Category: Open Access

More than a Mausoleum: The Library at the Forefront of Digital Pedagogy

This is adapted from a talk at the Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities, February 11th 2017 in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed a shift in the ways in both everyday folk and academics encounter the world. The promise of web 2.0 and the rise of the network has seen the input of every individual increase in importance. For universities, the consequences of this go well beyond social media presences or heated debates in comment threads, it challenges the very nature of the ivory towers our universities are constructed on top of. Some of the more nostalgic set have opined about the “death” of the traditional library and how universities need to “Save the stacks.” Are we losing the traditional library to chase digital trends?

Even I got in on the fun…

No longer are libraries cenotaphs of long dead books but a growing organism contributed, curated, and built by the members of the university community. A focus on digital pedagogy, allows librarians the flexibility to enter this new age of librarianship with a clearer idea of what we’d like the library to be 10, 15, or 20 years from now.

Not a library, a real cenotaph. (Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0)

Rick Anderson tells us it is a commonality amongst new librarians to say that the collection is dead. Rather than death, I think of it as a transition as significant as the one from scroll to codex, or manuscript to print.

I am choosing to illustrate how I see the future of collections shape up in the digital future. Buildings come in different sizes and shapes, staff perform different roles but collections, that is items preserved for use by research are common in most if not all library experiences throughout history. The collection forms the backbone of our pedagogical role.

With this in mind what are the principles of digital pedagogy in modern librarianship?
  1. Student voices matter, as much as established ones, in the conversation.
  2. Access goes beyond the limits of the library and campus
  3. The future of library is based on student needs both pedagogical and inspirational and the collection needs to mirror this.

By focusing in on the creation of scholarship by students into collections we are building upon the library’s core historical strengths while improving the teaching done in classrooms. We also exhibit examples of student work and learning to the world in perpetuity.

Librarians are often assaulted with comments that “all information is on the internet” and while many have struggled against this assumption and beaten it back in deference to our job security it is a fact that the internet has fundamentally changed the way that we receive information. As Lyman Ross and Pongracz Sennyey comment in “The Library is Dead, Long Live the Library” published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship  “the Internet has lowered the cost of propagating information to negligible levels. This fact diminishes the value of local collections and services. Libraries are no longer islands of information.”(Ross and Sennyey pg 146)

And as the digital world encroached on the library, as it did on most of our lives and interactions, the edifices faded. First it was the building, allowing access outside of the footprint of the traditional library, then it was the staff who became teachers rather than guardians, what happened to our prized collections?

David Lewis in Reimagining the Academic Library comments that “Until quite recently what constituted the scholarly record seemed clear, or at least we understood that portion that was the library’s responsibility.” (Lewis 32) But that now we have entered a new stage of ambiguity caused by digital objects. Information Literacy exists against this backdrop of unclear scholarly records.

This has led some researchers, David Lewis included, to argue that the maintenance of non-unique print collections should no longer be a focus of academic institutions. Instead, digital collections, costing significantly less to maintain and often times infinitely more usable and accessible than singular print copies. While a shift away from the collection of books and toward the teaching and the impacting of students is necessary, I argue it is not an end to the collections based approaches that define the library.

While I do not completely agree that our print collections are no longer necessary, our communities are pushing our hands when it comes to demanding access to more digital materials, outside of the building, and off of campus.

The loss of the stacks is mourned by many nervous colleagues. Some of this nervous energy has prompted change in library circles. When the Association of College and Research Libraries introduced a new framework for information literacy, it was met, as all change does, with both praise and scorn.

Part of this framework was a large redefinition of the task of research, which increasingly takes the focus of librarianship away from books and dust and places it into the classroom.

One movement in particular that I believe is of note here is the idea that of “Scholarship as Conversation”

The framework states that “Communities of scholars, researchers, or professionals engage in sustained discourse with new insights and discoveries occurring over time as a result of varied perspectives and interpretations”

Part of this is the necessary focus on citations as a communicative tool between the researcher and the past, but buried in here is the way in which we can use the tools of the digital to promote our student’s incorporation into this community.

“New forms of scholarly and research conversations,” the framework continues, “provide more avenues in which a wide variety of individuals may have a voice in the conversation.”

It is through digital pedagogy that we have the chance to offer our students keys to this conversation, either through publishing, the creation of exhibits, or the production of knowledge itself. Libraries then need to be at the forefront of this transition, from static collections based and traditional “gatekeeper” mentalities to the research driven and student driven collection creation.

