Web Accessibility in the Institutional Repository: Crafting User-Centered Submission Policies: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

Abstract:  While institutional repositories have long focused on ensuring the availability of research, recent university initiatives have begun to focus on other aspects of open access, such as digital accessibility. Indiana University’s institutional repository (IR), IUScholarWorks, audited the accessibility of its existing content and created policies to encourage accessible submissions. No established workflows considering accessibility existed when this audit took place, and no additional resources were allocated to facilitate this shift in focus. As a result, the Scholarly Communication team altered the repository submission workflow to encourage authors to make their finished documents accessible with limited intervention. This paper shares an overview of the accessibility audit that took place, the changes made to our submission process, and finally provides tips and resources for universities who aim to integrate accessibility more thoroughly into their IR practices.

 

Indiana University awarded $500,000 from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation | IT News & Events

“The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded a $500,000 grant to Indiana University (IU) to support the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC).

The grant will allow HTRC to develop reusable worksets and research models, curated by experts, for analyzing texts from the 17-million-volume HathiTrust Digital Library. The project—Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Dissemination (SCWAReD, pronounced “squared”)—aims to develop new methods for creating and analyzing digital collections, with an emphasis on content related to historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities….”

Grant aids project by IU, other institutions to digitize medieval manuscripts: News at IU: Indiana University

“Indiana University Bloomington and a consortium of higher-learning institutions have received a three-year grant for The Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections in the Midwest, which will create a digital repository and catalog of medieval manuscripts across Midwestern collections. 

The Council on Library and Information Resources awarded $281,936.10 for the project. IU Bloomington will serve as host for the grant, which was one of 18 projects receiving more than $4.1 million that the Council on Library and Information Resources announced Jan. 9 for its 2019 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards….”

Open Access at Indiana University Bloomington | Shreds and Patches

In April 2014, the Indiana University, Bloomington, Faculty Council Library recommended against moving forward with an OA policy. 

“[However], the Library Committee of the Indianapolis Faculty Council at IUPUI has recommended such a policy to its full campus council and the leadership groups on both campus intend to pursue educational and policy setting efforts around open access at the level of the university as a whole under the auspices of the University Faculty Council. Those watching open access policy work in Bloomington then should know that discussions on the issues are not concluded, despite the majority report of the Library Committee….

[At Bloomington] factors motivating member reservations about a campus open access policy defy categorization and are sometimes contradictory. A highly abstract summation of them is concern that such a policy could have various unintended negative consequences either as an outgrowth of achieving the stated goals of such a policy or in failing to do so.”

Open Access Policy Adopted by IU Bloomington Faculty | Indiana University Libraries

“In 2017, the Bloomington Faculty Council unanimously approved an Open Access policy that ensures that faculty scholarship will be accessible and available to the public for future generations. Adopting such a policy reduces barriers to research and learning by making research available on the public internet to be downloaded and shared freely, making it possible for scholarship to be more widely read and cited than literature that appears in closed-access, licensed journal databases. The policy can be found at IUB’s VPFAA site and an FAQ has been posted to our website. The Scholarly Communication staff will be available to help authors deposit their work in IUScholarWorks Open, our repository for the Open Access policy.. Faculty members may also contact us to opt-out of the policy or opt-out themselves using the same repository. Resources are available for faculty who are interested in learning more about the impact and implementation of the policy. Please direct questions to iusw@indiana.edu or the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs.”

Leveraging the License: Part I – Scholarly Communication

“The Scholarly Communication Department attended several orientations and events for new faculty over the last few weeks. During these events, I have had the privilege of chatting informally with a faculty members about IU Bloomington’s new Open Access Policy. Faculty have a lot of questions about how the policy works, what kinds of scholarship the policy applies to, and author processing charges (or APCs).

The question that has been most difficult to explain quickly and effectively in these informal conversations has been about how faculty can ‘leverage’ or utilize the license established by the Open Access policy when negotiating with potential publishers. This post will explain in more detail what ‘leveraging the license’ means and clarify when in the publishing process faculty should attempt to negotiate. This post on leveraging the OA policy license is part one of a two-part series. The second post will explore the OA policy license in more detail, particularly when it concerns utilizing third-party content.”

Indiana U Faculty Approve Open-Access Policy

“The Faculty Council at Indiana University at Bloomington on Monday unanimously approved an open-access policy intended to improve the availability of peer-reviewed scholarly articles written by the university’s researchers. Under the terms of the policy, faculty members (unless they opt out) are required to submit electronic copies of their scholarly articles so that the university can store them in an open-access repository. Similar policies have been approved at Duke University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, among others.”

Open Access policy adopted by IU Bloomington faculty – Scholarly Communication

“The Bloomington Faculty Council unanimously approved an Open Access policy today that ensures that faculty scholarship will be accessible and available to the public for future generations. Open Access means that scholarly articles are regarded as the fruits of research that authors give to the world for the sake of inquiry and knowledge without expectation of payment. Adopting such a policy reduces barriers to research and learning by making research available on the public internet to be downloaded and shared freely, making it possible for scholarship to be more widely read and cited than literature that appears in closed-access, licensed journal databases. The Scholarly Communication department has posted both the policy and accompanying FAQ on our website.

The Scholarly Communication staff will be available to help authors deposit their work — usually the final version of an article that has gone through peer review — in IUScholarWorks or another repository for archival purposes. Indeed, as Nazareth Pantaloni, Copyright Librarian for the IU LIbraries, observed: ‘The Indiana University Libraries are delighted that the Bloomington Faculty Council has joined the over 300 U.S. colleges and universities who have decided to make their faculty’s scholarship more freely available under an Open Access policy. We look forward to working with them to accomplish that goal.’ Faculty members may also contact us to opt-out of the policy, a process that will be incorporated into a one-click form once the policy is fully implemented.

The policy adopted today is only the latest step in an ongoing process at IU Bloomington. The BFC adopted one of the first Open Access policies in the country in March of 2004. That policy was actually a resolution in which the BFC decried the rising costs of academic journals and databases — at the time, 70% of a $9.2 million annual budget — and called on the IU Libraries to adopt several strategies in response, including, among other things, ‘to promote open scholarly communication.’ That resolution served as an impetus for the Libraries’ development of IUScholarWorks. Today, IU ScholarWorks hosts nearly 30 Open Access journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, and serves as the repository for nearly 8,000 items deposited by IU Bloomington faculty, students, and staff, including data sets, conference proceedings, out-of-print books recovered by faculty from their original publishers, doctoral dissertations from the Jacobs School of Music, Patten Lectures, and a wide array of journal articles, research reports, other scholarly literature, and even creative works of authorship. Current developments include improvements in the repository’s ability to host multimedia content and data.

Open Access policies are intended, in part, to provide an institutional mechanism for faculty authors to assert the retention of at least the minimum rights necessary in order not only to cooperate with their institutional OA policy, but also be able to reuse their work in other ways that could be beneficial to them, such as distributing their work via their own professional website, through social media, or simply to students in their classes.”

Rewarding open access scholarship in promotion and tenure

“Faculty often report that the promotion and tenure (P&T) process is a barrier to adopting open access (OA) practices.1 Even as libraries offer a growing number of OA services (including repositories, funds, journal publishing, data management, and altmetrics tools), efforts to reform the institutional scholarly communication culture will lag if the explicit and implicit values of P&T committees do not adapt.

Here we describe the efforts of one institution, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), to reward OA scholarship in the P&T process.”