at the end of it all I think you know everybody is happy even you know the link that was really
Dragging you when they see the final product uh you know everybody really really gets happy so
I wanted to go back to what uh Mary was saying is uh definitely go to uh your department and if you
do want to invest a year or two of your life doing something like this uh make sure you that's gonna
if you're on the p t process uh make sure that is something that will help you out sometimes
it isn't uh a good thing for your p t process if you're not the pI so just make sure you're your
director is you know how how to be advised on that journey and that could just mean that you're doing
a publication on this transdisciplinary research so make sure you're balancing it out uh that's a
really good advice on uh what who gets credit and how that will help you in your p&t process
if that's your pro uh if that's your goal I reiterate a couple of points on that Rachel
would you mind yeah go ahead go for it Kayla uh I think those are those are really great uh
suggestions and really great guidance to provide for these uh future professors and I think it's
really important to remember that why you're doing it question um you know if this is if it's about
helping students in a certain way or if it's about sharing knowledge that you've gained and
you really want to make sure it's just out there in the world knowing exactly what your goals are
for it is going to help you decide what avenue you should take how it's going to figure into your
promotion and tenure process potentially how much time effort or money you can put into it that's
really going to help if you can be as explicit as possible with yourself about why you're doing this
and keep your audience in mind so like we talked about
when we talked about the OER section you know there are there are lots of different ways that
you might share this information um but if it makes sense to include your uh your students then
make sure that you know what they need um and the best way to do that is to ask them
so if you can get feedback on resources from actual students you know keep keep in mind how
you're going to get that feedback and have a good feedback cycle for the resources that you make
yeah thank you so much for everyone and um this kind of ties back into what I was
talking about which I didn't really have much time to with academic incentives but it's really going
to be dependent on the individual department or unit or center where you're working I
really try to find you know this is this is a privilege you know when you land in a
department or a center where they have a really open culture about what they expect from you
so but you can also use the the power of persuasion too so keep that in mind as well
try to convince people to use the data show them that it's making a difference and it's important
and if you can convince them that you're going to get a publication out of it as
well that that could be another persuasive way to go as well so yeah we only have
two minutes left and I want to ask dean to pop she has any questions for the panelists
before we wrap up thanks and answer I don't have questions for you but I um
but I do want to put a couple of things in context if you don't mind um
it was in the 1990s I know that's a long time ago for some of you uh real youngsters and I was
publishing one of the books I would publish and what I wanted to do is have it be available to
everybody and to do things by chapters um and the answer was no um and they just couldn't do that
I thought okay fine so I just talked that out um I was at Washington State University at the time
and I ultimately found my way into being dean of the graduate school there
and I heard about this university that had gone um with electronic thesis and dissertation a hundred
percent um and I thought well that's cool but I was not as brave as Virginia Tech because we
had it as an option for the ETD um little did I know I was going to end up at Virginia Tech and
run into an individual who I hope is still on the call or on the webinar and that's Gail McMillan
um and Rachel will you ask about what project um you know my our colleagues worked on well I didn't
know that my project was to take what Gail had um planted in my head because I remember in fact it
was just next door in the glc auditorium where we had one of the first Open Access lecturers
and I really didn't know what Open Access was in the 16 years ago now and Gail consistently kept
telling me more about it and it was just Open Access and now we have all of the opens and so
I wanted to acknowledge that because I think it's really important for the work that Gail has done
and the project that all of us need to be on is making things open making education open um
we have gone too too commercial tuition is too high and all of those things and we have forgotten
the basic message of education and research is to ask questions answer them and tell others
about it and do it without charge um and so that's my message and some some of the students in the
class are probably getting that sense anyway about looking at how higher education has to change
but that would be you know the message that I would like to add I just want to
thank uh Thomas Mary Leigh and Jactone for um seeing the light um spending the few years and
and and now you're part of the converted if you will I want to thank all of the folks in in
the library for the ongoing work that you do because now the whole message
we have to be about is getting more allies um and making this all happen and I don't know
how many more opens can we come up with we don't need to answer that right now but but thank you
thank you so much for sharing that Dean DePauw that's really great and um
Gail did respond but to all panelists she says thanks Karen for the shout out so she's still
on the call with us um those are great has a great context and story I know we don't uh
we're out of time now but if anybody in the attendance has additional questions um I’ll
stay on for a couple more minutes if anybody else wants to but if not we can go ahead and wrap up
uh will this recording be posted somewhere yes it will it'll be posted on be VTechWorks within
the next week so if you're registered excuse me it should be put the link should be posted on
that link that Kayla just sent but it will also be emailed to you if you registered for the webinar
I’ll get out an email uh to the registrants that has the link to the so the recording so and it'll
have the captions on it as well so that's kind of the part that can be a little bit time consuming
one question for um maybe the panelists or maybe some folks at the library but do you have any
advice for kind of doing the first time trying to integrate an open textbook in your class so
going into a maybe it's your first time teaching and you decide that you want to start with an
Open Access textbook um what are the kind of different things that you need to consider versus
kind of just going with the the previous textbook that whoever taught the course before you use
I can't I could take a stab at that to begin with I think um any time that you start to introduce
a new resource you want to ask yourself what it's going to do for your students
so I think if you've got really clear learning objectives for your class then it's going to be a
lot easier to compare that to what's excuse me to what's offered by your textbook and to maybe what
was offered by your previous textbook and to get a sense of how you might translate one to the other
I know depending on what your department is there may be some things that are really
dictated to you you know the structure of the course or
kind of what content you have to cover so that may be more limiting and I would I would also say
if you can't transition to an open textbook right away that's okay it's
okay to start with adding in some Open Access readings and maybe start with adding in some
Open Educational Resources to supplement and kind of transition over time if that is you know
given your context if that's what's going to work best the more open it can be the better for sure
okay um and really quick I just want to also thank Dean DePauw
for over the the years that she's been here making Open Access such a focus point of her classes and
making sure we're included in this class I don't know how we'll reach so many graduate students
without her but we really really want to thank her for being such an uh open advocate
well the um thank you um and this as far as I’m concerned this class is going to continue
um to be taught and Open Access has got for the opens as
have to be um a part of it so you can reach the grad students through the grad school and to them
I’m looking at the ones in in this room as well because they will reach out as well that's great
I could also put in a quick plug for our consultation system that we have in the libraries
and I’ll put a link to that in the chat so if you're a student and you're interested
in online course design Open Educational Resources Open Access many many many topics we have folks
who are specialists in those areas that do offer consultations one-on-one consultations
that you can find at that link in the chat and we would love to meet
with you I love talking about pedagogy so if you want to set up a time we can do it
great well thank you all for attending if you have any other questions you can
like like Kayla pointed out go through the appointment system she loves talking about
pedagogy I love talking about research impact and research assessment which sounds incredibly nerdy
but trust me I love it so please reach out to us if you want to talk about these things
and let us know if you have more questions
and thanks to our panelists as well sorry that was a little bit late
thank you for inviting us yeah absolutely it is fun to talk about this now you know
yeah and really quickly Rachel I I love that you brought up that
art history book because I remember in 92 I had to pay 85 used for that book
yeah yeah I’d actually think my sister got it from my aunt so it was like a really dated version but
I was like I was like 18 years old I wasn't going to pay 600 700 for an art history book yeah
insane so it's like that's my rent exactly all right well thank you so much I I guess I’m gonna
check out yeah yeah thank you all for coming thanks for being here yeah thanks so much