Scholarly Impact – Library News

Jul 02 2020

UI Libraries awards 12 OpenHawks grants

Posted on July 2, 2020July 2, 2020 by The University of Iowa Libraries

The University of Iowa Libraries has awarded 12 grants for Open Educational Resource (OER) projects for the 2020-2021 academic year. OpenHawks is a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace current textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.

OpenHawks is funded by the annual Provost Investment Fund (PIF) from the UI Office of the Provost. This year, two projects are jointly funded with the Office of Teaching, Learning, & Technology.

The funded OER projects, which were selected through a competitive application process, will benefit students in a wide range of disciplines, including fine arts, English as a second language, neurobiology, political science, foreign languages, communication sciences and disorders, education, communications, and biostatistics.

OER (such as textbooks, videos, assessment tools, lab books, research materials, or interactive course modules) are free for students to use. The 2020-2021 OER projects will save UI students $171,000 in the first year alone. Removing cost barriers to course materials opens student access and positively impacts learning.

The value of OER extends to the wider academic community, since they carry legal permission for open use. The open licenses under which these items are released allow any user at any institution to create, reuse, and redistribute copies of the resources.

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 2021. For more information, visit www.lib.uiowa.edu/openhawks

Stephanie Dowda DeMer
OER creation grant: $4,700.
Title: Material Encounters.

Material Encounters is a textbook that will fill significant gaps in the research and presentation of alternative photography processes and theory. It achieves this by bringing together traditionally siloed information regarding process, theory, and interdisciplinary practice into one text to serve student research and faculty pedagogy. The textbook will include interviews with female-identifying and queer artists who innovate alternative processes and use their practices to address social, environmental, or personal issues.

Craig Dresser
OER creation grant: $8,200.
Title: Elements of Academic Writing

This text will help ESL students understand the purposes of writing assignments and their common component. This approach relies heavily on decision-making, informed by consideration of the context around the assignment. It aims to increase the students’ understanding and efficacy in the ways in which they communicate with their teachers through academic writing. In the end, students should be empowered to take on any manner of writing assignment, confident in their ability to communicate effectively.

Mei-Ling Joiner and Jason Hardie
OER creation grant: $8,200.
Title: A Centralized Online OER for Introduction to Neurobiology

Joiner and Hardie are developing a neurobiology OER to better align with the course as it is currently taught and to save students significant money on textbook costs. Existing textbooks for this course almost exclusively follow a molecule to whole organism approach, but the course begins with whole organism, then later addresses molecular level mechanisms, which invites the interest of students newly encountering neurobiology.

Courtney Juelich
OER creation grant: $3,000.
Title: Online Videos for Introduction to American Politics

By developing an online lecture system, students will replace the current $200 textbook with online video lectures and come to class ready to show comprehension and critical thinking through a discussion-based class. Teaching students of all majors about the basis of the United States government’s innerworkings, and the history of its laws is essential for our students’ growth and for our democracy.

Irene Lottini, Lucia Gemmani, Claudia Sartini-Rideout
Course redesign grant: $2,000.
Title: E-textbook and Workbook for Elementary Italian

The authors are planning to redesign this sequence to better help our students achieve the CLAS GE Program Outcomes and be prepared for programs abroad. The goal is to create an e-textbook and a workbook that will fulfill the two main objectives of redesigned courses: supporting students’ acquisition of the grammar and vocabulary that ensure meaningful communication and enhancing students’ familiarity with Italian culture. This project is co-funded by OTLT.

Stewart McCauley and Jean Gordon
Course redesign grant: $2,000.
Title: OER Redesign of Basic Neuroscience for Speech and Hearing

The authors will design a textbook that integrates topics in communication disorders with foundational concepts in neuroscience. This can best be achieved by using OER materials from a variety of domains—especially taking advantage of the wealth of freely available online audiovisual case illustrations—to better interweave normal and disordered processes. This project is co-funded by OTLT.

Mark McDermott
OER creation grant: $8,200.
Title: Developing an OER Toolkit for Science Methods Courses

McDermott will work with former students to develop an Open Educational Resource Toolkit that provides background information about the argument-based pedagogical approach the class explores, tools for planning units based on this pedagogical approach, supplemental resources for supporting science conceptual understanding, and sample activity plans for the experiences engaged in during the courses.

Sylvia Mikucki-Enyart
OER creation grant: $8,200
Title: Sexual Communication in Personal Relationships

The primary objective of this project is to create a no-cost, accessible, interactive, and flexible textbook and companion materials (e.g., activities, study guides) that enhance UI students’ theoretical understanding of sexual communication and increase their sexual communication efficacy to engage in sexual communication tasks (e.g., conversations surrounding consent, safe sex practices).

Beatrice Mkenda
OER creation grant: $8,200.
Title: Elementary Swahili Online Course

Swahili teaching and learning materials have relied on traditional textbooks, some of which lack listening materials. Listening is one of the most important skills in foreign language teaching and learning. The Swahili Online Course will be a proficiency-based teaching and learning resource for elementary levels and will provide interactive activities based on listening to native speakers of Swahili. Students will have an opportunity to listen and react to the video and audio in different ways, such as speaking, writing, reading, and identifying culture.

Caitlin Ward and Collin Nolte
OER creation grant: $6,000.
Title: Simulation Based Inference in Introductory Biostatistics

The American Statistical Association (ASA) recommends that introductory statistics education focuses on conceptual understanding, with an emphasis on technology and real data. Statistics education often places priorities on an antiquated view of the former, with symbolic manipulation and contrived examples taking priority over data exploration and statistical thinking, and BIOS:4120 is no different. Both the ASA recommendations and the advances in pedagogical literature on active learning bring to the forefront the need to restructure this course. The authors’ proposal aims to meet this need by developing a new resource, which empowers students to achieve a higher level of understanding through the use of technology and real-world data.

