Category Archives: oa.u.maryland

Affordable course content: A cross-unit collaboration to develop institution-wide strategies at the University of Maryland | White | College & Research Libraries News

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“The cost of higher education is a growing concern. Tuition, housing, and other fees have risen more than 160% since 1980. Textbook costs, which contribute to these financial worries, have nearly doubled in the past two decades. A recent national survey found that 65% of student respondents avoided the purchase of a required textbook because of cost. The same study reported instances of students taking fewer courses, not registering for specific courses, earning a poor grade, or dropping a course because of the cost of textbooks.1 This message of avoiding purchases or suffering undue hardship to buy course materials is echoed again and again throughout the nation:

80% of students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign report not buying textbooks or access codes due to cost.2
66% of students report avoid buying course materials due to cost, significant numbers report working extra hours, skipping meals, or selecting (or avoiding) courses based on course content costs.3

At the University of Maryland, we see evidence of this problem as well. A campus survey conducted in fall 2021 shows more than 40% of undergraduate and graduate students declined to purchase a textbook in the past year due to cost. Clearly, the price of textbooks and other course resources is influencing student behavior and possibly impacting academic success. Libraries and other campus units have taken steps to address textbook costs, mainly through the promotion of existing resources, open education resources (OER), and inclusive access models. The libraries also have a librarian with responsibilities for OER. However, at Maryland and at many institutions, efforts to gain traction are slow and lack a cohesive, university-wide approach to addressing the problem of affordable course materials.

Affordable course content continues to gain legislative traction. The Maryland General Assembly passed the Textbook Transparency Act of 2020 requiring all state institutions to conspicuously display the cost of course materials when students are registering for classes.4 Further interest in this issue is evident by the increasing number of state and federal grants devoted to the development of open educational resources. Our collaborative approach, described below, is our effort to define and implement a strategy to address this issue for our university community….”

Watch the Supporting Open Science in the Promotion & Tenure Process: Lessons from the University of Maryland Webinar

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“The academic promotion and tenure process establishes the incentive structure for institutions of higher education. Open science champions have long advocated for the process to better reflect important open science scholarship that is often under-valued and neglected in academia.

COS hosted a webinar on September 27, 2022, highlighting the five-year effort in the Psychology Department at the University of Maryland to adopt new guidelines that explicitly codify open science as a core criteria in tenure and promotion review. According to Dr. Michael Doughetry, Department Chair, the new policy was necessary to ensure incentives for advancement reflect the values of scientists and their institutions….”

Supporting Open Science in the Promotion & Tenure Process: Lessons from the University of Maryland

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“The academic promotion and tenure process establishes the incentive structure for institutions of higher education. Open science champions have long advocated for the process to better reflect important open science scholarship that is often under-valued and neglected in academia. This webinar will highlight the five-year effort in the Psychology Department at the University of Maryland to adopt new guidelines that explicitly codify open science as a core criteria in tenure and promotion review. Discussion will include forces supporting and resisting open science behaviors and strategies for creating buy-in across the department. According to Dr. Doughetry, Department Chair, the new policy was necessary to ensure incentives for advancement reflect the values of scientists and their institutions.”

University of Maryland Department of Psychology Leads the Way in Aligning Open Science with Promotion & Tenure Guidelines — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship

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“The University of Maryland is rewarding faculty members in the department of psychology who perform and disseminate research in accordance with open science practices. In April, the department adopted new guidelines that explicitly codify open science as a core criteria in tenure and promotion review.

The change was several years in the making and championed by Michael Dougherty, chair of the department. “When you think about the goal and purpose of higher education and why we take these positions, it’s because we felt there would be some good that we could impart on the world,” Dougherty said. “The traditional markers of impact are how many times you’ve been cited [in a journal]. That’s not the type of impact that is valuable to the broader society.”

The new policy was necessary, he said, so incentives for advancement reflect the values of scientists and their institutions….”

The University of Maryland Department of Psychology Leads the Way in Aligning Open Science with Promotion & Tenure Guidelines – SPARC

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“The University of Maryland is rewarding faculty members in the department of psychology who perform and disseminate research in accordance with open science practices. In April, the department adopted new guidelines that explicitly codify open science as a core criteria in tenure and promotion review….”

 

Merit Review Policy – [U of Maryland, Psychology Department]

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“Examples of specific evaluative criteria to be used in merit review, based on professional standards for evaluating faculty performance….Openness and transparency: Degree to which research, data, procedures, code, and research products are made openly available where appropriate; the use of registered reports or pre-registration. Committee should recognize that researchers may not be able to share some types of data, such as when data are proprietary or subject to ethical concerns over confidentiality[7, 1, 6, 2, 5] These limitations should be documented by faculty.”

