Mar
23
2020
Category: Business
Jun
04
2019
Students will benefit from Open Educational Resource (OER) projects
The University of Iowa Libraries has awarded fifteen grants to eighteen faculty for Open Educational Resource (OER) projects for the 2019-2020 academic year. OpenHawks is a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace their current textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.
OpenHawks is one of five innovative, interdisciplinary initiatives funded by the annual Provost Investment Fund (PIF) from the UI Office of the Provost. The PIF will provide OpenHawks projects with funds totaling $87,288 for AY 2020. The funded OER projects, which were selected through a competitive application process, will benefit students in the College of Education, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of Medicine, and Tippie College of Business.
OER (such as textbooks, videos, assessment tools, lab books, research materials or interactive course modules) are free for students and carry legal permission for open use. The open licenses under which these items are released allow users to create, reuse, and redistribute copies of the resources.
Removing cost barriers to course materials opens student access and positively impacts learning. OER provide further benefit when faculty fully integrate free resources into their curricula by “remixing” or tailoring materials to enhance specific learning objectives.
The next call for proposals will be in the spring of 2020. For more information, visit www.lib.uiowa.edu/openhawks
Mercedes Bern-Klug, faculty in the School of Social Work in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $7,000. For this project, Dr. Bern-Klug will create an OER textbook on global aging. By replacing the textbook with up-to-date readings and resources from different sources, Bern-Klug ensures students will learn the material from organizations and authors with a track record of producing high-quality materials germane to global aging.
Stephen Cummings, faculty in the School of Social Work in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $1,400 for Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Cummings will develop an OER textbook on human behavior in social settings for an online, graduate-level course in Social Work. Students will benefit from the vibrant content of this textbook, reflecting current events and engagement for a more dynamic learning environment. The OER resource is projected to save students money, as it will replace a $55 textbook.
Hannah Givler, lecturer in the School of Art and Art History in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $9,000 for Woodworking: Theory and Practice in Studio Arts. Givier will create an OER textbook that combines theory and practice, illuminating the material behaviors of wood. The resource will include foundational and experimental techniques for bending, joining, and framing. The textbook will be used by students in her wood-bending and wood-joinery courses in the School of Art and Art History. It will provide students with the narratives and experiences of contemporary artists working conceptually with wood materials—a perspective missing from currently available textbook resources.
Julia Kleinschmit, faculty in the School of Social Work in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $1,300 for her OER project, Computer Lab: statistics with less pain – in your wallet. Students taking a required one-semester-hour statistics course will benefit from this resource. Kleinschmit will remix existing OER resources to replace existing textbooks and eliminate expensive software purchases, saving students nearly $150 each.
Mouna Maalouf, lecturer in Chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $4,000 for Principles of Chemistry II—Lab Manual in pressbook. The goal of this project is to create an OER lab manual for the freshman chemistry laboratory, replacing lab manuals from publishers that range in cost from $10 to $40. The born-digital lab manual will be easier for students to access and navigate. In addition, the digital resource will be easier for the instructor to update frequently.
Kate Magsamen-Conrad, faculty in Communication Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $10,000 to create no-cost, accessible, engaging, tailored resources for UI students. The project, Introduction to Social Scientific Communication Research Methods, will include a textbook, study guides, presentation materials, and class activities developed in collaboration with UI librarians, the UI Human Subjects Office, and other campus partners. Conrad is replacing an $125 textbook with content tailored for UI students.
Emilia Illana Mahiques, faculty in Spanish & Portuguese in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $1,000 for an OER project titled Aligning peer review, assessments, and learning objectives in SPAN:2000 based on the framework resulting from her research study on peer review. Through this project, Mahiques will create a bank of activities instructors can use to train students on effective, efficient peer review processes aimed at improving students’ abilities to write in their second language. She will also create peer review guidelines and corresponding assessment rubrics according to the curricular requirements of the Spanish Writing course.