Sang-Seok Yoon and Joung-A Park
OER creation grant: $8,200.
Title: Developing a Textbook for First Year Korean Course

The objective of developing this resource is to make students’ learning experience more active, fun and challenging, and to reduce students’ financial burden of purchasing the textbook used in First Year Korean: First Semester. This textbook is an essential part of the class for self-study in addition to attending lectures and doing exercises in the class.

Giovanni Zimotti and Alexis Jimenez Candia
OER creation grant: $8,200.
Title: Intermediate Spanish II: Spanish for Healthcare

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is undertaking efforts to redesign the GE CLAS Core sequence of Spanish. The aim is to modernize the curriculum offered to meet the needs of 21st century students and to better prepare them in their future careers. As part of this redesign, it is paramount to develop materials that are meaningful for the specific type of students that will be taking this course. Unfortunately, the commercially available textbook we currently use is very expensive for students and outdated. This project aims to create an OER textbook that is personalized to the educational needs of the students of Spanish Intermediate II: Spanish for Healthcare.

Mar 26 2020

Virtual Services from Scholarly Impact

Posted on March 26, 2020March 27, 2020 by Sara Scheib

Although the campus libraries are closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff of the Scholarly Impact Department are working remotely to assist UI faculty, staff, and students. Extensive resources and information about our services is always available at our website: https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/scholarly-impact/. We offer virtual one-on-one consultations and group training sessions upon request. Contact us today at lib-impact@uiowa.edu for scheduling!

If you need assistance with Scholarly Communication issues, such as:

Finding and using Open Educational Resources (OER)
Applying for an OpenHawks OER grant (Applications are due April 24, 2020!)
Making your scholarship Open Access
Navigating copyright and fair use for course materials and publishing

Our Scholarly Communications Librarian, Mahrya Burnett, is available to help.

If you need Research Data Services, such as assistance with:

Data management plans
Managing data during research
Sharing or publishing research data and getting a DOI

Our Data Services Librarian, Brian Westra, is available to help you. You can contact him directly or through lib-data@uiowa.edu.

And if you need assistance with boosting your scholarly impact, we can help you with:

Creating and managing researcher profiles, like ORCID
Measuring the impact of your research
Analyzing the publication output of individuals or groups

Sara Scheib and Sherry Xie are available to help.

Let us help free up your time so you can focus on your teaching, learning, and research!

Feb 17 2020

Considering OER? Get Some Funding with OpenHawks!

Posted on February 17, 2020February 17, 2020 by Sara Scheib

The Libraries are happy to announce our second round of OpenHawks funding, available to any faculty member or graduate student who is interested in using or developing Open Educational Resources (OER) for a UI course. If you are concerned about the cost or quality of your existing textbooks and would like to explore OER, this might be the nudge you need!

We’re offering a range of awards, depending on the type of project you’d like to complete.

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.

To find out more, visit the OpenHawks website. Here, you’ll find the Call for Proposals, as well as general information about OER, training materials, and more. Applications are due on April 24, 2020.

OpenHawks is a program funded by the Provost’s Innovation Fund (PIF) and UI Student Government.

Dec 20 2019

Data Management Course for Researchers

Posted on December 20, 2019February 4, 2020 by Brian Westra

Got research data? Have you shared it?

Other researchers, funders, publishers, and the public want to know:

The public – A Pew research survey found that open access to data and independent review inspire more trust in research findings by the public.

Research participants – Many clinical trial participants understand and support data sharing (within confidentiality and privacy protections) in order to advance medical research and improve patient outcomes.

Funders – Research funders strongly encourage or require data sharing, and require that research proposals include data management plans describing data sharing.

Other researchers – Many research disciplines and related professional societies and associations require data to be shared in support of reproducibility, transparency, and accelerating research. For example: American Geophysical Union, earth and space sciences, social sciences, and American Psychological Association.

Journals/Publishers – Many journals also have requirements that data be shared and preserved via repositories. For example: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, PLOS, Wiley, Nature, and Sage.

Preparing for data sharing

Good data management and curation practices will make it easier for you to preserve and share your data.

Graduate students are often responsible for many of the data management tasks associated with their research, and these practices may be new to them. These changing expectations and requirements may also be unfamiliar to faculty and staff. In order to assist with these tasks, the libraries provides instruction, consultations, and infrastructure to help researchers across the university with data management and curation.

In Spring 2020, we will be offering a 1-credit course on research data management.

This course is intended to build knowledge and expertise in essential best practices that students can immediately apply in their own research settings. We’ll focus on active-learning, with readings and discussion-based explorations of how to apply good data management to planning, active research, and preserving and sharing data.

The course is appropriate for any researcher who deals with quantitative data. We hope to see you there!

Course Title: Managing Data to Facilitate Your Research

Time and Location: 9:30 am – 10:20 am, Mondays, in 1100 UCC

Instructors: Brian Westra, Marina Zhang

More details: https://myui.uiowa.edu/my-ui/courses/details.page?id=924164&ci=172636

If you have any questions, please contact Brian Westra, brian-westra@uiowa.edu

Jun 04 2019

Eighteen faculty win UI Libraries OpenHawks grants

Posted on June 4, 2019July 1, 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 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.

May 09 2019

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

Posted on May 9, 2019August 21, 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.