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Feb
15
2019
Category: Faculty News
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.
Nov
09
2018
Eight Big Ten universities, a federal funding agency, and private companies come together to fund the development of Collaborative Archive Data Research Environment (CADRE)
Students, faculty, and researchers across the Midwest and beyond will gain crucial access to large research datasets through a secure, cloud-based platform called CADRE (Collaborative Archive Data Research Environment). CADRE will be developed through a large-scale partnership led by the Indiana University Libraries and the Indiana University Network Science Institute.
The $2 million project is funded by an award of nearly $850,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary federal funding agency supporting the nation’s libraries and museums. Additional support comes from eight other universities in the Big Ten, including the University of Iowa; the Big Ten Academic Alliance; the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs program; and two private companies: Clarivate Analytics and Microsoft Research.
The University of Iowa Libraries will collaborate with IU Libraries and other partners from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) to develop a cloud-based platform that will allow library users direct, hands-on access to bibliometric, patent, and other large databases.
Other BTAA partners are Michigan State University, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, The Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and Rutgers University.
“We firmly support this project because this type of shared secure data mining service is badly needed by research libraries, and importantly, by sharing the costs of enhancing, maintaining, and updating the platform across libraries, the costs become very affordable,” says John Culshaw, the Jack B. King university librarian at the UI Libraries. He says that without collaborative partners, the University of Iowa would not be able to “parse, secure, and host such enormous repositories of data, let alone develop the Graphical User Interfaces necessary to facilitate patron-driven queries.”
“This project exemplifies the role of libraries in the information age,” says Jamie Wittenberg, research data management librarian and head of scholarly communication at Indiana University Libraries, who will direct the project. “Our mission is to efficiently and effectively connect researchers with the materials they need to advance innovation and discovery. CADRE will open up the power of data mining to everyone, not only people with specialized expertise.”
Bibliometric research is the “science of science”
The ability to deeply analyze connections between these texts will support bibliometric research, a growing field that plumbs the world’s increasingly large and complex databases to reveal the underlying structural forces that affect the production of scientific knowledge. This work—often called the “science of science”—has shed light on a wide range of subjects. For example, bibliometric analysis has helped reveal the depth of women’s historical contributions to science and the influence of large-scale historical events on research activity.
CADRE will provide a user-friendly “front door” through which the partner institution members can request bibliometric analysis of available data. The project will automate many complex and time-consuming tasks that were previously required to conduct this research.
Product developers seeking input. To build user interfaces that will be of the highest utility for you, CADRE seeks your input. Potential users in all disciplines (faculty, staff, and students) are encouraged to provide input through user stories. To share your user story, please complete this form. All responses, no matter how abstract or seemingly trivial, are very helpful for us and will be given serious consideration as we plan for the development of CADRE.
Another important feature of the system is the power to share data. Individuals who use the platform will not only be able to share the results of their analyses, but also the software code, algorithms, workflows, methods, and the specific software versions and configurations used to run their analyses. This is critical for making the work reproducible, as well as helping the original researchers refine their methods for other projects.
Watch a video about the project
The first new materials to be accessed via CADRE are records of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which contains data on publicly-available patents and intellectual property, and the Microsoft Academic Graph, a public database of 160 million scientific records.
Also contributing expertise to the project will be IT experts at Microsoft, Clarivate, and several units at IU, including the Research Data Services group; Science Gateways Research Center; Pervasive Technology Institute; and University Information Technology Services, or UITS. UITS will also contribute to the development of CADRE through access to the university’s supercomputing resources and cloud-computing platform, Jetstream.
Other organizations supporting the project include the Greater Western Library Alliance and the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana.
Oct
19
2017
During the month of Open Access week (October 23-29, 2017) 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 third post is by Padmini Srinivasan, Professor, Computer Science.
