Scholarly Impact – Library News

Jun 04 2019

Eighteen faculty win UI Libraries OpenHawks grants

Posted on June 4, 2019June 11, 2019 by The University of Iowa Libraries

OpenHawks is a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace their current textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.

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 Strong, 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.

May 09 2019

University of Iowa Libraries becomes institutional member of Open Access publisher Cogitatio

Posted on May 9, 2019May 9, 2019 by Brett Cloyd

Today hefty paywalls prevent research published in most scholarly journals from being read online by audiences that many academics often most want to reach—policy makers and elected officials, industry leaders, non-profits, educators, the general public, and even faculty from smaller teaching colleges and community colleges. The University of Iowa Libraries has signed an institutional agreement with Cogitatio Press to support Open Access publishing by faculty, students and staff in their journals. According to SPARC, “Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” Instead of paywalls, Open Access is often supported by article processing fees (APC), that are often the responsibilities of the authors (or their institutions). The agreement with Cogitatio means the APCs are paid for as part of a 3-year membership by the university. This means that the scholarly research produced by University of Iowa faculty and students can be viewed in full text online and shared widely.

Cogitatio’s peer reviewed journals include

In Political Science, Professor Caroline Tolbert and graduate students Scott LaCombe and Courtney Juelich each have had articles accepted for publication in a special issue of Politics and Governance dedicated to understanding state ballot measures (initiatives and referenda) after completing a rigorous peer-review process. Professor Tolbert is excited about the prospect of having coauthored work published in an Open Access journal that is rigorously peer-reviewed. “There are not yet many options for Open Access in Political Science, and this model of publication is one model for the future for scholarly writing. We need to expand our readers beyond just other academics and engage in conversations with policymakers and the general public. I also found Cogitation’s peer-review process very thorough. Politics and Governance is a high quality journal. Some scholars worry that Open Access is not as prestigious, but I encourage my colleagues to take a look.”

The Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing guides for “What Faculty Can Do” and “Open Access Models” provide additional information on Open Access at the University of Iowa.

Mar 05 2019

UI Libraries announces OpenHawks grant program for Open Educational Resources (OER)

Posted on March 5, 2019March 5, 2019 by The University of Iowa Libraries

The University of Iowa Libraries announces OpenHawks, a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to adopt or develop Open Educational Resources (OER) for enhanced student success.

What are OER?

OER (such as textbooks, videos, assessment tools, lab books, research methods, 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.

Why use OER?

Acknowledging the rising costs of educational resources and increasing financial pressures on students, the UI Libraries works to provide creative solutions in partnership with other campus units. As a result of this collaborative work, OpenHawks grants support faculty efforts to use OER at any level: adopting or remixing existing materials, developing open access assessment and learning tools, redesigning courses, or creating an original OER to share under an open license.

How to apply

The UI Libraries will issue a formal Call for Proposals in March 2019. The award levels outlined below provide guidance for grant applicants on the amount of funding that may be approved for different types of proposals. UI instructors can apply for awards at any of these levels.

Award Type	Award Range	Requirements
Adoption	$500-$1,000	Use an existing open textbook for a course with no editing and minimal course adaptation required.
Remixing	$750-$2,000	Adapt, update, combine, or improve existing OER to replace a currently used textbook. Use of library-licensed materials may also be considered.
Support Materials	$1,000-$3,000	Develop test bank questions, teaching support materials, quizzes, interactive learning aids, or other support materials for existing OER.
Course Redesign	Up to $5,000	Redesign a course around the use of OER.
OER Creation	Up to $10,000	Create an original Open Educational Resource to be used in a course and shared under an open license.

OpenHawks grants are funded by the Office of the Provost and UI Student Government (UISG) and administered by the UI Libraries with support from the Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology (OTLT), University College, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS).

For more information about OER:

UI Libraries OER page
UI Libraries OER guide
SPARC guide to OER
Open Textbook Network resources
Faculty and instructors interesting in applying for OpenHawks funding can direct questions to Scholarly Communications Librarian Mahrya Burnett at mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu.