While librarians have been quick to reject the gatekeeper mentality, faculty in fields across campus have been hesitant to give up the reins of the academic conversation. Some institutions have had long histories of undergraduate research prior to the age of the internet, it is the openness in the digital world that prompted a revolution in student publishing.

Char Booth explains in “Open Access as Pedagogy” that digital publishing “grants privilege and power to student authors, gives them space to assert their intellectual agency, allows them to enter the academic conversation and…maybe alter some professional paradigms.”

Entering this academic conversation encourages students to reject the monolithic scholarly record that dominates our ideas of the University, and telling students their voice matters allows a reconfiguring of the idea of research. The best way to understand research is to conduct it yourself. There are more tangible reasons this is innovative.

Char Booth continues “With that newfound power comes responsibility; with Open Access comes exposure…leads these already ambitious students to dig deeper into primary and secondary sources, to think harder about their meaning and value to their scholarship and to argue more effectively and write more forcefully.” (Booth 6)

Feeling that student work is often too “un-polished” or “not up to par” with the rigorous examinations that come after years of graduate school. Some are worried that student work will impact their own standing as professional academics. Bad student work with a faculty name on it reflects poorly on mentorship.

In giving the keys of scholarship to our students we promote not only their work but the University as a whole; much like open access creates exposure for us on the Tenure Track, our students become examples. By opening up the collection to reworking by students we not only improve their education but we break down the barriers that hold new ideas back.

It rejects the model of the library as a singular direction where the collection is controlled by the librarian and lent to the student or researcher. Instead it breaks down those barriers to encourage the exchange of information and ideas across all levels.

Nowhere on campus is better for this kind of interdisciplinary engagement, and nowhere is better suited for the task of preserving collections, albeit digital ones, then the organization trusted with this preservation since Alexandria. This is not a death for the library, or of the collection, but a new beginning.

Theory as a keel: Developing a critical framework for open education, Part 2

“If open is the answer, then what is the question?” was posed by educator and researcher Catherine Cronin (National University of Ireland, Galway) in her keynote address for the Open Education Conference 2016 in Edinburgh, UK last April. This question challenges our community to explore the why behind the how driving open education initiatives, and reveals the need for a body of critical research examining the same.

Jamison Miller, Ph.D. student in the School of Education at William & Mary, hopes to develop a framework that balances critical analysis with practical implementations, and provide the open education movement with the foundation to help move it forward in a socially responsible manner. He credits his affiliation with the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) with providing an invaluable support network for doctoral students studying open education. The group helped bring Jamison to Krakow last spring for the OEGlobal Conference, and will be supporting a trip to Cape Town for this year’s conference in March.

Continue reading “Theory as a keel: Developing a critical framework for open education, Part 2”

The Rock and the Hard Place (Part 3): Being Open For Change

Two years ago the department in which I work was charged with developing a new organizational structure in response to changes in the scholarly publishing landscape.  Reflecting, presenting, and writing in various venues about this, it’s hard to avoid the ad nauseam reference to change – change is the new normal; embrace change; anticipate change; be the change you wish to see in the world.

In my previous post, the second in this three part series, I noted that the literature is growing in supporting the fact that flipping (changing) the subscription model to open access is an attainable reality, and that a will to do so is what’s needed.  My experience rethinking acquisitions and resource sharing workflows to support this changing landscape lead me to believe there is more than will at play.

One problem many libraries are aiming to solve with reorganizations, is the inadequate support of e-resource and open access workflows resulting from predominantly print based workflow and organizational structures.  This is interestingly parallel to an observation Van Noorden makes regarding the costs (that translate to high pricing) of traditional publishing and open access models. He writes:

“Whereas small [open access] starts ups can come up with fresh workflows using the latest electronic tools, some established publishers are still dealing with antiquated workflows for arranging peer review, typesetting, file-format conversation, and other chores.  Still older publishers are investing heavily in technology and should catch up eventually.”

Investing heavily is an interesting lens with which to consider the tensions at play in the subscription model and open access and is often the starting point for change. Investment connotes the shared driver of money at stake.  But investment of time, thought, and resources are also very much at play in exploring alternative workflow and organizational structures in these same spheres.   And because both involve people, solutions are not always a matter of simple arithmetic.

I had the opportunity to take notes for parts of the OA Symposium held at the University of Kansas recently, which was aimed specifically on open access funding alternatives to article and book processing charges (APC/BPC).  As I took notes for the symposium, I listened for specific connections to the subscription model that might lead to actionable solutions in my circle of influence. From almost every participant there was a common call for: concrete, actionable solutions (that do not reinvent the wheel), connections, and momentum.  Not surprisingly, these same outcomes are desired by those involved in reorganizational efforts to address and support such changes.