Open Access – The sound way forward
At a personal level Open Access to scientific and technical publications is fundamental to my day-to-day activities as a researcher and educator. Barriers, especially financial, in our ability to access our own cumulative knowledge are detrimental to the growth of our societies, particularly in regions of the world struggling even for basic sustenance. It is good to see ‘open access’ which made its formal appearance at the turn of the century, gain momentum including in my field of computer science. Authors now have varied options as for instance, to retain just copyright or to retain all rights. I became aware – some years ago – of how painful it was to access the literature when I wanted to make thirty copies of my own paper for my graduate class. The publisher asked for several thousand dollars in copyright fees! If it had been a last minute article selection then making copies for free would have been approved under ‘fair use’. But I could not make copies and plan to distribute them say in a month’s time. The whole situation was bizarre. Open access comes to the rescue in this and many other situations. I would like to especially credit the field of physics for our open access opportunities today. Physicists had set the precedent for free sharing of knowledge way before open access came up the horizon. Physics departments and libraries, at least across the US, would with almost clock-work precision exchange pre-prints amongst themselves through the postal service. Each department maintained its mailing lists for sending and receiving these preprints which would be arranged nicely in a reading room. Reliance on the postal services diminished with the arrival of arXiv – a repository for electronic preprints – about thirty years ago. ArXiv continues today even in areas beyond physics. The fact that this ‘free’ exchange model clearly did not impinge on the profits from journals in Physics was part of the winning argument for the spread of Open Access. I also want to acknowledge the strong support offered by Libraries and Universities such as our own; for instance, their support of publication costs associated with Open Access journals is invaluable. These fees are worth it given the long term access options they yield. My students and I have availed of this facility on several occasions and we are grateful for these funds. I know open access will continue to flourish and anything outside will steadily become a dwindling exception.
Jul
11
2016
Q&A with Duncan Stewart
ILA’s past president and UI special collections catalog librarian
Q: How long have you been an active member of ILA?
A: I joined ILA in 1998 when I got my first professional library job as a cataloger at the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City. I joined ILA because ALA was not affordable or vital to my job as a state librarian.
Q: List any positions or projects you’ve worked on for ILA
A: When I joined, I volunteered to be a member of ILA Governmental Affairs Committee (GAC). I was a member for several years, assisting with ILA Lobbying Day at the State Capitol in the Law Library. Then I became chair of GAC and held that position for several years, working closely with ILA leadership and ILA professional lobbyists in Des Moines. ILA actually has a fairly powerful lobbying voice in the state legislature. Over the years, I have served on the ILA-ACRL board, as a member of the ILA Executive board, and as vice president, president, and now past president of ILA.
Q: How would you describe what ILA is and how it serves Iowa/Iowans?
A: ILA serves Iowa librarians, libraries, and librarians as the organized voice of the library community in the state. With 1500 members from every county of Iowa, we combine all types of librarians (teacher librarians, public librarians, academics, special librarians) into one strong group. This works well in Iowa because we are a small state and separate groups for every type of librarian would be impractical, though ILA does have subdivisions where like-minded librarians gather for professional development. ILA serves Iowa by explaining the need for and huge impact of state assistance to Iowa libraries through the State Library of Iowa. ILA has partnered with the State Library to ask for state financial aid for Inter Library Loan, making books much more available to participating libraries. ILA has worked to support and shape the State Library and the services it provides. But the best example of ILA benefiting Iowans is the statewide contract for Ebsco Host, the database of journal articles and news stories—the State Library, with ILA’s ongoing assistance, uses this contract to provide access (paid) to every library in the state. ILA has also been instrumental in garnering legislative support for ongoing access to Learning Express, which is a database of professional tests and educational materials available to all Iowa libraries.
Q: Please explain why, as a University of Iowa librarian, you joined and participate in ILA
A: I continued my membership in ILA, even though I also became active with ALA after being hired at UIL in 2002. I did this because I had seen the positive effects that ILA had on Iowa libraries, I enjoyed working with librarians from across the state and from many kinds of libraries, and because I am convinced that membership and participation in ILA is one way for UI librarians to fulfill the mission of the library and the university to serve the people of Iowa. UI librarians have had strong support for ongoing membership in ILA and have served at every level from committee member to president (I was ILA president in 2015). ILA benefits greatly from the commitment and energy of UI Librarians and would not be the same organization without us.
Q: What is something you learned through participating in ILA that you might not have learned at another conference or on-the-job?
A: The most basic thing I learned as a member of ILA is the strength and diversity of the library community in Iowa and our power when we all work together. ILA includes para-professional staff members, state certified librarians without MLS, as well as MLS librarians. Together we span the spectrum of libraries in the state and cooperate to improve all library services. I learned that it is not only possible, but highly powerful to work with people of greatly differing backgrounds, job experience, and training. ILA taught me that there is strength in cooperation and numbers.
Q: What do you value most about your participation in ILA?
A: The thing I value most about ILA is the chance to meet, work with, and celebrate successes with librarians from across Iowa and from every kind of library. ILA is, at heart, the center of the Iowa library community. And I see my work in ILA as a direct contribution to serving the people of Iowa. ILA allows you to meet the citizens and librarians of Iowa that we are here to serve. ILA unites librarians, government, and library users into a force for library support.
Q&A with Brett Cloyd
Active in ILA leadership and UI government information librarian
Q: How long have you been an active member of ILA?
A; I joined ILA as a student in the UI School of Library and Information Science in 1996.
