Author: Dan Heuer

Categories
Open Access

On Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress

For those of us in the OA community, some whiplash-inducing news broke earlier this week: Elsevier acquired bepress. I learned about the purchase from a listserv email, pointing to a blog post. My initial reaction was that surely this must be the fake news we’re hearing about these days, since I hadn’t seen any press releases from bepress or Elsevier, and such a partnership seemed sort of antithetical, given how libraries tend to see Elsevier and the OA movement as diametrically opposed (I equate bepress here with the OA movement, since they’re best known for Digital Commons, an institutional repository that many libraries use for supporting their OA initiatives). After some digging around, I found the press release and James Comey’s “mildy nauseous” feeling sank in the pit of my gut.

I shared this news with my colleagues at a Library & IT leadership meeting yesterday. Since folks on the IT side of the house are not as familiar with Elsevier and the OA movement, I told them to imagine that the famously-orphaned Harry Potter announced with great joy that he was being adopted by Lord Voldemort. I realize this analogy is over-the-top and unfair, but it describes how I felt after hearing the news, and I do think it sort of describes the tone of the acquisition.

I often use Elsevier as a foil when I evangelize open access. They’re a great antagonist to the OA protagonist I paint. Here’s an easy way of preaching the OA gospel:

  1. Look at your annual spend with Elsevier (probably a lot)
  2. Calculate what percentage of your materials budget that is (likely a big slice of pie)
  3. Look at Elsevier’s profit margins (30.7% in 2016)
  4. Determine how many of your faculty published with Elsevier in the past year (they publish lots of good and important journals, so it’s probably a decent amount)
  5. Point out that most author agreements ask the author to forfeit his or her copyright.
  6. Figure out how much Elsevier has paid those professors for their excellent scholarship (hint: $0).
  7. Look at point # 1 again.

I like using that approach when explaining the merits of OA because it’s based on real numbers/dollars, and it nicely illustrates the fact that the University is paying for access to scholarship that it funded and that its scholars produced. From here, professors are usually more willing to hop on the OA train in one way or another. Some are gung-ho and try to publish in a gold OA journal, while the more skeptical or those whose disciplines truly value publication in specific titles might opt for a green OA approach. We’re very happy with green OA.

We use bepress’s Digital Commons to host our institutional repository, where our authors can deposit their final manuscript per our Open Access policy. This allows the Bucknell community to read scholarship that their colleagues have written that we might not subscribe to. It also allows anybody in the world with internet access to benefit from our faculty’s scholarly output. Otherwise they’d have to pay $31.50 to download the article.

It really does seem so bizarre and backwards that our annual subscription fees to bepress, intended to support our OA mission, are now going into Elsevier’s coffers.

I’m very happy with the Digital Commons platform, and I’ve had nothing but wonderful experiences with the folks at bepress I’ve worked with, but this new partnership strikes me as tone deaf and seems philosophically discordant. While I don’t think we’re planning to abandon ship with Digital Commons just yet, it would be naïve of me not to start investigating other options.

 

 

 

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Uncategorized

On staplers

Anybody who has worked at a public service desk can do two things very well: (1) quickly tell somebody how to get to the bathroom and (2) refill/unjam staplers (at the Library Services Desk, besides answering questions and checking out books, we’re also pretty good at handing out pens and highlighters).

Apparently we’re not as good at providing stapler support as I thought: a few weeks ago, The Bucknellian published a satire piece lambasting us for our egregious dearth of available staples. Our regular Swingline staplers, apparently, were no longer cutting it. They were constantly running out of staples, getting jammed, or getting stolen. With such a dire need on our hands, what were we to do? We did the only thing we could, and we bought the Rolls-Royce of staplers: the Rapid 5080e Professional Electric Stapler. This puppy can staple up to 90 sheets at a time and is guaranteed to last for at least 500,000 staples. Its packaging touts a low noise level (perfect for libraries), and its high-capacity magazine (5,000 staples) ensures that it’ll go a long time without needing to be reloaded.

Not wanting to incite stapler envy, we quietly installed our newest acquisition next to the printers in the Courtyard. I believe our efforts were a rousing success: writers at The Bucknellian took note of the library’s newest feature and took credit for their hard-hitting investigative journalism that brought students what they demanded. Well done!

