ACS Publications announces open access initiative for primarily undergraduate institutions – American Chemical Society

“The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) is pleased to announce that it is sponsoring open access publication for corresponding authors at qualifying primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). “Overnight, this program makes it possible for researchers at 114 institutions to publish their work in ACS journals, open access, at no additional cost to the researcher or the library,” says James Baldini, vice president of global sales, business operations and analytics at ACS Publications. “We are excited to generate awareness of this program so that authors at PUIs can immediately begin enjoying the benefits of sponsored open publication with ACS.” …

The program is available to any PUI that doesn’t offer graduate degrees in the sciences and that subscribes to the journal section of the ACS All Publications Package. This offer lasts the duration of the institution’s subscription, with no limit on the number of research articles that can be published open access during that time. Corresponding authors can opt in to open access when they sign their publishing agreement with ACS. Should each enrolled institution publish a modest number of articles as a result of this program, it will represent in excess of $1 million in ACS open access content….”

Colleges Should Reward Efforts to Make Research Open | MIT Libraries News

“We applaud the August 25 memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research that calls on federal agencies to develop policies that will provide immediate open access to the outputs of federally funded research (“‘A Historic Moment’: New Guidance Requires Federally Funded Research to Be Open Access,” The Chronicle, August 25).

The potential benefits of immediate open access to research articles and to the data underlying the research include improving rigor and reliability, increased opportunity for reuse of data to ask new questions, faster and wider dissemination of new knowledge, broader participation in the research process, and the potential to reduce global inequities in publishing of and access to federally funded research.

Along with a diverse community of long-time advocates of open scholarship, we welcome the new OSTP guidance and its potential for accelerating a transition to a more open and equitable scholarly ecosystem. Funder requirements, however, are only one element of a complex system of norms and incentives. A major barrier to the widespread embrace of — and therefore the ultimate success of — mandates like the OSTP guidance is the degree to which scholars experience current incentive systems as at odds with practicing open scholarship. When individual career success incentives and reward systems — as codified in hiring, promotion, and tenure standards — are experienced as misaligned with open scholarship values and mandates, individual scholars are left in an impossible bind. Left unresolved, this misalignment will undermine the potential positive impacts of open scholarship generally and the OSTP guidance specifically, as many scholars are likely to navigate the seemingly inherent tensions via pro-forma compliance at best, and active resistance at worst. Something has to give.

The good news is that universities can make simple changes to hiring, promotion, and tenure practices to ensure that the work scholars do to make their research openly available is recognized and rewarded. Including language in hiring, promotion, and tenure guidelines that signal that open sharing of research outputs, and the impact of that sharing, is valued, will go a long way to aligning the incentives for career success with the practice of open scholarship — making what is now increasingly required, also what is rewarded.”

HELIOS Launches with Focus on Collective Action

On March 31, 2022, presidents and high-level presidential representatives from 65 colleges and universities participated in the first convening of the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS). HELIOS emerges from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. Current members collectively represent 1.8 million students, faculty, and staff. The key outcome of the meeting was a clear commitment to collective action to advance open scholarship.

Encouraging impacts of an Open Education Resource Degree Initiative on college students’ progress to degree | SpringerLink

Textbooks are traditional and useful learning resources for college students, but commercial texts books have been widely criticized for their high costs, restricted access, limited flexibility, and uninspiring learning experiences. Open Education Resources (OER) are an alternative to commercial textbooks that have the potential to increase college affordability, access, and instructional quality. The current study examined how an OER degree—or pathway of OER courses that meet the requirements for a degree program—impacted students’ progress to degree at 11 US community colleges. We conducted quasi-experimental impact studies and meta-analysis examining whether OER course enrollment was associated with differences in credit accumulation and cumulative GPA over multiple terms. Overall, we found a positive effect of OER degrees on credit accumulation and no significant difference on cumulative GPA. Taken together, these results suggest students are maintaining their GPAs despite taking more courses, on average. This suggests that students taking OER courses were making faster progress towards degrees than their peers who took no OER courses.

College of DuPage’s human services program adopts open educational resources to lower textbook costs for students

“Eager to expand access to educational opportunities, the Human Services program at College of DuPage is taking advantage of the college’s Open Educational Resources (OER) program.

To date, more than half of all Human Services classes at COD utilize OER to make attending college more affordable for students….”

Expanding OER statewide – AACC 21st Century Virtual CenterAACC 21st Century Virtual Center

“Getting access to physical textbooks has become more difficult during the pandemic. Campuses are closed to students, and the cost of textbooks is a growing barrier.