Brandon Myers, lecturer in computer science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $2,999 for a project titled Guided Inquiry Activities for Advanced Computer Science. Myers will create OER learning activities using an instruction strategy shown to improve student engagement and learning called Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL). In POGIL, students cooperate in teams to construct and apply concepts in carefully designed activities. Unfortunately, such activities are not readily available to computer science instructors. In this project, Myers aims to create, pilot, revise, and share four to six POGIL activities to support two courses, Database Systems and Programming Languages. The activities will be shared with a Creative Commons license on the CS-POGIL project website (http://cspogil.org).
Ted Neal, professor of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education, has been awarded $10,000 to create an OER titled Earth and Space Science for Elementary Teachers. Neal will develop an OER textbook, in cooperation with students, that will cover broad topic areas as mandated by the State of Iowa’s new science curriculum for which adequate teaching resources do not yet exist. Under Neal’s direction, students will develop this comprehensive resource, providing future elementary science teachers with concise, accurate, and centralized resources for K-12 instruction in earth and space science.
Marc A. Pizzimenti, faculty in Anatomy and Cell Biology in the Carver College of Medicine, has been awarded $9,859 for Online Physical Examination Skills Modules with Integrated Basic Science Review. These instructional modules will help students learn basic physical examination (PE) skills by creating efficient, timely, scalable, easily accessible resources that will assist in training, but will also serve as the primary resource for students learning the basics of PE.
Jacob B. Priest, faculty in Psychological and Quantitative Foundations in the College of Education, and Rachel Williams, faculty in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, have been awarded $8,000 for their project titled Heathy Relationship OER. Priest and Williams will create an OER to replace a $141 textbook on relationships. Their resource will be designed to enhance relationship communication and skills so students can make and maintain healthy relationships. Rather than providing statistics about relationships, this OER will help students learn actual relationship skills and apply them to different relationship situations.
Steven Stong, faculty in economics in the Tippie College of Business, has been awarded $1,000 for Test bank and clicker questions for Principles of Microeconomics 2e openstax. This project involves creating a 100-question bank of exam and quiz questions designed to help students develop a better theoretical understanding of economics and also gain the analytical skills they need to apply the theories to solve real-world economic problems. Strong is developing these questions to supplement an OER textbook that he is already using for Microeconomics.
Christine Wingate, faculty in English as a Second Language (ESL) in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded $7,730 for American English Sounds, an online resource already under development for courses focused on ESL speaking skills. Pronunciation is a vital part of these courses, and students need more time to practice and improve pronunciation than is possible during class. Wingate’s OER will help students practice pronunciation independently as directed by the teacher with tutorials, which will be accessible online through a computer or mobile device. Each tutorial will provide explanation, examples, and practice activities, including activities that could be recorded and submitted for teacher feedback.
Sang-Seok Yoon and Joung-A Park, faculty in Asian & Slavic Languages in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, have been awarded $5,000 for First Year Korean: First Semester. Yoon and Park will create an OER workbook for students studying the Korean language. This workbook will improve on the currently used commercial text by incorporating stronger content in conversations, listening comprehension, and Korean culture. The resource will reduce expenses for students while providing a more engaging and effective learning tool for UI students, with a special focus on preparing students for specific study abroad and work experiences in Korea.
Giovanni Zimotti, lecturer in Spanish & Portuguese, and Fernando Castro Ortiz, lecturer in Spanish and director of the Spanish Speaking, Writing, and Conversation Center in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, have been awarded $9,000 for Intermediate Spanish II: Spanish for Educators, a new UI course designed specifically for educators. Commercially available textbooks for this course are pedagogically outdated, very expensive for the students, and lack a well-developed online component. Zimotti and Castro Ortiz will create an OER textbook customized to fulfill the educational needs of UI students taking this new course, integrate content and technology already available at our institution and/or online, create self-assessment materials to supplement the OER textbook and classroom instruction, test and teach a pilot course using the content created in this project, and promote this new OER resource at national conferences and other professional venues.