Breaking down any large problem — like institutional reorganizations or flipping subscription based or APC models of open access — requires both an ability to see the actors involved and the connections at play.  Both cases need a good dose of facilitation and process mapping.  In the OA Symposium participants did a fair amount of idea-generation, but also worked together in small groups to break down the processes involved in the APC model and its connections to many local and international players.  Proposing alternative models addressed the practicalities and anticipated challenges of implementation. Some of these proposals mentioned connections to subscription model in general terms; others offered more specifics.  I starting thinking more about the workflow and organizational implementation on a couple of these ideas.

Common funding models for open access initiatives, besides funding APC, are investing in open access memberships.  This is somewhat like subscription-based membership in consortia, which aim to reduce individual cost of participants and garner negotiating power in numbers. But a new (to me) twist on this model proposed that instead of modeling the price of participation on FTE or Carnegie classification (as the subscription models commonly do), perhaps differing levels of participation could be more voluntary, like endowments. Taking this a step further, I wonder if the options to invest as a silent donor would attract even more willing participation.  While contrary to the more public investment desired by open access advocacy, this recognizes a more guarded approach the subscription model workflow sometimes takes in managing messages about investment.  Take new e-resource trials, for example, which on the face of it represent no actual monetary commitment. However, a decision to even pursue trials may be carefully considered against messages that might appear to over promise the availability of resources that cannot be realistically afforded.  Such a decision might also  work at cross purposes with existing renewal workflows in negotiating better deals. To be clear, the need for budgetary accommodation in subscription renewals does not prevent libraries from considering new resources, but an awareness that the complexities of that messaging should be recognized.

Another, perhaps controversial twist on the membership models was tying participation with a commitment to reinvest subscription dollars along various timelines. (e.g. 1% – 100% over 10 years).  The incremental nature of this approach is also similar to subscription renewal workflows, which operate in annual incremental percentages increases (e.g. multi-year renewal deals often negotiate a pricing percentage cap on increases).  Again, its success with subscription workflows may come down to a question of transparency.  As with some licensing negotiation terms, a public, unified statement of commitment often helps get such clauses addressed in negotiation. Whether internal, or a transparent part of the negotiation process, finding a way to flip the negotiation of price cap percentage to a price reinvestment percentage is an interesting concept.

There are million other tiny ways to begin rethinking subscription and open access workflows in concrete ways. My next concrete step is to consider the steps recommended in the OA2020 Roadmap which is teeming with concrete practical solutions for subscription and open access budgeting and reporting, assessment, negotiation, and more. Being present at KU’s OA Symposium allowed me to pay attention and consider realities I hadn’t been aware of and take stock of how much more I can learn and potentially contribute.

 

References

Richard Van Noordern, “The True Cost of Science Publishing,” Nature 495 (2013), 426-429, doi:10.1038/495426a

Is Open Access Enough? Strategies for Healthier OA.

I’m a salesman, and the hardest part of my job is encouraging people to buy. As a Digital Scholarship librarian I manage the Institutional Repository (IR) and peddle Open Access (OA) to students and faculty, who, despite enthusiasm in our field are sometimes skeptical about web based and OA resources. For a long time, librarians have championed OA in the light of the greater good that access will provide. We very often cite the evidence that OA increases impact factor and citation counts for our faculty, while librarians like Char Booth show the ways in which OA empowers students to publish and contribute to larger scholarly conversations. Unfortunately, in the recent past we’ve seen high profile rejections of the OA model. The most notable of these is the American Historical Association’s recommendation against OA deposit of History Theses and Dissertations. This has been debated and framed as “protecting the most vulnerable” in the academic profession. Inherent in this is a distrust of the open access model as a legitimate form of scholarship (despite arguments to the contrary). Anecdotally, I hear stories of faculty discouraged from publishing open access because of the lesser prestige associated with these journals.

Low faculty involvement in the Institutional Repository and suspicion of OA are symptoms of growing concerns surrounding the intellectual weight of OA resources. There are some in our universities who will see Char Booth’s assertion that OA is good pedagogically for students, as evidence to this point that OA journals and publishers do not have the weight that traditional “brick and mortar” journals have (ie it is good enough for students but not good enough for faculty.) For a long time I have explained the importance of OA to my faculty as a discoverability and impact issue, but, evidence has shown it is a quality issue as well. Just because availability of research increases its use, most often through FUTON (Full Text Online) bias, this is not indicative of the caliber of a resource. Therefore, Librarians shouldn’t dismiss our faculty’s concerns as a stodginess or an unwillingness to publish in web sources, but instead view them as part and parcel of larger debates of what makes research influential, impactful, and important.

