Open Access Publishing Round Table Minutes

ATTENDING: GayleBradbeer (Auraria), Rick Boeder (Auraria), Chris Brown (DU), Alan Charnes, JayatiChaudhuri (UNC), Carol Dickerson (CC), Yem Fong (UCB), RebeccaHarner (CC), Cynthia Hashert, Dave Hodges (UCCS), Joe Kraus (DU), Joan Lamborn(UNC), George Machovic, Rose Nelson, Chris Sugnet (CSU)

Libraries and the Alliancegave updates of activities:

The Collaborative Librarianship editorialboard is working on bringing up the first issue of that open access journal. IvanGaetz (Regis) is the current editor. The publishing and management software forthis e-journal is the widely-used OJS (Open Journal Systems - for more info seePublic Knowledge Project at http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs).George noted that OJS is a separate silo and it is not an archive. There mightbe a grant opportunity of integrating OJS with Fedora.

CCcreated an informational guide about Open Access at http://www.coloradocollege.edu/library/index.php/guides/open-access.Rebecca Harner described the successful Open Access forum held at CC. They tookthe Harvard mandate as a hook to develop interest in attending the forum. Theforum was informal and included lunch. They advertised it widely on campus. Thefaculty that attended was a good mix from various disciplines

JoeKraus suggested following the open access blogs at Harvard, Stanford, and theOpen Access Directory wiki as a way of keeping current and becoming informed.

CSUwants to get on the radar of the V-P for Research.  They have developed policies using the Cal Statemodel and started with the VetSchool. Idea is forfaculty to submit a form when they submit an article for publication thatspells out what their rights are as an author and what they are going to dowith the article.

YemFong reported that they have participated in the ARL/ACRL scholarlycommunications institute. The CU Boulder faculty assembly has been discussingopen access and there is a library committee working on an open accessresolution. This resolution to support open access will go to faculty assemblyfor adoption. They are going to survey select faculty to ascertain how muchthey know about open access and institutional repositories.

At UNC,they have a scholarly communications committee, have attended the ARL scholarlycommunications institute, and are seeking ideas from this group.

Aurariahas considered sending participants to the scholarly communications instituteand is identifying faculty or administrative partners. They are seeking ideasfrom the round table group as well.

Issues, Challenges, Initiatives of OpenAccess

Sustainibility - Artstor is sustained by subscriptionsand Carnegie Mellon backing. DOAJ is asking for contributions. Other OApublishers ask the contributing authors to pay and in some cases the universityadministrations and/or libraries agree to subsidies these fees.  Locally, DPL makes lower resolution imagesavailable but will charge for higher resolution.  Therefore, the ADR will have an e-commercefunction with the money going back to the institution.

Textbooks and Course Support - Rice University Press is becoming anopen access publisher. They are purchasing rights to publish 10 e-textbooks.Chris S. pondered the possibility of using IRs to mitigate the cost oftextbooks. Faculty could put their own textbooks into the IR. Faculty will verylikely put their own supplementary course information into the IRs. Boulder has createdshared syllabi, a social networking tool for Teaching Assistants.

Quality and Peer Review - Some faculty question the quality ofopen access publications. Commercial publishers lobby faculty and tell themthat "their" journals are under attack by OA initiatives, that impact factorsand quality are eroded. This is less of an issue as peer review is used andmajor players are entering into open access. In many cases, OA journals havegood impact factors. Knowing where to post OA journals (Sherpa, Romeo, DOAJ)raises impact factors. Libraries need to educate and work with faculty todisperse these fears. Faculty need more information/explanation about whattheir author rights are.

Metadata - Chris B reported that Oregon Statehas set up a true federated search using Library Find which is open accesssoftware. Oregonhas most of EbscoHost's metadata available in LibraryFind and they do monthlyloads of new content.

The Alliance asked Elsevierfor their metadata to put under the local umbrella of a next gen catalog.Elsevier said yes but put a price tag of about $250K on the metadata, so atleast some publishers view metadata as a valuable asset. That is why OhioLinkand others have huge archival repositories of e-journals and contracts thatretain hosting rights.

Alliance Digital Repository

The Alliance is buildingportals for all the participating institutions that will result in a searchableinterface and pull the ingested content back out. There will be 12 "scopedviews" and then one "global view" of what the individuals institutions decideto show as open access. With this individualized branding, the libraries willhave an excellent marketing tool.

The Alliance is working on abroad set of template agreements for us the use. All types of formats will behandled by the ADR. Currently, there is no video viewer, but Media Player, RealPlayer, etc may be used.

ETDs - For theses and dissertations, the Alliancewas worked with Proquest that if ETDs go into the Proquest portal, the Alliance gets a copy of thecontent and the metadata and it will be put into the ADR. A "pre-submissions"copy of the ETD comes to the ADR therefore, it is somewhat different than theProquest version.

However,working out local university/college policies is still a challenge. Somestudents are concerned about open access. They think that they might want topublish a version of their dissertation as a monograph, but are concerned thatit would lose value if it is available through open access. It is up to thestudent to tell Proquest if they want their EDT to be open access or not. Thestudent fills out a form with that information. If they check NO to openaccess, it will not be open access in the ADR. Perhaps the Graduate Schools could advise students to check the YES toopen access box on the Proquest form.

Datasets - Inputting raw datasets are a problem topull out because the numbers have to go into "something". Carol brought up thepossibility of dataset curation and preservation which via collaboration may bean area for possible grants. Chris S suggested that Univ of Michigan is lookinginto dataset curation.

DU isputting materials into the ADR in 3 categories: 1) library documents, 2)university documents, 3) faculty submissions. DU has something like 10K digitalobjects and is in the process of loading into the ADR. Because some of theseimages are huge, it is a labor intensive project. They have been working withthe legal counsel to come up with a unified agreement for the facultysubmissions into the ADR...a "deed of gift". Faculty will be instructed in how tocreate metadata for their submissions. They are developing a purgecycle/policy.

Undergraduate Research - Another possibility to investigate isthe buzz around undergraduate research. UCCS described their Journal of UngraduateResearch. They did a survey and targeted Political Science and Sociologyfaculty to broadened the undergraduate research scope but did not have the kindof faculty response that they hoped for. Several institutions indicated thatthey had departments devoted to undergraduate"something"... research, artistry,experience, etc. SPARC has a conference on undergraduate research.

Grants - Carol Dickerson is looking for possible grants to pursuein the area of open access and the ADR. Mentioned previously were the OJS/Fedora and the datasetcuration/preservation ideas. Other ideas that surfaced: 1) fast-tracking aportal for the School of Public Health, 2) Growing the CreatingCommunities/Neighborhoods initiative into an "Encyclopedia of the West" into whichunique content for the region is included (think "Encyclopedia of Chicago"),and 3) Partnering with k-12 public schools in developing a database of syllabi.