Jan 07 2019

Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) now available to UI researchers

Posted on January 7, 2019March 12, 2019 by Sara Scheib

The University of Iowa is now an institutional member of QDR (Qualitative Data Repository) . The QDR membership gives faculty and other researchers a platform to store and share their qualitative data and enhances campus efforts for providing Research Data Services.

“QDR is a dedicated archive for storing and sharing digital data (and accompanying documentation) generated or collected through qualitative and multi-method research in the social sciences,” according to the Syracuse University based organization. “QDR provides search tools to facilitate the discovery of data, and also serves as a portal to material beyond its own holdings, with links to U.S. and international archives.”

“The main benefit of membership is curation and preservation of data projects deposited by affiliates – faculty, students, and research staff – of member institutions”.

Most data repositories focus on quantitative data. QDR offers an advantage for curating qualitative data. Alternatives include having researchers manage data on their own, which would mean more time and expense.

QDR is being funded at the University of Iowa by the University Libraries and the Iowa Social Science Research Center. The University of Iowa Libraries has been working closely with the Office of the Vice President of Research and Economic Development, Information Technology Services, and campus offices to support data management. Brett Cloyd (brett-cloyd@uiowa.edu | (319)335-5743) from the UI Libraries is the QDR Institutional Representative and serves as liaison with QDR. Please contact Brett with questions for help in getting started. More information is available at the UI Libraries’ QDR Guide.

Funding for QDR is provided by the National Science Foundation, and hosted by the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry, a unit of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Jan 03 2019

2019: The Year of Public Domain

Posted on January 3, 2019January 3, 2019 by Mahrya Burnett

Photo Credit: Center for the Study of the Public Domain

For the first time in 20 years, artistic works copyrighted in the U.S. will enter the public domain, opening up a trove of material published during 1923 to be freely digitized, read, and used as the basis for new works. But why is this happening now? After all, shouldn’t copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain every year? One would think so, but since the late 1970s, U.S. copyright law has been subject to a series of extensions and retroactive patches that have tied up and confused the status of copyrighted works produced during the mid-20th century. (Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has an excellent breakdown of recent copyright history here. The Atlantic also published a comprehensive article on this issue, which can be found here.) The result has been that nothing has entered the public domain since 1998. But January 1, 2019 marks a pause in the era of the shrinking public domain. If no legislative action is taken to the contrary, each year, we will now have a new set of books, recordings, movies, and other creative works to enjoy freely.

Here are some places to check out the creative works of 1923:

Hathi Trust Digital Library – These materials from the Google Books Project have been digitized for years, but as of January 1, the full-text is now available to everyone.
Center for the Study of Public Domain – Duke’s Public Domain Day page has some great selected highlights.
Public Domain Review – This journal specializes in mining the public domain. Here are their international picks for this year.

Interested in finding out more about U.S. copyright law and how to determine a work’s copyright status? As part of the library’s new Scholarly Impact Department, part of my job is to help faculty work through complex copyright issues, such as what can be used in the classroom, how to retain your rights as an author, and how to apply Creative Commons licensing. Feel free to send me an email at mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu to set up a consultation. You might also try these excellent copyright resources:

Cornell University Library Copyright Information Center – This handy reference chart is great for a quick check on copyright status.
Digital Copyright Slider – This Flash-based slider provides copyright status for works, depending on when they were published and whether copyright was renewed.
UI Libraries Copyright Guide – This guide provides the basics on copyright issues, such as Fair Use, seeking permissions, author rights, and licensing

Dec 04 2018

DOIs for Theses and Dissertations

Posted on December 4, 2018 by Sara Scheib

All theses and dissertations in Iowa Research Online have now been assigned DOIs. DOIs, or Digital Object Identifiers, are unique and persistent IDs for electronically published documents. DOIs will be used by publications citing your thesis/dissertation, so that there will be better information about where your work has been cited. Using a DOI also allows less formal usage to be tracked as well, such as tweets, links in Wikipedia, blog posts, etc. and will be included in alternative metrics (altmetrics).

A DOI looks like this: 10.17077/etd.g638o927 and a DOI link looks like this: https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.g638o927. Clicking on the DOI link will take you to the current URL for the publication. URLs can change, but DOIs don’t. If the URL for your thesis or dissertation changes, due to a service migration or other updates, the DOI link will direct traffic to the correct URL. That’s why it’s important to include DOIs or DOI links in your citations, so your readers can follow your work back to the references you cited.