I have seen this in my limited experience as a new librarian at both my graduate school and my current institution. Predatory journals and publishers work to capitalize on our enthusiasm for OA to entice our libraries to purchase, and our faculty to publish in, less than reputable journals. This is where our enthusiasm hurts the people we’re here to help, and hurts the overall image of OA. That is why I believe that librarians should encourage more than just openness in publishing; we should encourage quality. These are not mutually exclusive.

A result, perhaps, of the glut of false information on the internet we are suspicious of the quality of online sources. Open sources because of their very nature exist outside of the familiar boundaries of the expensive and locked journals of yesteryear, and so they are presumed to lack intellectual weight. How do we as librarians combat this in our efforts to encourage OA? For libraries with OA funds, we should only fund journals that appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and we should investigate every publisher who appears on the market. We should become well-versed in resources like Beall’s List that show predatory publishers, and we should warn each other about new and shady publishers. These sources are not set in stone so we should be open to talk with publishers about what we desire from open access publishing. We should hold our own hosted journals and monograph series to the same standard that our University Press partners and influential journals do. By doing this we do not limit who can publish or what can be published, but we ensure that OA journals and repositories will be treated with the respect that we know they should. The result would be that all open research including student research (which is often seen as unpolished or unready for the limelight) will be more impactful because of the healthier state of Open Access. We are approaching a moment where open publishing could be as accepted, especially for tenure files, as established sources.

Alas, all of this open information is useless if no one is reading it. We should make it a point to include OA resources into our database instruction. Why isn’t the Institutional Repository taught in our class sessions as a resource for students to use? Why do we always point to our paid databases rather than OA ones? There are two common sense reasons for this, one being that we pay for these resources, and two that these resources are “legitimate,” as in they are peer-reviewed and, often, backed by universities or organizations. Open Access in some ways counteracts the elitist undertones of this kind of thought. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Open resources are not seen as legitimate because we do not treat them as such, and legitimate resources do not use them because we do not believe them worthy. As Daniel Dorner and James Revell remarked in 2012, about IRs and OA, they: “must also be seen by information seekers as an accessible information resource whose content is useful to their needs”1 This worthiness is built not on availability but on expectations of quality. Hence, increasing the use of the IR or of OA resources will show that they are a worthy home for higher quality projects. If we expect people to submit to OA sources, we should encourage them to use the materials that are already housed in them.

Out of the Margins: Reflections on Open Access Week 2016

Please welcome our new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger Lily Troia (@LilyTroia), Digital Services Librarian at the College of William and Mary, primarily working at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in digital scholarship, open access, and research data management.

This year marks the 9th annual International Open Access Week, a celebration that engages the global research community in issues surrounding openness. Open Access Week was first launched in 2008 by SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and student partners, and seeks to raise awareness of, and encourage participation in, open access advocacy, working towards the goal of making openness the default in research. This year’s theme, “Open in Action,” aims to motivate individuals, institutions, and organizations to take concrete, actionable steps towards increasing open access to scholarly materials.

Access to research and scholarly articles gets to the heart of the library and information profession’s ethos. Conditions around access to information have the power to sharply segregate society into haves and have-nots—a circumstance acutely represented in the serials crisis academic libraries have been grappling with for 20 plus years. In a 2013 TEDMED talk, Elizabeth Marincola, CEO of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), warns of the repercussions of this commoditization of information, and a society in which only students at the wealthiest schools have access to the best research.

The open access alternative represents a commitment to the basic tenets of scholarly pursuits, and recognition of the incredible distribution potential of digital technology. The rise of the Internet Age has irrevocably changed the economic landscape for countless industries, especially those involving intellectual property, so it should come as no surprise that scholarly publishing would also face a similar reckoning. Yet open access offers all stakeholders an opportunity to evaluate what’s broken, what needs to be maintained, and to collaborate to create new methods and tools for communicating the fruits of research and academic labor to the widest audience possible.

