Academic libraries are often called upon by their university communities to collect, manage, and curate information about the research activity produced at their campuses. Proper research information management (RIM) can be leveraged for multiple institutional contexts, including networking, reporting activities, building faculty profiles, and supporting the reputation management of the institution. In the last ten to fifteen years the adoption and implementation of RIM infrastructure has become widespread throughout the academic world. Approaches to developing and implementing this infrastructure have varied, from commercial and open-source options to locally developed instances. Each piece of infrastructure has its own functionality, features, and metadata sources. There is no single application or data source to meet all the needs of these varying pieces of research information, many of these systems together create an ecosystem to provide for the diverse set of needs and contexts. This paper examines the systems at Pennsylvania State University that contribute to our RIM ecosystem; how and why we developed another piece of supporting infrastructure for our Open Access policy and the successes and challenges of this work.
Category Archives: oa.penn_state.u
Libraries launches ROAM, an expanded open educational resources repository | Penn State University
“Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing unit recently launched ROAM, a newly expanded online publication service for openly licensed educational materials authored by Penn State faculty. Short for “Repository of Open and Affordable Materials,” the platform builds on a service created and previously hosted by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) that published most of the college’s courseware free of charge for anyone to access. ROAM will extend EMS’ vision to include content from all disciplines and campuses across the University….”
Libraries launches ROAM, an expanded open educational resources repository | Penn State University
“Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing unit recently launched ROAM, a newly expanded online publication service for openly licensed educational materials authored by Penn State faculty. Short for “Repository of Open and Affordable Materials,” the platform builds on a service created and previously hosted by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) that published most of the college’s courseware free of charge for anyone to access. ROAM will extend EMS’ vision to include content from all disciplines and campuses across the University….”
University Libraries renews access to ScienceDirect for research benefit | Penn State University
Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap
Open pedagogy projects can be multi-faceted, single-semester or multi-year, and can result in any number of student authored/created/directed scholarly or non-scholarly outputs. These outputs could include, for example, a public-facing blog post, translating a Wikipedia page, creating a digital scholarly edition, socially annotating, revising an open textbook, and/or contributing to crowd-sourced transcription projects. The Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap is a module-based resource that will assist you in planning, finding support for, sharing, and sustaining your open pedagogy project, regardless of its size or scope. The Roadmap will take you through four modules which will guide you through the 5 Ss of open pedagogy projects: Scope, Support, Students, Sharing, and Sustaining.
Negotiating Open Access Journal Agreements: An Academic Library Case Study
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an opportunity for academic libraries to advance open access (OA) to scholarly articles. Awareness among faculty on the importance of OA has increased significantly during the pandemic, as colleges and universities struggle financially and seek sustainable access to high-quality scholarly journals. Consortia have played an important role in establishing negotiation principles on OA journal agreements. While the number of OA agreements is increasing, case studies involving individual libraries are still limited. This paper reviews existing literature on publisher negotiation principles related to OA journal negotiations and reflects on recent cases at an academic library in Pennsylvania, in order to identify best practices in OA journal negotiations. It provides recommendations on roles, relationships, and processes, as well as essential terms of OA journal agreements. This study’s findings are most relevant to large academic libraries that are interested in negotiating with scholarly journal publishers independently or through consortia.
University Libraries launches open-access Penn State Journal of Medicine | Penn State University
“Penn State University Libraries’ Open Publishing unit recently published the first issue of the Penn State Journal of Medicine. All of the content in the peer-reviewed journal is edited by medical students in the Penn State College of Medicine and published open access, meaning it is freely available under a Creative Commons license.
The journal’s mission is to provide “a means for publication of clinical and medical-based research completed by students enrolled at the Penn State College of Medicine,” as well as “an avenue for students to display their work on a peer-reviewed platform (and receive) the feedback they need to improve the quality of their work in a learning environment,” according to its mission statement….”
Research database centralizes information about Penn State faculty scholarship | Penn State University
“A new database established by a collaborative team including Penn State University Libraries aims to provide centralized, consistent access to scholarly research metadata for Penn State faculty research, while eliminating much of the administrative work involved with research-activity reporting software used by higher education faculty.
The Researcher Metadata Database (RMD) aggregates content from multiple scholarly research databases including Digital Measures, Pure, the Penn State Electronic Theses and Dissertations database, National Science Foundation (NSF), Open Access Button and Clarivate (formerly Web of Science). RMD’s function not only helps to create a single access programming interface (API) for faculty profiles and department web pages, but also facilitates implementation of Penn State’s Open Access Policy and the ability to generate reports on common data requests.
A unique feature of the RMD Is the ability to push information to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) system, whose identifiers are increasingly used by funding organizations such as NSF and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a source of information on research activity, including biographical sketches of researchers….”
Penn State Libraries Open Publishing
“Penn State Libraries Open Publishing is the Open Access imprint of The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. The Libraries publish full-featured electronic scholarly journals, searchable annotated bibliographies, and topical web portals using a variety of platforms (e.g., OJS, Drupal, Biblio). All of our publications are freely available to view online and download. Because we publish Open Access, all copyrights are retained by individual authors, journals, or sponsoring entity, and almost all publications are licensed for use under a Creative Commons license….”
University Libraries’ labor unions digitized collections project completed | Penn State University
“Following three years of digitization and preparation, Penn State University Libraries has made available a vast collection of archival materials documenting the 20th-century American working-class experience, including the largest and most significant record series within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) archives….”
Penn State joins coalition that provides open access to coronavirus research | University Park Campus | Penn State | Daily Collegian | collegian.psu.edu
“Penn State has joined a coalition of research organizations that will provide open access to research findings of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, according to a press release.
The university signed a January statement from the Wellcome Trust, which supports the global response in relation to the virus….”
Open, affordable textbook efforts save students $4.8 million in potential costs | Penn State University
“Strategic efforts by Penn State University Libraries faculty and staff over the past three years to lower or eliminate the cost of textbooks and other course materials has paid off — nearly 20 times over — in potential savings for Penn State students….
Funded primarily by Provost Nick Jones with support from Penn State World Campus, University Libraries, Teaching and Learning with Technology, and Barnes & Noble, the initial investment of approximately $245,000 has saved students $4.8 million in potential expenses on textbooks and other course materials. The success from these initiatives has enabled an ambitious three-year plan to be extended to invest an additional $600,000….”
Open Access Policy Recommendations
The proposed rights-retention or “Harvard-style” OA policy at Penn State U. The Faculty Senate approved it on April 23, 2019, and it now awaits action from the President.
Open Access Policy Recommendations
The proposed rights-retention or “Harvard-style” OA policy at Penn State U. The Faculty Senate approved it on April 23, 2019, and it now awaits action from the President.
Work | Open-Access Monograph Publishing and the Origins of the ODSP.doc | Work ID: x346dv41v | ScholarSphere
Abstract: This essay explains the background of open-access monograph publishing as developed principally by university presses, often in association with libraries. It begins with discussions at Princeton University Press in the early 1970s about how to deal with the crisis of scholarly monograph publishing and moves on to describe a joint library/press project in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in the early 1990s. The failure of that project to be funded led the library and press at Penn State to launch a jointly operated Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing in 2005, which supported one of the pioneering programs in open-access monograph publishing. The CIC project, in particular, anticipated the AAU/ARL proposal announced in June 2014 to subvent the publication of first monographs using an open-access model.