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The Oviatt Library is committed to the free flow of information.
Our Scholar Spotlight Program provides faculty with the
opportunity to make their scholarship available online and open to anyone.
This video will provide you with a basic understanding of the Open Access movement
and how you can participate in it as a new tenure track faculty member
here at CSUN. We asked Biology Professor Steven Dudgeon
for his thoughts on how ScholarWorks has impacted his own research.
I found out about it first through my colleague and collaborator
Janet Kubler, who's also in the biology department, and she was working with,
I think, some panel with the provost, and that was when it
came to her attention that ScholarWorks existed, and she
brought it to my attention and then we decided that we should use that in
terms of, you know, a repository for data initially because and how we sort of
came to be formally become involved is that both the National Science Foundation and the National
Institutes of Health have required that principle investigators make their
data publically accessible to the public — because it's the taxpayers who are funding the research.
So this seemed like the easiest, best way to do it was to put it in our own institution.
What is Open Access? it is defined as: Free, Immediate, Permanent, Full-text,
Online Access. The Open Access movement is fundamentally concerned with
removing price and access barriers to any and all scholarly writing or
educational materials. Honestly whether we get the proposals funded or not,
this is always a very positively reviewed aspect of proposals we've had.
I've had reviewers say in their reviews that, "I want one of these. This is fantastic."
And so everybody who reviews it and reviews these plans thinks this is a fantastic system.
So it certainly helped us in terms of getting acceptability and meeting those
requirements and being very favorably looked at and in terms of —
I think it's probably too early to tell in terms of other —
we've only had more previously published datasets up for a year now so we're really
getting feedback from the community so much.
But why is Open Access such a vital part of scholarly communication?
Publicly funded research is being sold back to the public.
Universities are being asked to buy back research developed by their own faculty.
Journal costs have increased to unsustainable levels.
Some titles cost tens of thousands of dollars per year to access.
Looking at the graph, one can see that the price of Health-Science Journals from
2000 until 2009 rose 114% on average. Yet the Consumer Price
index rose only 31%. Over the same period of time,
there has been an overall decline in library funding.
This results in a reduced ability for the library to provide ongoing access to all necessary materials.
Shrinking funding represents shrinking access for the library and the university.
Open Access helps faculty in a number of ways.
However, the most compelling reason is that Open Access has been shown in
numerous studies to increase the likelihood that your scholarship will be cited.
This phenomenon is known as the Open Access Citation Advantage.
Studies found marked increases in citations for something placed in Open Access,
ranging from modest increases of 30-40 percent all the way up to 400 percent --
depending on the discipline. Certain disciplines have shown greater influence from
Open Access. In fact, there is a significant impact on the scholarship in both
Physics and Mathematics.
As an ecologist, it's kind of come late to ecology.
It really started with the molecular biologists and GenBank.
I think is where the whole movement came from and seeing what a super resource,
having DNA sequences, you know, input to a repository like
GenBank and CBI, that people around the world could make use of in
ways that maybe the original person hadn't. It was such a
fantastic idea, and so much advance in research came from that,
that I think that ecologists came to think that there should be one of those for
ecological datasets as well, particularly long-term datasets
rather than just have things anecdotally here summarizing statistics and papers and to have the full
data available for people, you know, across the globe for different
ecosystems that people work on. So I think that's, kind of, where it came from,
and I think it's the wave of the future, and I think the funding agencies have
recognized that because taxpayers want to know what their money's
going for, and they should have a means to see, you know, what's
generated from it and to make use of it maybe in ways that other people hadn't.
So I think it's definitely going to be more prevalent in the future not
only just for the genetic data that's input but the ecological data as well,
both environmental, tracking how species populations are doing and
probably in ways we haven't imagined yet, I suspect.
It is very easy for CSUN faculty to join the Open Access Movement.
The first strategy would be to publish work in an Open Access Journal.
Faculty can also post their work openly on a website.
However, this can be risky. The web is notoriously unstable.
Links break and are not recoverable. Many publishers also do not allow this.
Doing so would risk violating the publisher's copyrights.
Finally, faculty can simply add their work to CSUN's Green Open Access repository ScholarWorks.
As part of our Scholar Spotlight program, Oviatt Library Staff would upload work into the system on your
behalf. ScholarWorks has several advantages.
First, it is registered and recognized internationally as an open access repository.
Second, ScholarWorks provides true digital preservation in the form of permanent URLs, which never break.
It provides digital backups of your work. Backups are provided at many levels of the
CSU, including locally on the library's servers, and at the CSU Chancellor's Office level.
Finally the long-term funding and support for ScholarWorks occurs at both the
CSUN level as well as the CSU system-wide level.
Third, items placed in ScholarWorks are indexed by
Google and other search engines and will appear in search results,
further expanding the reach of your scholarship. Finally, ScholarWorks helps to improve CSUN's
standing on a national and international level. By showcasing the work of its faculty,
ScholarWorks potential students see the quality of work that faculty and students produce.
The Scholar Spotlight Deposit Service is offered to all faculty as a way to foster participation in
the Scholarworks online repository. We will ask you for one thing: your CV.
Once we receive that, we will do the following things:
First, we will research your publisher's Open Access policy,
writing and asking for permission to add your work to ScholarWorks if necessary.
Second, we will search for and obtain a digital copy of your work.
If one is not available, we will digitize it in-house and upload to ScholarWorks on your behalf.
This includes adding all important information such as author, title, abstract,
links to publishers and all citation information.
Finally, we will create your own personal profile within ScholarWorks.
It will include your contact and department information.
It will be your permanent online showcase for your research.
I would definitely recommend people use it — not only for
datasets but I see, you know, things that you've set up in terms of
integrating our publications with those datasets and links to our other Web resources on
campus to have a really full, integrated thing. I think it's
actually a great resource for faculty and researchers to use,
and I recommend that they definitely do that, particularly for their datasets because it's required now.
Here is a real-life example of how a repository can improve accessibility.
One faculty member co-wrote and published a paper in February 2012.
After one year, the article had been read over 500 times in the online journal itself.
It was also deposited into two separate repositories.
One copy was placed in ScholarWorks, one in a
repository for the University of Hawaii.
The result has been another 450 item views.
Essentially, 45 percent of the views for this article come from an Open Access repository.
The impact on Open Access is certainly real. The numbers of those accessing this work will
continue to grow. Leading eventually to more citations.
Importantly, the statistics provided by ScholarWorks can be
incorporated by tenure track faculty and reported
as part of their Personal Information Files -- aka the PIF.
I think in the long term, we would like to have a really kind of a really integrated
presentational materials about our datasets in Maine.
Not only the numbers from the different experimental plots but photos of those plots
along with the GPS coordinates and all the data we can tie to pictures and locations of
what these experiments are and what's happening with them over time in
terms of the data and then again having that integrated with the publications that are linked to
those, as you've already done for us and things like that would be kind of the range of
things I can see doing so people can see the place and get the numbers and really get a sense of what's going on there.
We are here to serve you in your scholarly communication needs.
If you have any questions about Open Access, please
contact either Andrew Weiss or Elizabeth Altman at the Oviatt Library.
They will be happy to answer any and all questions you have regarding
Open Access, ScholarWorks, and Scholar Spotlight.