Q: List any positions or projects you’ve worked on for ILA
A: I have been active in the Iowa chapter of the Government Documents Round Table (I’ve held all of the executive board positions) and the Iowa chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (I’ve chaired the Spring Conference Planning Committee and held the office of President). I am currently an Executive Board Member of ILA. I am also the ILA Membership Committee Chair for 2016. I have been able to gain leadership experience and make an impact on improving Iowa libraries.
Q: How would you describe what ILA is and how it serves Iowa/Iowans?
A: ILA provides learning and engagement opportunities for Iowa libraries and Iowa library staff. We share best practices, inspiration as well as challenges via on-line communication channels, personal connections, and conferences. ILA advocates for Iowa libraries by way of its lobbyists and special events like the ILA Legislative Reception at the state capitol..
Q: Please explain why, as a University of Iowa librarian, you joined and participate in ILA
A: I felt that I could make a direct impact by way of my participation. It was very easy for me to become involved in the organization and I saw the benefits of gaining leadership opportunities and working with librarians from across the state. Service to the state has been important part of my work with a public university.
Q: What is something you learned through participating in ILA that you might not have learned at another conference or on-the-job?
A: I really appreciate my contacts with the State Library of Iowa. I see their dedicated staff at ILA events and I am able to learn about their interesting projects and share their work with students and faculty on campus.
Q: What do you value most about your participation in ILA?
A: I really value my friendships with members of ILA. This is my 20th year as an ILA member. I appreciate the variety of people I have met over the years. ILA has helped me expand my views of Iowa by meeting people from across the state.
Q&A with Sara Scheib
Current ILA/ACRL president and UI Sciences librarian
Sara Scheib and ILA/ACRL
Q: How long have you been an active member of ILA?
A: I joined ILA as a SLIS student in 2006. I knew I wanted to get a job in a library in Iowa, so I wanted an opportunity to attend the conference and network with other Iowa librarians. Plus, ILA membership is free for full-time students, so it was a bit of a no-brainer. I joined the ILA/ACRL subdivision in 2008 when I got my first professional job as the Emerging Technologies Librarian at Kirkwood Community College.
Q: List any positions or projects you’ve worked on for ILA.
A: I was fresh out of library school and working in a community college library when I joined. I knew I had a lot to learn, so I joined the Community College Roundtable and the Iowa chapter of ACRL. Iowa ACRL was looking for volunteers for committees, so I volunteered for the Electronic Communications Committee. It was ideal for a first committee because it helped me stay on top of the subdivision’s activities and all our business was conducted electronically, so I didn’t have to miss work to attend lots of meetings.
The following year, Kirkwood was slated to host the subdivision’s annual conference, so I volunteered to work on the local arrangements for the Spring Conference Planning Committee. The same year, I was recruited to chair the Electronic Communications Committee. This gave me a vote on the Executive Board, which was an excellent group of librarians who really helped to mentor me. It was my first real leadership position, and I enjoyed my work.
After a brief hiatus while I worked in a rural public library, I knew I wanted to get involved again, so I returned to the Executive Board as chair of the Electronic Communications Committee in 2013. In 2014, I was nominated to be Vice President/President-Elect of ILA/ACRL. It’s a three-year commitment (1st year – chair of Nominations Committee; 2nd year – President; 3rd year – chair of Awards Committee), so it’s not something I undertook lightly, but I knew it was time to step up and take a stronger leadership role in the group. I was elected in 2014 and spent my first year as Nominations Chair picking my team for the following year. This year, I’m serving as President. It’s a lot of work, but I have great team on the Executive Board and they make my job much easier. Next year, I’ll be the Awards Chair. That involves selecting the winners for scholarships and other awards, which should be lots of fun.
I’m also the Advisor to the Student Subdivision of ILA, which allows me to help library school students as they build careers of their own.
Q: How would you describe what ILA is and how it serves Iowa/Iowans?
A: ILA and ILA/ACRL serves Iowa/Iowans as a state-level advocate for libraries of all sizes and types. We help to make sure there’s a library staffed by a qualified teacher librarian in your child’s school. We help libraries conserve their limited budgets by making it more affordable for them to borrow books and other materials from one another. We provide access to valuable news, research, and job training materials to all Iowans by making sure every library has access to high quality databases like EBSCOHost and Learning Express. Finally, we are the primary professional development organization for librarians working in all kinds of libraries all over the state. We learn from one another so we can serve you better.
Q: Please explain why, as a University of Iowa librarian, you joined and participate in ILA?