The benefits of open access might seem obvious, but to many in academia, they are not. In a recent webcast Q&A with Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and author of the seminal work Open Access, Suber pointed out 30% of journals are now OA, and roughly half of peer-reviewed articles are OA after publication within two years, indicating incredible progress towards the goal of making open the standard. A recent report revealed the growth rate for open access articles double that of published research articles in general. Despite these heartening statistics, Suber noted librarians continue to be the drivers of most open efforts, a necessity to the campaign, but one that will fall short without equal engagement from faculty and researchers. Continued (and amplified) focus on outreach will be crucial to the movement. Certainly the public’s right to know should resonate with many, especially when considering taxpayers fund a good portion of the research. The limitless analytical potential of text and data mining across wide swaths of intellectual output cannot be understated. For some researchers, the requirement to share data or their articles may be reason enough, yet the benefits of increased exposure, substantial citation advantage, fostering of collaboration, and opportunities to have huge public impact, should be continually reinforced via communications and policy.

Since its earliest days of inception as a grassroots, scientist-led initiative, open access and the related efforts around open data and open research have successfully shifted the conversation in scholarly communication, with funder requirements for OA the norm, and self-archiving allowances by for-profit journals common. While the cause has certainly advanced, bolstered by the momentum accompanying public access mandates, cultural shifts in academia, especially those surrounding tenure and promotion, have been slow to respond, and wading through this extended transitional period has resulted in traditional models and subscription costs maintaining a firm foothold. Researcher participation, most notably in the humanities, is still far from universal. Scholarly communications librarians, those working with institutional repositories, and university administrators[1] reveal concerns about slow shifts towards faculty buy-in and acknowledge researcher misconceptions around open access are prevalent.

While the open access movement is specifically focused on scholarly journals, it represents a broader shift towards openness made possible by networked technology. Open data has been at the center of the research community’s discussion surrounding reproducibility, and has many other implications: data sharing can stimulate innovation; like new analytical tools, it enables new research questions to emerge when datasets are combined, it serves as an incentive for better data documentation, and it can reduce costs associated with research by eliminating redundant efforts and other inefficiencies.

In addition, librarians must be ready to support non-traditional uses of data and collection materials – like digitization of archival materials, artistic projects, or software programs. While tangential to the serials-focused movement, special collections and archives must be involved in open initiatives, and educating information professionals working in these fields will be paramount to developing a unified message and building strategic alliances across the open data, research, and science movements.

Suber acknowledged institutional change is among the hardest hurdles, yet implored librarians to maintain optimism, and encouraged actionable efforts such as blogging about open access, publishing their own works in OA outlets, and refusing to peer-review for non-OA journals. Advocacy to increase open access is needed now more than ever. Many organizations, professionals, and policy-makers are responding to the call, with targeted work aimed at building both internal and external support, and development of policies and platforms that promote greater participation. It is critical these conversations are inclusive, and identify (and work to deconstruct) the privilege and power structures inherited from our communities of practice. In a recent blog post, April Hathcock, Scholarly Communications Librarian at NYU, calls upon the open community to address ways the movement simply recreates the dominating “Western neoliberal research institution . . . fully colonized across the globe;” and notes any transformation of scholarly communications must demand openness and transparency in its own discourse.

Above all, open access advocacy is about collaboration with all research communities, and the broader public, who are also key stakeholders—and investors—in this process. We must form alliances with like-minded publishers, expand our role in digital scholarship, and build public awareness around the ways that open issues touch all of our lives. Advocacy also involves enlisting the support of our institutional administrators, anticipating and addressing faculty concerns, engaging early researchers and even undergraduates, and ensuring all academic librarians are confident in their understanding of copyright, open licensing, and new modes of publishing.

Forward-thinking institutions like William and Mary are creating new positions such as mine, focused on facilitating academic digital services, expanding open research, and recognizing the vital importance these roles play in promoting a healthier flow of scholarly communication. I feel incredibly privileged to have been tasked with organizing our International Open Access Week events here at William & Mary Libraries, and view these outreach and educational activities as essential components of open access advocacy and action.

In 2009, when asked to give his outlook for the future of open access, Suber referenced the sage words of computing pioneer Alan Curtis Kay: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” The outlook of digital scholarship is riddled with unknowns, so it is up to us to engage various stakeholders and audiences, enlist their support in open access initiatives, and empower the academic community towards sustainability. It is up to us to ensure the dissemination of information is not stymied or stalled by lack of action, and to stand firm in our commitment to make certain the future is open.

[1] See more on this discussion (specifically in the context of IR participation) in a recent series of blog posts and responses: Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository?; Institutional Repositories: Response to comments; Repositories vs. Quasitories, or Much Ado About Next To Nothing