The North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) launched an online library of educational content in December to provide faculty and students with free digital materials to enhance teaching and learning.

The cloud-based openNCCC is an OER platform, also known as open education resources. The initiative enables educational entities to create, share and access a library of digital materials that can be modified to adjust to student and faculty needs. The platform will support new approaches to teaching and provide equitable access to quality educational materials throughout the state….”

NestFlix Season 1, Episode 5: The OERevolution @ West Hills Colllege Lemoore – YouTube

“This episode features our OER Librarian, Kelsey Smith, as she explains Open Educational Resources, licensing, attribution, and open pedagogy….along with some of the highlights of our ZTC degrees and the OERevolution@ WHC Lemoore that has revolutionized our courses and saved our students over $3 million in textbook costs!”

 

 

 

 

Adopting an Open Access Policy at a Four-Year Comprehensive College

“THIS CHAPTER OUTLINES THE STEPS TAKEN TO IMPLEMENT AN open access policy at a public, midsize, four-year institution [The College at Brockport]. There is no “one size fts all” in policy-making, but the authors intend to provide motivation for others to continue to work on policies that can enhance the scholarly profle at their schools….”

Participant Experiences and Financial Impacts: Findings from Year 2 of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative | Achieving the Dream

“This report expands on last year’s report with updated course and enrollment data as well as new findings about students’ perceptions of their OER courses and the institutional costs and actual student savings of OER degree pathways. A final report in September 2019 will include findings on student and course outcome data. Here are several highlights from this report that caught our attention:

  • The Initiative has spurred significant expansion of OER courses and enrollments at participating colleges.
  • Students find OER materials more relevant, easier to navigate, and better aligned with learning objectives than traditional textbooks.
  • Faculty see increased student engagement with OER materials.
  • College leaders see OER degrees connected to other institutional strategic goals, including affordability, increased access and equity, decreased time to degree, and improved pedagogy.
  • Students realize significant savings from use of free and open course materials, savings that can help them with financial challenges that might interfere with their ability to continue and succeed in their program of study….”

Free Textbooks Are Not Always Free: New Study Analyzes OER’s Costs to Colleges | EdSurge News

“When professors shift to assigning Open Educational Resources instead of publisher-produced textbooks, the move typically saves students money (and it can be a significant amount). But OER is not free, since it costs money to develop the materials, takes time for professors to evaluate and adopt them, and typically involves other campus-support services as well.

report released last week gives perhaps the most detailed accounting of the pricetag to colleges looking to make signiciant moves to OER….”

ATD? ?College? ?Presidents? ?Introduce? ?Congressional? ?Staff ?to? ?the? ?Power? ?of? ?Open? ?Educational? ?Resources? ?at? ?Capitol? ?Hill? ?Briefing | Achieving the Dream

“Achieving? ?the? ?Dream? ?President? ?and? ?CEO? ?Dr.? ?Karen? ?A.? ?Stout,? ?Bunker? ?Hill? ?Community? ?College? ?President? ?Dr. Pam? ?Eddinger,? ?and? ?Odessa? ?College? ?President? ?Dr.? ?Gregory? ?Williams? ?drew? ?an? ?audience? ?of? ?30? ?Congressional staff? ?members? ?plus? ?higher? ?education? ?policymakers? ?and? ?open? ?educational? ?resources? ?(OER)? ?supporters? ?to? ?a briefing? ?on? ?OER’s? ?impact? ?on? ?community? ?college? ?student? ?success.?”

OER Saves Students $1 Million in Textbook Costs   | Today at Santa Fe | Santa Fe College | Gainesville, FL

“Over the last few years, several Santa Fe College professors opted to forego the use of traditional textbooks and use Open Educational Resources (OER) to save students money.  OER content is licensed in a manner that provides perpetual permission resulting in the ability to retain, reuse, revise, and redistribute content.”

VI. Open Access Policy – Faculty Handbook – Vassar College

“Each member grants to Vassar College permission in the form of a nonexclusive, worldwide license to reproduce and publicly distribute, via Vassar’s institutional repository, each of their peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, provided that the articles will not be sold for a profit. Each faculty member is expected to provide an electronic copy of the accepted manuscript of each article to the repository in an appropriate format as specified by the Vassar College Libraries.

The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty of Vassar College; work completed prior to appointment at Vassar can be submitted at the faculty member’s discretion. For articles with copyright restrictions, and/or upon the express direction of the faculty author, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will not apply the policy for a particular article or delay access for the necessary period of time. In collaboration with the Library Committee, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will be responsible for interpreting and applying this policy….”