A: I participate in ILA and ILA/ACRL because I recognize the excellent work my colleagues are doing at all kinds of libraries across the state and I want to learn from their experiences. And as I develop my own areas of expertise, I have a responsibility to share that knowledge and give back to the Iowa library community.
Q: What is something you learned through participating in ILA that you might not have learned at another conference or on-the-job?
A: While extremely valuable, the national-level conferences I attend as a science librarian tend to be very specialized and have a narrow focus. Sometimes, it’s important to get out of the corner you’ve painted yourself into and see what others are working on. I get some of my best programming ideas from public librarians. And my colleagues at small liberal arts colleges have some of the most engaging and innovative teaching methods. Plus, I get to meet and develop relationships with some of the most passionate, smart, and funny people in the state.
Q: What do you value most about your participation in ILA?
A: I graduated from library school less than 10 years ago. ILA/ACRL has given me the extraordinary opportunity to take on a leadership role very early in my career. By giving presentations, working on committees, planning conferences, and leading meetings, I have gained the skills and confidence I need to become more active within my own department and on the national level. This has been very advantageous to my career and I did it all while working to provide more opportunities to the citizens of my home state!
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A: I encourage all librarians working in Iowa to get involved in ILA in some form. No matter what your interests or skills are, you can find your niche in ILA. It will be hard work at times, but the benefits you’ll receive and the relationships you’ll build will be worth it.
May
04
2016
UI Libraries’ Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio champions DH initiatives
Under the guidance of Senior Scholar Judith Pascoe, the Studio Scholars Program steering committee has selected ten faculty members and five graduate students from a competitive pool of applicants for Digital Humanities (DH) support.
Prior to the selection process, the Scholars steering committee worked with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio to identify digital humanities initiatives.
With an eye toward synergistic use of university resources to support digital humanities projects across the campus, the committee defined collaborative scholarly contexts to attract compelling DH project proposals. The result was five digital humanities initiatives in two categories:
Digital Archives Initiatives
- Embracing Difference in Iowa
- Memory & Knowledge
DH Jumpstart Initiatives
- Get Digital with Your Scholarship
- Get Digital with Your Dissertation
- DH Researcher
Find full descriptions of initiatives here.
Over the coming months, winners of Studio Scholars Initiatives Awards will receive immersive support from the Studio, which will provide resources, expertise, technical assistance, and access to specialized equipment for their DH projects.
DIGITAL ARCHIVES Initiatives
Winners of Digital Archives Initiatives Awards receive $1500 and support for projects that engage with archival material and voices from the past or present. This year, there are two initiatives in this category: Embracing Difference in Iowa and Memory & Knowledge.
Embracing Difference in Iowa connects scholars with existing archives at the University of Iowa and brings to light narratives from across the UI community.
- Michael Hill, associate professor of English, won for his project titled “Black Students in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1939-1959). Hill is creating a digital platform to give the public access to the collegiate experiences of Margaret Walker, Herbert Nipson, and Michael Harper, a trio of black students who constitute the earliest black students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Memory & Knowledge helps develop cross-generational conversations about the changing nature of academic disciplines. It also encourages responsible archiving of existing scholarly material and the development of a digital skillset increasingly in demand for academia.
- Frances Cannon, an MFA student in nonfiction writing, was selected for her project “Mapping the gardens of memory: the Carl Klaus Archive.” Cannon will collaborate with Carl Klaus, emeritus professor of English and founder of the UI’s nonfiction writing program. With their shared interest in writing about botany, agriculture, and horticulture, the project will benefit both. Cannon will create a digital repository of Klaus’ archives, while Klaus, in return, will provide editorial and professional guidance.
- Heidi Lung, lecturer in museum studies and anthropology, will develop a digital exhibit/archive focusing on the 34-year career of George Schrimper, former curator and director of the Natural History Museum as part of her project titled “George Schrimper and UI Museum Studies.” The project will also document the history of museum studies at the University of Iowa.
- Heather Wacha, PhD candidate in history, will be pursuing a project titled “Marilyn Thomas and the Bonaparte Pottery Museum.” Ms. Wacha will create a digital repository documenting the life and work of Marilyn Thomas, who, over a period of 45 years, revived, researched and developed the historic Bonaparte Pottery Museum in Bonaparte Iowa.
DH JUMPSTART Initiatives
The DH Jumpstart Initiative Awards provide faculty members and graduate students to explore digital approaches to their work.
This year, there are three initiatives in this category: Get Digital with Your Scholarship, Get Digital with Your Dissertation, and DH Researcher.
Get Digital with Your Scholarship offers awardees an immersive, three-day consultation and work session with Studio staff members. Awardees will work with staff to develop digital components of their research, including videos, maps, infographics, etc. Scholars could also create a digital manifestation of a monograph or embark on new projects enabled by new research applications (e.g., mapping or network analysis).
- Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, assistant professor in religious studies and communication studies, is text-mining newspaper archives to study the incidence and usage of “connection” at the moment of global telegraphy establishment, as part of her project, “World-Wide Wire: Religion, Technology, and Dreams of Global Unity before the Internet.” She is also designing a map that will chart the convergence or divergence of colonial shipping routes, early telegraph cables, and later fiber-optic cables.
- Kim Marra, professor in theatre arts and American studies, is working with Studio staff to develop a digital component to her project “The Pull of Horses: Embodied Interactions across Urban American Species, 1865-1920.” Marra’s work addresses cross-species interactions and brings together a rich archive of newspaper and magazines illustrations, as well as silent film footage, documenting the central role horses played in American city life.
- Brenda Longfellow, associate professor, art & art history, with Studio staff support, is designing a digital project to supplement her book manuscript as part of her project, “Past Lives, Present Meanings: Recycled Statues in Imperial Rome.” Professor Longfellow is examining the origins and afterlives of statues that were moved to Rome from other parts of the Roman Empire, possibly mapping these movements digitally.
- Anne Stapleton, lecturer in English, is working with Studio staff on her project “Walter Scott’s Swath of Influence: Mapping Towns Named Waverly in the Midwest.” Stapleton is digitally mapping and collecting images and histories associated with American towns named after Scott’s novel. She will, in turn, use these materials in an undergraduate class that explores the long aftermath of Scott’s literary fame.
- With the support of Studio staff, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, assistant professor, communication studies, is developing a digital supplement to her book manuscript, which focuses on motherhood in the context of homeland security culture. For her project, “Homeland Maternity: Risk, Security, and the New Reproductive Regime,” she plans to use GIS software to map key locales in contemporary U.S. reproductive politics.
Get Digital with Your Dissertation invites graduate students to explore digital components for their dissertation.
- As part of “Creative Alternatives: Experimental Art Scenes and Cultural Politics in Berlin 1971-1999,” Briana Smith, PhD student in history, is working with Studio staff to develop a mapping element to enhance her dissertation’s exploration of ephemeral art actions and performances in late twentieth-century Berlin.
- Gemma Goodale-Sussen, PhD student in English, is working with Studio staff to explore options for annotating historical images related to prison photography and modernist literature for her “Prison Portraiture and Modernist Literature” project.
- As part of “Mapping National Park Historiography: Iowa Effigy Mounds,” Mary Wise, PhD student in history, is honing her mapping skills and working with Studio staff on ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS approaches to the materials. Wise will construct maps that shed light on Iowa National Park Service historiography, with a particular focus on Effigy Mounds.
DH Researcher, student research support, pairs faculty and students who have an interest in digital scholarly research and addresses a range of research tasks associated with ongoing projects in the Studio.
- Paul Dilley, assistant professor in classics and religious studies, with the help of a student research assistant, is compiling a database of all known Greek authors and titles (including fragmentary and lost works) as part of “Philology Extended: Towards a Distant Reading of Ancient Greek Literature.” The project will facilitate a preliminary distant reading of the entire ancient literary field.
- Loren Glass, professor of English, with the assistance of a student researcher and digital humanities librarian Nikki White, is mapping the professional itineraries and connections of everyone who ever attended or taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from its inception in 1936 to the present date. Their project, “Mapping the Workshop” will help visualize an array of social and historical networks related to the growth of creative writing at the University of Iowa.
- Julia Oliver Rajan lecturer, Spanish and Portuguese, with the help of a student translator, will heighten the accessibility of materials in the “Coffee Zone” project, which documents the regional dialect of the western Puerto Rico coffee zone and preserves the oral histories of the people who work there.
The Studio Scholars Program, administered by the University of Iowa Libraries’ Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio (DSPS), is a faculty research group dedicated to supporting faculty projects related to the Digital Humanities (DH).
Contact: Tom Keegan, head of the University of Iowa Libraries’ Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, thomas-keegan@uiowa.edu
Feb
10
2016
NEW PAGING SERVICE—Beginning January 4, 2016, you can request up to 10 items for pickup at the Main Library through our catalog. Please request materials before 12:00 a.m. midnight for pickup after 12:00 p.m. noon the following business day. Requests received on a Friday will be ready the next Monday.
—When you have immediate need for items that are not available from the University of Iowa Libraries, search UBorrow. UBorrow enables you to find and request books directly from 15 major research libraries, with combined collections of more than 90 million volumes.
Learn more about and search UBorrow at guides.lib.uiowa.edu/uborrow
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