To find the DOI for your thesis or dissertation, go to the IRO theses and dissertation series or your favorite search engine and search for your name and your thesis or dissertation title. Click on the title of your thesis or dissertation, and the DOI will be listed in the first field in the record. If you have any questions, or if you are not receiving monthly download counts and would like to, please contact lib-ir@uiowa.edu.

Oct 25 2018

Scholarly Communications and OA

Posted on October 25, 2018October 23, 2018 by Willow Fuchs

Written by Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian

In the libraries, we spend the whole month of October celebrating Open Access (OA), and with good reason. As scholarly publishing continues to evolve and spawn new models for disseminating knowledge, it’s more important than ever to make sure that anyone can access critical research and that scholars from anywhere in the world can publish their discoveries. It’s also important for scholars at the University of Iowa to understand how to manage the impact of their research, disseminate it as widely as possible, and to choose publication venues that will help reach their goals.

Guiding researchers as they navigate these issues is a big part of my job as a scholarly communications librarian. I meet with all kinds of students and faculty to talk about the ins and outs of publishing their research. If you’re interested in getting your publications out from behind paywalls and into the hands of readers, here’s how I can help:

Find open access journals in your discipline

One way to make your research open is to publish in an open access journal. But what does that mean? Open access journals are publications that make it free for readers to access ALL of their content through the publisher’s website. Quality OA journals will be transparent in their business and editorial practices and should be well-regarded in your field. They should also be up-front about any Article Processing Charges (APCs) used to offset the cost of publishing. The Directory of Open Access Journals can help you determine whether a journal is, in fact, open and can help you find open journals in your discipline. I can help you navigate this directory or provide you with additional information about journals.

Get your work into Iowa Research Online

Iowa Research Online (IRO) is Iowa’s institutional repository for publications and other research artifacts. This means that UI faculty, staff, and students can upload their published work and make it discoverable to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world. Including your article in IRO is another great way to make your research open, and I would be glad to help walk you through the process. Not every publisher will allow you to include the final version of your article in a repository. But luckily, there are tools that we can use to determine exactly what your publisher will allow. Sherpa/RoMEO is one such tool. This directory lists current publisher policies on self-archiving and will tell you what you can and cannot include in IRO.

Find funding for Article Processing Charges (APCs)

APCs are one of the most misunderstood aspects of scholarly publishing. In some disciplines, it has long been standard practice to charge authors “page fees” for charts, graphics, color printing, or other publication costs. In other disciplines, giving money to a publisher is considered “pay to publish,” and is not seen as a legitimate practice. In the world of open access publishing, we have seen APCs crop up, proliferate, and grow to sometimes thousands of dollars per publication. Not all OA journals charge APCs, in fact the vast majority do not. However, the ones who do are often big name journal titles, with high impact factors, produced by major academic publishers. These are often the same journals in which scholars need to publish, for promotion and tenure, or simply to be widely read. In many ways, these publishers still control the landscape, even the OA landscape, and it looks like their APCs aren’t going away anytime soon. If you find yourself needing to pay an APC or are considering an OA publication, but don’t know how to fund it, I can help. Often, you can designate grant funding to be earmarked for APCS or your department may have funds available for this purpose.

Get up-to-date on funder mandates for open

Funding organizations are slowly recognizing that the research they fund as a public good should, in fact, be available to the public. While other parts of the world are further along that the United States in this regard (See Plan S, for example), certain federal agencies require that funded research be made publicly available. When this is the case, researchers must comply with the mandate. Some agencies, such as the National Institute of Health, make complying with this policy relatively easy. Others are a bit more tricky. This is another area where I can be of assistance.

If you’d like to discuss how to make your research open, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to send me an email at mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu to set up an appointment. I’m also a part of the library’s new Scholarly Impact Department, which rolls our scholarly communications and data services into one unit. If you’d like to learn more about the new department, please contact us at lib-impact@uiowa.edu. Let’s work together to make Iowa’s scholarship as open as it can be!