Dec
10
2018
How will I afford my textbooks this semester? Can I pass this course even though I don’t have the book? Is it illegal to download this PDF of the book that I found online?
These are the kinds of questions students ask at the beginning of the semester. The solutions they find are creative. Sometimes a whole group of roommates will share a book. In other cases, they will find a dubious copy for free online. Other times, they skip textbooks entirely. For some students, it’s a matter of buying food or buying books.
UI Libraries and UI Student Government are easing some of this burden with a collaborative project called the Textbook Affordability Pilot (TAP). Under TAP, a committee of library staff and student government representatives collect donated textbooks and purchase new ones for “high impact courses.” These are classes for which the cost of books is high and more than 100 students are enrolled in the course. These books are placed on course reserves in Main Library and the branch libraries for students to use free of charge.
Plans for TAP began in the summer of 2017, when student government approached the Libraries with questions about making textbooks more affordable. The UI Libraries encourages faculty to bypass traditional textbooks where possible by using books from the Libraries’ collection and using open educational resources. The Libraries also keeps copies of some textbooks on course reserve. Despite these efforts, librarians and students realized more could be done.
UISG Director of Academic Affairs, Tristan Schmidt, and Scholarly Communications Librarian, Mahrya Burnett, along with interested colleagues, began to explore the idea of purchasing textbooks and collecting donated copies. There was broad interest on both ends. Eventually, UISG and UI Libraries both allocated funds, totaling $17,000 for the one-year pilot. The committee drafted a set of criteria for books to be included in TAP and identified objectives for success. Then they started buying and collecting books.
As TAP began accepting donations last spring, the response from students was overwhelming. They donated hundreds of books, filling the UISG offices at the IMU. The committee is now working with faculty, students, and librarians to finalize its purchase list in order to get new books processed and on the shelves. TAP aims to have 100 books available for student use through course reserves at the Main Library and several other campus libraries by spring semester 2019. Their hope is to see the program grow over time so that more and more books are available for the students who need them.
For complete information about TAP, visit http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/TAP
TAP information for students
Can I access my textbooks for free? One easy way to find out whether your textbook is on Course Reserves is to use this simple search tool. Search by course name, instructor, or book title.
TAP information for faculty, instructors, and TAs
Do the textbooks for my course qualify for TAP? Faculty can email LIB-TAP@uiowa.edu to see if their textbooks are TAP eligible.
Oct
12
2018
During the month of Open Access week (October 22-28, 2018) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The first post is by Danielle Medgyesi, recent MS Graduate, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health
Actualizing Unrestricted Knowledge Sharing for Collaborators, Partners, Allies, and Beneficiaries, Globally: From Iowa to Switzerland to Haiti
This year’s Open Access (OA) theme (2018): “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge” is especially relevant to a project our team recently published in an OA journal. As a University of Iowa graduate student in the College of Public Health, I worked closely with Assistant Professor Kelly Baker, PhD, and her extensive international network to develop a thesis project conducted in an internally displaced persons (IDP) community in Corail, Haiti. The community was established as part of the 2010 earthquake relief effort. Reflective of IDP communities worldwide, Corail has become a permanent residence for many families. Yet, residences face unsanitary and unsafe conditions due to a lack of permanent sanitation infrastructure and access to waste management services. The goal of the thesis project was to evaluate young children’s exposure to environmental hazards during play in public neighborhood areas that contain deteriorated latrines, trash, free-roaming animals, and open drainage canals.