 

University of Maryland’s Senate Approves Policy to Enhance Equitable Access to Scholarly Publications | UMD PACT

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“At its meeting on April 6, 2022, University of Maryland’s Senate voted to approve a new institutional policy that will advance equitable, open access to the University’s research and scholarship. In alignment with the University’s land-grant mission and its social justice values, the new policy, entitled “Equitable Access to Scholarly Articles Authored by University Faculty,” aids in the removal of price and permission barriers related to discoverability and access for anyone seeking UMD’s peer-reviewed scholarly work. 

The policy was spearheaded by UMD PACT, a campus-wide working group sponsored by the University Library Council, the Office of the Provost, and the Division of Research. The benefits and features of the policy are summarized briefly below: …

Through the policy, faculty members grant certain nonexclusive rights over their scholarly articles to the University of Maryland. This grant of nonexclusive rights, called the Equitable Access License, allows the University to distribute peer-reviewed versions of the articles free-of-charge to the general public, through DRUM, the University of Maryland’s online institutional repository. Faculty members commit to depositing (self-archiving) peer-reviewed versions of their scholarly articles into DRUM. The policy includes waiver and embargo options to enhance author freedom and control over their work….”

UMD’s Senate Approves Policy to Enhance Equitable Access to Scholarly Publications – News | UMD Libraries

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“At its meeting on April 6, 2022, University of Maryland’s Senate voted to approve a new institutional policy that will advance equitable, open access to the University’s research and scholarship. In alignment with the University’s land-grant mission and its social justice values, the new policy, entitled “Equitable Access to Scholarly Articles Authored by University Faculty,” aids in the removal of price and permission barriers related to discoverability and access for anyone seeking UMD’s peer-reviewed scholarly work. 

The policy was spearheaded by UMD PACT, a campus-wide working group sponsored by the University Library Council, the Office of the Provost, and the Division of Research. The benefits and features of the policy are summarized briefly below: …”

 

UMD Libraries Joins Open-Access Publishing Initiative; $15K Faculty Grants Available

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“The University of Maryland has joined TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a national initiative to advance open-access publishing of monographs in the humanities and social sciences. TOME aims to make important long-form scholarship available to readers across the globe, without cost and permission barriers, by creating a system in which academic institutions subsidize the publication of open-access books.

For its initial two-year pilot program, TOME@UMD will sponsor the publication of open-access, digital monographs by UMD faculty members, awarding three grants of up to $15,000 each, with funding from University Libraries, the Office of the Provost and the College of Arts and Humanities. Funded monographs must be published by a participating university press under a Creative Commons license and must be made openly accessible through a digital repository such as the Digital Repository for University of Maryland (DRUM)….”

University of Maryland PACT (Publishing, Access, and Contract Terms)

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“As the state of Maryland’s flagship institution and one of the nation’s preeminent public research universities, we are committed to action that will make Maryland’s research more visible, accessible, affordable, and transparent….

Our current scholarly publishing and communication ecosystem is in crisis. University of Maryland researchers are on the front lines of developing innovative solutions to urgent problems that threaten the well-being and health of the planet and people across the globe. Yet, trends in international publishing make it increasingly difficult to provide equitable access to the publicly funded research that can help our communities thrive and make our lives better. Learn how you can take action and be part of the movement for open and equitable scholarship….”

University of Maryland Libraries becomes the institutional home of SocArXiv – News | UMD Libraries

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“The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries is pleased to announce that it has become the institutional home of SocArXiv, an interdisciplinary, open access repository of scholarship. The new partnership between the Libraries and SocArXiv ensures the future development and sustainability of the repository, which had previously received seed funding from the libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with additional support from the Sloan Foundation, the Open Societies Foundation, and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at UMD. Working with partners, the UMD Libraries will sponsor SocArXiv to help sustain shared infrastructure for open scholarship and to provide equitable access to this diverse collection of research for scholars at UMD and around the world….”

UMD partners on Open Science Framework – News | UMD Libraries

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“The University of Maryland Libraries and the Division of Research are pleased to announce that UMD is now an institutional partner of the Open Science Framework (OSF), an online research management and collaboration platform from the Center for Open Science. The OSF system makes it easier for UMD researchers to manage projects throughout their life cycles and to collaborate with others across institutions, with an overarching goal of making more research outputs and data transparent, discoverable, and reusable. UMD researchers can log into the new OSF portal at https://osf.umd.edu/, using their university credentials….”

HathiTrust award goes to UMD researcher, team developing digital humanities software – News | UMD Libraries

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“Even when the coronavirus pandemic struck, and access to physical library resources came to a halt, Matt Miller and his research team didn’t have to hit pause on their project. Aided by the digital collections and research support available through the University of Maryland Libraries’s membership with Hathitrust, they could continue  moving forward with their work detecting and transcribing Persian and Arabic texts. 

Miller — a professor at the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies in the University of Maryland’s School of Languages, Literatures and Culture —  leads a team of global scholars working to develop a user-friendly software that can create digital text using scans of Persian and Arabic books. Their enterprise is supported by an $800,000 grant Miller received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation back in 2019. …”