Categories
Open Access

New York Times and Open Access

I was dismayed when The New York Times put up a paywall around its online content back in 2011. I get why they did it, but I was accustomed to getting their great content without the need for a credit card, username, and password. Living in central Pennsylvania, it’s impossible to get home delivery (and trust me, I’ve tried). Several local stores and gas stations carry a handful of copies, but you have to get there early in the morning to guarantee a copy (it’s often impossible to get a copy of the Sunday paper after 10 am).  An online subscription was a tough pill for me to swallow at the time, given that I didn’t have a physical artifact to hold on to, which would look nice on my coffee table and makes a great weed blocker in my gardens when I’m reading it.  And as an avowed cruciverbalist, the online edition does not allow me to indulge my daily ritual. Times change (no pun intended), and I no longer have any reservations about online-only subscriptions, so I’ve been an online subscriber to the Times (plus crosswords) for awhile now.

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Screenshot from the NYTimes homepage on November 7, 2016

This morning when I opened the NYTimes app on my iPad, I was greeted with this headline: “The New York Times to Offer Open Access on Web and Apps for the Election.” What caught my attention more than the fact that they’re offering free access was the way they phrased it: they used the term Open Access. They could have said “free,” “non-paywalled,” “complimentary,” etc., but they made a conscious decision to call it OA. I wish they used the phrase in the article itself to help contextualize my understanding of their rationale for using that term, but it appears only in the headline.

As an advocate for OA scholarship, I think I’m glad to see the term appear on the New York Times‘s homepage. My hesitancy here is that it’s not truly OA. The content is gratis, but certainly not libre. And when the clock strikes midnight on Thursday, all of the journalism that was freely available will once again be cloistered behind the paywall. Me being the eternal optimist, I’m seeing the glass half full here: non-subscribers will have free access for a period of time, and the phrase Open Access gets some big-time exposure, which will hopefully advance the cause. OA is really a paradigm shift, so making people aware of its existence and what it is and why it’s necessary is really the only way to get that pendulum swinging.

Categories
Conferences

#BUDSC16

I had the privilege of attending #BUDSC16 (Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference 2016) this past weekend, which was coordinated by some of my wonderful colleagues here in Library & Information Technology. I was not involved in the planning or coordination of the conference, so I had the guilty pleasure of being able to attend a conference at my own institution as a regular attendee.

The conference’s theme this year was “Negotiating Borders through Digital Collaboration,” and as you can guess, collaboration threaded its way through just about every presentation I attended. While much traditional scholarship (especially in the humanities) seems to be solitary work, digital scholarship, almost as a virtue, employs the work of a variety of contributors with diverse backgrounds. As our VP for Library & Information Technology, Param Bedi, noted in his remarks, it’s rare to attend a conference where you have professors, independent scholars, students, librarians, instructional technologists, and administrators one one room, but that’s definitely the case at #BUDSC16. The conference was preceded by a Crossing Borders summit, where the (intentionally) small group of participants sought to hash out many of the questions surrounding digital scholarship, such as: where does it (administratively) live, where are skill sets missing or duplicated, and how can we tear down departmental silos that might be hampering opportunities? Unfortunately I did not attend the summit, but I was amused (and very much encouraged by) one of the outcomes of the summit: the coining of the term scholaboration and the launch of a website/wiki related to it, which you can find at scholaboration.us (I like that the top-level domain is .us, which I’m reading as not United States, but us: we, all in this together). I’m eager to follow the progression of the wiki and to watch it grow, and perhaps to scholaborate on the wiki. 

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Standing-room only at a #BUDSC16 #s2c: Defining Student Success through Digital Scholarship Initiatives.

One of the most inspiring presentations was #BUDSC16 #s2c: Defining Student Success through Digital Scholarship Initiatives. As you an see in the picture on the left, this session was standing-room only. Students from Gettysburg and Lafayette spoke so passionately about their scholarship and how embracing digital techniques really helped them to do something new. The students’ research wasn’t necessarily related to each other’s, but they were in cohorts organized by their schools’ respective libraries and used similar tools (such as Scalar) to organize and showcase their research. The cohort model and the use of a shared tool really seems to have severed the students well; they really seemed to grow a deep sense of camaraderie and trust, which I’m sure encouraged them and helped them trust their instincts, which I’m helped them push the envelope and dig deeper in their research since they all seem to have a sense of ownership over their scholarship, which is so great to see, especially at the undergraduate level. 

Like most of the sessions I attended, the two keynotes were remarkable. On Friday night, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom (assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society) spoke about VCU’s new master’s program in digital sociology. Her keynote was deep, engaging, and very funny at times. I think it’s the only keynote I’ve ever seen that got a standing ovation at the end. The second keynote, given by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, assistant professor in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, was also captivating and eye-opening. She showed how Google, which might be viewed as an impartial spitter-out-of-the-most-relevant-information, is definitely not so and is unfortunately plagued by racist, sexist, and misogynistic results. It really underscored the need for a deep understanding of ethics and the need for subject matter expertise for those creating the algorithms underlying search interfaces.