As with many Global Health efforts, this project required resources and collaborators beyond the academic setting. We worked closely with colleagues at the non-profit organization, Terre des hommes, including our team leader at headquarters (Switzerland) and local staff working with and living in Corail (Haiti). As the project unfolded, our network of allies and those impacted by and interested in the health and safety risks of young children grew extensively. Thus, for the project to reach its’ full potential, we needed to involve and inform a diverse audience—from caregivers living in Corail, local partners in Haiti, and more broadly non-profit organizations and other academic institutes globally. Knowledge sharing, especially in the context of international research, is heavily dependent on the ability to overcome geographic, socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Publishing in an OA article to ensure free access to the public is a step in the right direction to overcome such barriers. Yet, reflective of the 2018 theme, it is our responsibility as researchers and those involved in information sharing to continuously evaluate and develop new strategies so that research is truly accessible to a diverse audience, including those who have limited access to the internet and literacy.
Conclusively, I would like to express my support and gratitude for the OA fund at the University of Iowa and encourage others, especially students, to take advantage of this wonderful resource. With the decision to re-fund the OA program in the spring, the staff at the University of Iowa library were swift to respond and process our application to publish the thesis project in an OA international journal (IJERPH). The library’s quick turnaround permitted the manuscript to be available to the public shortly thereafter. Having the OA fund at the University of Iowa is a valuable resource for faculty and graduate students who may not have other means to pay for the processing fee. I look forward to following OA efforts as they continue to expand and reach a global audience.
Oct
26
2016
During the month of Open Access week (October 24-30, 2016) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The fourth guest post is by Ed Folsom, the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at The University of Iowa. He is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-director of the Whitman Archive , and editor of the Whitman Series at The University of Iowa Press. He is the author or editor of numerous books and essays on Whitman and other American writers.
The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (WWQR) is now in its second year as an online open-access journal, and we could not be more pleased with our new format and open distribution. We are reaching a wider audience than ever before, since scholars, students, and the general public can now freely access the entire thirty-three-year run of the journal. Our third online-only issue, published last fall, was a testament to (and a test of) our new open-access platform. We published the complete book-length text of Whitman’s newly discovered Manly Health and Training along with an introduction by Zachary Turpin, who made the find. The discovery received front-page coverage in the New York Times and was the subject of feature articles in The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Observer, and over a hundred other newspapers and websites around the country and around the world. Interviews about the discovery were broadcast on NPR, BBC, and CBC. Most outlets that reported on the find linked to the WWQR website, where readers and listeners could (and still can!) freely access the complete text of Whitman’s journalistic series. There were over 20,000 downloads of Manly Health during the first weekend following the Friday New York Times story. This meant we had thousands of first-time visitors to WWQR, and we hope many of those folks will return often to check out the latest work on Whitman. The journal is always free and open, and we welcome our new readers from every continent. Our website offers a daily map of downloads from WWQR, which demonstrates that our readers do indeed come from around the world.
While not every issue of WWQR contains a new book by Whitman, every issue contains important new discoveries and readings. The online open-access format of the journal has now allowed us to enhance articles by including high-quality scans of Whitman manuscripts. We are working now to add an HTML version of each new issue along with the PDF format. Our ability to publish longer works, like Manly Health, is a tremendous advantage, and WWQR has another major surprise in store for our forthcoming winter/spring 2017 issue—a discovery that will again generate international media coverage. The details are a secret for now, but everyone should be watching for another dose of big Whitman news this coming February.
One more interesting development resulting from last fall’s publication of Manly Health is worth mentioning. While WWQR offered PDF, Kindle, and eBook versions of the complete text of Whitman’s newly discovered journalistic series, print publishers sensed that there was still a market for a commercial edition of the find—in fact, our 20+ thousand downloads indicated that there were probably many readers who would welcome a print edition of Manly Health for their personal libraries. Regan Arts, a New York publisher, approached WWQR about publishing Manly Health as a book, enhanced with illustrations from nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals. Stefan Schoeberlein, WWQR’s managing editor, and Stephanie Blalock, Digital Humanities Librarian and Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, joined Zachary Turpin and me in selecting illustrations. The book will be published in December, and WWQR will receive a modest royalty from the publisher, which will help support the journal, now that we no longer have paying subscribers. The evolving interactions between the new online open-access WWQR and the world of print publishing are fascinating and unpredictable. It’s an exciting new era we have entered into, and we remain optimistic about next thirty years of the journal.
