“The University of Texas Libraries announces access to now offers access to Pressbooks for the creation of open educational resources (OER).
Pressbooks is an open textbook creation platform allowing authors to write and publish open access books. Work can then be exported into several formats — including PDF, MOBI, and EPUB — and shared….”
“Central European University (CEU) Press are pleased to announce that the library at the University of Texas at Austin is a new subscribing member of their Opening the Future collective OA funding programme.
The University Library has chosen to sign up to the Library Selection Package containing 50 books selected by an independent panel of librarians. This selection is a cross-section of the other three backlist packages and represents those titles that might be of interest to researchers across a number of disciplines. CEU Press is a leading publisher in the history of communism and transitions to democracy; it is widely recognised as the foremost English-language university press dedicated to research on Central and Eastern Europe and the former communist countries….”
“Central European University (CEU) Press are pleased to announce that the library at the University of Texas at Austin is a new subscribing member of their Opening the Future collective OA funding programme.
The University Library has chosen to sign up to the Library Selection Package containing 50 books selected by an independent panel of librarians. This selection is a cross-section of the other three backlist packages and represents those titles that might be of interest to researchers across a number of disciplines. CEU Press is a leading publisher in the history of communism and transitions to democracy; it is widely recognised as the foremost English-language university press dedicated to research on Central and Eastern Europe and the former communist countries….”
“The strategic planning process that President Hartzell laid out included the announcement of the strategic aspirations and pillars12 that support the strategic direction of the university to become the world’s highest-impact public research university. These aspirations cover the range of impacts UT Austin will have on people, place, and the pursuit of transformative experiences, education, and research. The “people” pillar includes an expectation that UT Austin will “foster free and open discourse to enhance knowledge and understanding” (University of Texas at Austin, 2021a, emphasis original). Further, our pursuit is to “embody our public mission to serveTexas, the United States and the world” and to “advance ambitious research, scholarship and creative arts” by “operat(ing) best-in-class research infrastructure and resources” (University of Texas at Austin, 2021a, emphasis original). How do we achieve such laudably lofty goals? The University will need to take a multi-faceted approach to achieve these and the rest of the aims in our strategic direction, but we would argue that one of the fundamental blocks in the foundation for this plan is embracing open scholarshipin ways that can be sustained and encouraged to flourish at UT Austin….”
“UT Libraries is excited to announce that Texas ScholarWorks (TSW) has crossed the 100,000 item threshold!…
Texas ScholarWorks (formerly the University of Texas Digital Repository) was created to provide open, online access to the products of the University’s research and scholarship, preserve these works for future generations, promote new models of scholarly communication and deepen community understanding of the value of higher education….”
A student Perspective on Open Educational Resources (OER) and Course Materials Affordability
“More than 60,000 digitized items and a new educational resource based on the papers of two LGBTQ pioneers are now online thanks to researchers at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin….
The project was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources. The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation….”
“The University of Texas Libraries is pleased to announce the cohort in the Open Education Fellows pilot program. A competitive application process yielded many high impact proposals, and the selection committee undertook the difficult task of narrowing the outstanding crowd to officially name three Open Education Fellows who will convert their courses to zero-cost required materials through the adoption of existing open educational resources (OER) and one team of Open Education Fellows who will develop their own OER to serve students at The University of Texas at Austin and beyond.
Please join us in congratulating the Adoption / Adaptation Fellows, Dr. Joel Nibert (Department of Mathematics), Dr. Diane McDaniel Rhodes (School of Social Work), and Dr. Amy Kristin Sanders (School of Journalism and Media), as well as the team of Authorship Fellows, Dr. Joshua Frank, Dr. Delia Montesinos, and Mina Ogando Lavin (Department of Spanish & Portuguese). …”
“In this interview, Francesco Maggi (Professor of Mathematics, UT Austin) and Enrico Valdinoci (Professor of Mathematics, University of Western Australia) talk with Colleen Cressman about their new fee-free, open-access journal in Mathematics, Ars Inveniendi Analytica, for which they are the founding Editors-in-Chief. Established in 2020, Ars Inveniendi Analytica leverages the open-access repository arXiv as infrastructure: An author posts a manuscript to arXiv and then links to it in the submission form to the journal. Upon undergoing peer review, and if accepted for publication, the final version of the article is made available on arXiv. Francesco and Enrico discuss the merits and challenges of this model of publishing.”
“In this interview, Colleen Lyon, who is Head of Scholarly Communications at the University of Texas at Austin, talks with Colleen Cressman about her department’s efforts to make sharing research easier—from providing tools, such as Texas ScholarWorks and the Texas Data Repository, to offering classroom instruction, consultations, workshops, and learning communities. She also talks about the university’s focus on open practices with the Provost’s Sustainable Open Scholarship (SOS) Working Group and the ways she and her department have been able to “support open publishing initiatives that promise to be more financially sustainable over the long-term,” including a new arXiv overlay journal, Ars Inveniendi Analytica….”
“The Libraries announces the “Fostering Inclusive Classrooms with Open, Free & Affordable Course Materials” instructor learning community, to promote IDEA concepts through the adoption of open educational resources (OERs).
The OER Working Group eagerly seeks applicants to join its first instructor learning community in Fall 2021. With support from facilitators and guest experts, we hope to join participants from across disciplines in their efforts to make their courses as financially inclusive as possible by eliminating or substantially lowering course material costs. The emphasis of the community will be open educational resources (or OER), which are learning materials that carry open licenses and allow anyone to freely read, share, and modify them. These permissions also enable instructors to adapt them for greater cultural responsiveness and accessibility or even include students in building them. …”
“Much of the research being conducted at universities, colleges, and institutes around the world is written up by professors, graduate students, and research associates and published in toll-access (subscription) journals. Anyone lacking a subscription to that journal will not be able to access the articles published there. This creates a serious access problem for many people across the globe.
An alternative method of publishing, called Open Access, allows for anyone to read the results of research for free.
So, why should you care?…”
“The University of Texas System has joined the Texas Library Coalition for United Action (TLCUA) to rethink how university libraries collectively can improve access to faculty research and to push for changes to the costly subscription models offered by publishers of academic journals.
A total of 41 institutions in Texas have now joined the Coalition – including the 14 UT institutions – making it the largest and most diverse consortia of its kind and giving it significant negotiating power.
Beyond the high cost of subscriptions, which is becoming unsustainable for many academic institutions, the Coalition is advocating for increased author control of their own scholarship and for university libraries to increase the accessibility of scholarship produced by their own faculty members….”
“we believe that the mathematical community could and should engage into the creation of a line of arXiv overlay journals, covering the various areas of Mathematics, and publishing papers of the highest quality. We are thus launching, with the support of a group of colleagues who have accepted our invitation to serve as editors, an arXiv overlay journal in Mathematical Analysis, called Ars Inveniendi Analytica. This journal will benefit from the financial support of the University of Texas Libraries, and has been assisted in these initial stages by the Harvard Library, a member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories….”
“For the UT libraries, which constantly grapple with a small number of powerful, dollar-minded research journal publishers over the cost of texts, solving a minor financial crisis could entail taking a step back from the age-old industry altogether. With spending stagnant and the cost of research journals steadily rising year-over-year, embracing the concept of open access — putting articles out freely on the Internet and skipping paywalls — has emerged as a practical work-around for the UT Libraries that also keeps UT at the forefront of academic publishing … But Haricombe said she sees opportunity in open access — for financial and philosophical reasons. Although the idea is not new, Haricombe said she hopes to establish a more serious focus on the concept at UT, declaring the 2015–2016 school year as ‘the year of open’ …”