Friday -- Session 3:  Handling scholarly communication issues

Facilitator:  Colleen Lyon –Grand Valley State

Notetaker: Kristen Fitzpatrick, IEEE

340-350 articles in repository: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/

Lot more work involved than expected to find out whether  faculty could legitimately post their work, share, distribute, and if so, in what form.

Recommend having them add SPARK addendum, negotiate with publisher for additional rights.  Three successes in working through agreements.

What are the problems – faculty ask “why bother?”  “What’s in it for me?” Faculty got excited about download counts, and also, persistent URL.

Dean of School had a lot to do with push.  Trying to get an Open Access mandate.    Right now GVSU faculty have to come up with their own funding if they wanted to publish in the “author pays” model.  Library thinking of coming up with a kitty to support it.

Hard to see what value add is for faculty since everyone they want to get it already have access.

Moving to do repositories for data sets .  Florida State starting to look into it but money, server space, management issues to be worked through.  Humanities prof an advocate since he wants novel online for student use.

CSU got grant from NSF to start bringing in datasets.

Archivist standpoint – digitizing one thing – how do you make them findable? Who is indexing this stuff?  Should we go to the big publishers and see if they would be interested in indexing.  Not unprecedented.

Are “you” getting inquiries about open access publishing/repository posting?  Usually only questions about “I’ve done this – is it o.k.?”

Difficulty in getting faculty to understand their rights – or lack thereof- with regard to copyright.  Gov’t agencies make sure that the government retains rights that it needs.  Also on open access agreement, legal office must sign agreements.  Just starting to get questions about open access – “can we do it?” “who pays for it?”  Offering to do presentations at office meetings to explain the parameters.   Trying to get to executive research people to talk about centralized funding of open access.  Will better funded research centers get to do more?  How will this impact the library?

Why are researchers so afraid of open access?  They grow up in the profession knowing the core journals and being more comfortable.  Still a lot of connection to academic community.

Some open access journals getting weighted – optics journals are moving to OA.  Depends on discipline how faculty see it.  

Minor things  the library world are doing now aren’t really advancing OA.

University cut 1.x million, but researchers haven’t changed stance on OA.  They publish where they need to publish and don’t worry about whether the U has it until later.  When career is on the line, you’re not going to gamble a year’s research and grant funding  and publish in OA.  Until things evolve and OA has standing in the professional community, PLoS Biology an example, they will stick with the known entity.

ArXiv.org  -- anyone going to contribute? (One school got a request for support)  SPIRES a competitor being used.

Optimistic view of the world “ hope that we can work with publishers to find a way to keep from having to give up so much that we can’t provide needed services to users.“

Strategies for getting everyone on board OA – has to go through the subject specialists/liaisons.