Oct
13
2016
During the month of Open Access week (October 24-30, 2016) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The second guest post is by Jose Pablo Leone, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Hematology.
See his Iowa Research Online deposited publications here.
My name is Jose Pablo Leone, I am Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Iowa. I have used the University of Iowa Libraries’ OA Fund a number of times and it has been a great resource. The staff at the Library is extremely helpful, they have helped me identify target journals and search the literature several times. Publishing articles in open access journals in my experience has been very gratifying. It allows for a much broader reception of the manuscript, many more researchers around the world are able to read it, making for a wider audience, and as a result of these you become more acknowledged by these researchers. In addition, I have found the free access and the self archiving features very valuable, this allows you to easily share your articles with your peers and collaborators. Researchers often struggle when they cannot access an important manuscript due to non-open access policies. In this regard, the opportunity to publish your work in open access allows creating potential collaborations with researchers that are focusing on your same topic in different countries. I have had the pleasure of being contacted by researchers about some of the articles I published open access and it has been a great experience. Another advantage of open access journals is that as your article gets more reads, it could also get more citations, making the impact of your manuscript stronger. Most journals also offer very user friendly tools to track the reception of your article, such as number of reads, downloads, citations, social media, etc. Finally, there are many misconceptions about open access journals that I would like to mention, for example, many people have the wrong concept that an open access article will not be cited in public databases such as PubMed, this is not true and depends on the journal rather than the open access policy or not. Some researchers believe that the open access journal will not have an impact factor, this is not correct, many open access journals do have established impact factors, however it is important to check this with each journal, as many of the newer journals will not have an impact factor yet. Lastly, some authors do not consider open access journals under the wrong impression that the article will not be peer reviewed, the reality is that submissions to open access journals do undergo a full peer review process and in addition, quite often the timing of this process is faster in open access journals.
Oct
07
2016
During the month of Open Access week (October 24-30, 2016) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The first guest post is by Chioma M. Okeoma, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Microbiology. 
See her Iowa Research Online deposited publications here.
Open access (OA) literally means making literature available to researchers, teachers, journalists, policy makers, and the general public without barriers. Without the open access mechanism, readers or consumers of scientific findings would face price and permission barriers for the use of research findings.
For authors like me, OA provides unlimited access to our work to anyone regardless of their geographic location. The benefits are optimal dissemination of intellectual findings, rigorous peer and public discourse, and increased citations. Above all, OA provides an author maximum visibility and impact for research findings. As authors benefit from publishing OA, so do institutions.
Of course OA publishing is not without a cost to authors because OA publishers charge fees to cover costs. However, the cost of publishing may be covered by grants to authors, or by government and/or institutional subsidies depending on the country and institution. For example, the University of Iowa is a huge proponent of OA publishing. The University through the Office of the Provost and University Libraries provides funds to cover the fees for OA publishing; http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/scholarly_publishing/OAfund. So when next you think of publishing, think OA. Try it and you will find being “OPEN” truly rewarding.
Chioma M. Okeoma, Ph.D
Oct
30
2015
During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The seventh, and final post, is by Kelly Cole, Associate Professor and Departmental Executive Officer, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Health and Human Physiology.
Open Access Publication Just Makes Sense
According to the PLOS organization, “Open Access ..stands for unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse” of peer-reviewed original scholarly work (emphasis added). I’m tempted to stop right there. Unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse of our discoveries that mostly were supported by public funds and hence deserve to be in the public’s hands rapidly (and the NIH agrees). With digital access worldwide assured by the world-wide-web, we assure the second of the two basic tenets of modern science – dissemination (the first being discovery). What else is left to debate?