If you have some time, I’d encourage you to scroll through the conference hashtag on Twitter, #BUDSC16 (also embedded on the righthand side of the page), to see what you missed if you weren’t here. And while you’re at it, start watching the #BUDSC17 hashtag so you can find out the second registration is open for next year’s conference.

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Uncategorized

2016 Authors Reception

On the afternoon of October 4, Library & Information Technology, in partnership with the Provost’s Office, hosted our annual Authors Reception, where we recognize faculty and staff who have written or edited books or book chapters. This year, we were honored to showcase 61 works by 41 authors, representing 25 departments. For a full list of submissions, click here.

We asked a few professors to speak about their works and their writing process. Rafe Dalleo (English), Anna Paparcone (Italian Studies), and Carol Wayne Wright (Religious Studies) all gave wonderful snaptalks about their current scholarship. It’s great to see how the library is supporting their scholarship and to be able to see the physical manifestations of their hard work and passion.

Video credits:
Filming: Brianna Healey Derr and Sawyer Owens
Editing: Matt Butler

Categories
Open Access

International Open Access Week 2016

Happy International Open Access Week 2016!

What is Open Access? Peter Suber, a leading voice in the OA movement, describes Open Access scholarship as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.”

On October 4, 2011, the faculty of Bucknell University approved an Open Access policy that grants the University rights to make their journal articles Open Access by publishing a copy in our institutional repository, Digital Commons. This means that faculty are able to upload their post-peer reviewed final manuscript to Digital Commons, so that researchers without subscriptions, or those who cannot afford expensive subscriptions, can access their scholarship for free, from anywhere in the world, as long as they can get online. Not only does the free accessibility lead to more downloads and citations, it serves as a public good by removing barriers to access.

For more information about Open Access, Bucknell’s OA policy, and how you can participate, please visit our Open Access Publishing and Scholarship page.

Categories
Conferences

WMS Global Community and User Group Meeting

I just returned from the first-ever WMS Global Community & User Group Meeting (#WMSGlobal), held at the OCLC headquarters in Dublin, OH. It was a great conference, but as all worthwhile conferences go, it was a whirlwind and felt too short (leaving at 4 am on Monday and returning at midnight on Tuesday makes it seem even more like a blur).

Unlike preOCLCvious WMS conferences, this one was global (as opposed to regional), so it was great to see how our international colleagues use WorldShare. Several librarians mentioned that because WorldShare is cloud-based, they do a lot of their transactions on iPads with bluetooth bar code scanners, which helps create a more personal interaction. Instead of the “please approach the bench” approach to requesting research assistance or to checking out a book, staff can help patrons find, access, and check out items at a more personal level (although this would be even better if we had RFID tags in our books). It’s great to see many libraries taking advantage of cloud-based solutions to help break down traditional barriers and make the process of discovery and access seamless. Considering the recent announcement that ILLiad-like workflows will be available in WorldShare (although it will be a separate product than WorldShare ILL), I can immediately see benefits here for ILL (pulling and updating concurrently–fewer touches per transaction). As I depend less on my computer and more on my other devices to get work done, the ability to do more in a browser without having to be tethered to a desk is great. As OCLC continues to mature their inventorying abilities for WMS, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to come up with an excellent mobile inventorying process for making sure we can account for our books and for making sure they’re findable.

Though the scope of the sessions I attended varied from technical to philosophical, one emergent theme I picked up on is the increased use of patron-driven acquisitions. More and more libraries are leveraging the scope of WorldCat to expose a wealth of resources to their patrons, allowing them to start their research with the best possible resources, not just locally-held ones. Bucknell’s library has been just about 100% PDA for about 4 years now, and it seems to be working very well. It was encouraging to hear other attendees say that they’ve heard of Buckenll’s bold PDA strategy and that they’re starting to adopt a model based on ours. Building collections based on what your patrons tell you that they need is a great first step, but it’s not enough. Building relationships with other libraries, depending on resource sharing to fill gaps, and cooperative print sharing seem like the best set of tools to ensure you’re serving your patrons best.

On a personal note, I had a great time at the conference, made some new friends, and found some trends to start following. I had a tour of the OCLC headquarters, and below you can see a few photos that I took. I was able to go in the OCLC data center (as big as 3 basketball courts), and I got to see the WorldCat cluster of servers. Unfortunately, photography is strictly forbidden in the data center, so you’ll have to use your imagination.