This is the simple, honest motivation for me to publish in Open Access journals – rapid, worldwide dissemination. The profit-driven and slightly unsavory alternative has been well-discussed from the very first thoughts about the possibility of open access publishing; namely print publishers (in paper or digital format) who own the rights to the published articles, then charge fees for digital access, and who then require permission for reuse at a fee (they own copyright). (We’ve all been through the copyright torture when we attempt to write a chapter in a book using figures from our published work.) Clearly, these are the expected policies of a for-profit, bottom-line enterprise, and a partnership with scholars that worked to the advantage of both parties. I accepted that early in my career. The model worked in its own perverse way, and it was the only game in town for world-wide dissemination, not to mention its role in career advancement through peer-review and the need to publish in high-impact journals for maximum gain.
The burgeoning success of Open Access publication, along with digital media and the world-wide-web, clearly shows that it is time to move on. The remaining barriers to each individual scholar for deciding whether or not to publish in Open Access seem to be rooted in decisions about career advancement; that is, the need to publish in elite, supposedly high-impact journals. Last year Prof. Bernd Fritzch wrote a wonderful entry to this blog site concerning the eroding utility of journal impact factors, and the ongoing evolution of newer ways of tracking citation impact of a scientist’s work (such as the h-index and others). It would seem that with digital access (and digital searching), amplified further by open access, the impact of a paper is now less a matter of where it was published, and more a matter of the content of the paper (as it should).
I too remember long days in the library with Index Medicus, tracking down papers, which then evolved into Current Contents mailed to your lab periodically. We didn’t have time to scour every possible key word or topic heading (remember, we were turning pages in a catalog and we couldn’t use arbitrary key words and the magic of Boolean operators). We focused first on the keywords and terms that made the most sense (and were always amazed when someone turned up an important paper that escaped our search), and then on a subset of high-impact journals. Many of these journals were high impact because of the shared, tacit agreement amongst our peers to publish our best work in just the places where we all tended to look first.
Folks, those days are over. With digital search across large, publicly supported databases, our work can be found just about anywhere, barring our poor choices of titles or keywords. That means your work will be found in Open Access journals, and it will be cited based on the merits of your scholarship and not just the reputation of the journal. This scenario continues to evolve, but the direction seems clear and we’re building speed. Prof. Fritzsch asked the question “Are we witnessing a revolution in information flow…?” I’m wondering if Bernd asked the question as a rhetorical device. It seems to me the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’!
Oct
28
2015
During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The sixth guest post is by Kembrew McLeod, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa and an independent documentary producer. A prolific author and filmmaker, he has written and produced several books and documentaries that focus on popular music, independent media and copyright law.
See all of Kembrew’s Iowa Research Online deposited publications here.
Q: Two of the publications you have deposited in the IRO received an extraordinary number of downloads in the first half of this year, “Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity” (had 1772 from Jan-July 2015), and “Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities“(had 1347 from Jan-July 2015). Could you tell us a little about these two publications?
Freedom of Expression was my second book, which originally was published by Doubleday-a trade press that miraculously allowed me to license it under a Creative Commons license. These licenses make it easy for authors to legally encourage the sharing of their work, and it has been an enormously successful project (since 2004, millions of books, songs, etc. have been published under Creative Commons licenses). “Genres, Subgeners, Sub-Subgenres and more” is an article I wrote when I was a grad student, which happens to be one of my most cited publications.
Q: Were there specific reasons behind putting these two publications in the IRO?
Quite simply, I wanted to make it easy to share my work, and by putting it in the hands of librarians, I knew that it would be properly archived and made accessible to the public
Q: Have you seen any benefits from having these works available freely and openly through the IRO?
Yes, definitely. By making it accessible, it increases the chances that other scholars (and, more generally, the public) might be exposed to my writing. This has certainly increased the number of other scholarly publications that have cited my work, which is obviously a good thing.
Q: What are your general thoughts on the value and importance of academics making their work open access?
Open Access is hugely important. In fact, I no longer publish in journals that have overly restrictive copyright policies. The final straw was when I was prevented from sharing one of my own articles because Digital Rights Management (DRM) crippled the PDF file. DRM is a technological protection system that limits the number of times-or the ways in which-a work may be copied and distributed. After I emailed the PDF of my article to my undergrad class, a student tried to print out a copy of my article. Unfortunately, all that was printed out was a blank sheet of paper, save for a notice at the bottom that read: “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.”
I had no idea Blackwell, the company that published it, set limits on the distribution of my own article, though I’m not at all surprised. I can’t think of a more disturbing, yet poetic, expression of copyright-gone-mad than a blank sheet of paper where published research should be. The most insane thing is that I got the PDF from a database that the University of Iowa subscribes to-which means that the state paid me a salary to produce knowledge, and then my library had to pay a private company to access that knowledge, and on top of all that I was still prevented from distributing my own writing!
Oct
23
2015
During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.
The fifth guest post is by Matthew Uhlman, Urology Resident, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.
Expectations Exceeded – My Experience With The Open Access Fund
Thanks for the chance to write about our experience with the open access (OA) fund here at Iowa. To introduce myself, my name is Matt Uhlman and I’m a 6th year Urology resident at the University. Over my time here, I’ve seen and learned a lot. Being at a large referral center, and in Urology no less, we see plenty of abnormal things and when we come across them, we often look to the mystical “literature” for guidance.
In a number of instances, I found that there wasn’t much written on the things I was seeing and since I find that writing about cases helps me process through them and cement concepts, there were a number of times I, along with colleagues, decided we wanted to write up a case we’d seen. There are very limited options for such papers (case reports), but what I found was OA journals had emerged as a place for them. For a long time, I’d written off such journals figuring they were just filled with the ramblings of people paying to publish stuff that wasn’t really worth my time. However, as I started to look around for case reports, I found they were a really helpful resource as they were effectively mini-review articles on rare things.
During my research year, I had written up a number of cases and when I came across the OA fund at the University, using it was a no brainer. The costs to publish weren’t prohibitive, but were unfortunately a tough sell to the department given the tight budgets we work within. After I learned about the fund, I talked with the librarians who work with it and was happy to learn how eager they were to help me get support. It didn’t feel like I was going to a tight fisted group who would find any reason to not support our efforts, but rather an ally who genuinely wanted to get behind us.
Since that time and with the knowledge of the OA fund, I’ve been able to utilize it another 4 or 5 times, publishing in a number of different journals. An interesting unintended, but positive, outcome from the OA fund has been the opportunity to help a number of medical students publish. Without dedicated research time, it can be tough to find time for long term research projects. Being able to help students write up a case report or short review article has been a great way to get them involved in researching a subject and then contributing to the overall body of medical literature, plus, it looks nice on their resume when they apply for residency!
Looking back over the last few years since I found out about, and started using the OA fund, it’s been a catalyst to being able to publish on the things I’m encountering on a daily basis in residency, not just the things that others deem “worthy”. Case and point, we recently published a paper on the safety of instillation of a chemotherapy compound in the bladder at the time of a specific surgery. We had submitted the paper to a number of journals and had basically been told, “This isn’t a common cancer, nor a common practice. Come back when you have a randomized trial”. For anyone familiar with research, randomized trials take a long time, a lot of coordination, a lot of money and early safety/efficacy data. We decided to go with a more well-known OA journal within Urology and ultimately had the paper accepted and published. After doing so, we started hearing from physicians at different institutions who were interested in starting a trial, now that someone had done the initial safety work. There’s a long way to go, but the first step was publishing our results and the OA fund made that much more attainable.
My experience with the fund at Iowa has been uniformly positive. To anyone thinking about utilizing the funds, I say go for it. It’s allowed me to write about the things I’m seeing, walk with students through the process of publishing and publish on topics that are timely, but don’t always fit into the limited scope of our standard journals. I don’t know if this sort of fund is available elsewhere, but I feel like it should be!
Again, thanks for the opportunity to write about my experience. I hope y’all have a great day!
All the best,
Matt