Tag Archives: open access

Ames Library Open Access Week Events

Open Access Week (Oct. 25-31) is an opportunity for academic and research communities to continue to learn about the benefits of Open Access and Open Educational Resources. The Ames Library faculty are offering multiple educational opportunities during Open Access Week. These events are targeted towards faculty and staff, but interested students are also welcome! If you want to learn more about Open Access and Open Educational Resources in general, please visit the Ames Library’s Scholarly Communication Guide.

Exploring Open Educational Resources Faculty Panel
Following a brief introduction to OER, faculty members from Educational Studies, Psychology, Political Science, and Theatre Arts will briefly describe their experiences with exploring OER options to replace traditional course materials. Panelists will then take questions from the audience. This work was funded by small OER grants from the Ames Library.

Monday Oct. 25, 4:15-5:15PM
In-person in the Beckman Auditorium, Ames Library
or Zoom livestream:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86897572137?pwd=MmloMXY3MHRPZ0ZKRTFudUxteDU0UT09

Copyright Basics/Q&A
Stephanie Davis-Kahl, University Librarian & Copyright Officer, will review our Copyright guide with a focus on teaching and learning.  

Tuesday, October 26, 4:30–5PM
Zoom only: https://us02web.zoom.us/my/stephaniedk

Extending the Reach of Scholarly and Creative Works
DigitalCommons@IWU is one component of IWU’s own contribution to Open Access. In this session, Meg Miner will provide an overview of the ways DC@IWU and its companion platform Selected Works help expand the audiences for student and faculty work.

Wednesday Oct. 27, 12:10-12:40PM
Zoom only: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82079824716?pwd=WmJobDV2djBRc2FmRm00Y25GSU5GZz09

Beyond the Book: OER Learning Objects
While textbooks may be the first open educational application that springs to mind, much of the OER movement has focused on open educational objects: discrete pieces of information that can be used in various contexts and combinations. This presentation will introduce you to several library-produced objects centering around fake news and plagiarism and allow you to have a voice in what other objects would best serve the IWU community. Presented by Abby Mann, Online Learning Librarian

Thursday, Oct 28, 4-430PM
Zoom only: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4822493204?pwd=TGpialgxR1hRZFc1NUNMYjFhL3M5Zz09

For any questions about these events or OA / OER, please contact Chris Sweet, Scholarly Communications Librarian at csweet@iwu.edu

Free images to use and reuse and Happy OA Week!

Olveritas Village

Olvera Street in the oldest part of downtown Los Angeles, California

Here’s a seasonal and timely message from the Free to Use and Reuse collection at the Library of Congress.

The seasonal part of the message is they are profiling images of autumn, Día de Muertos and Halloween in this subset of their collection.

The timely part is that this is also Open Access Week, a global event for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. This year’s emphasis is on examining who the knowledge-sharing and information spaces and systems are designed for, who is missing, who is excluded by the business models we use, and whose interests are prioritized.

OA 2020 banner logo

 

Bringing IWU Scholarship to the World

As we have become ever more dependent on access to digital scholarship during the coronavirus pandemic, it is worth celebrating the long-time commitment that the Ames Library has shown to promoting open access to the scholarly and creative work completed by Illinois Wesleyan’s students and faculty, especially through our institutional repository, Digital Commons.

Launched in 2008, Digital Commons provides open access to scholarly and creative work produced by members of the IWU community, including journal articles, book chapters, conference presentations, undergraduate honors research, undergraduate research journals, and records of the university.  On May 27, 2020, we recorded the 4,000,000th download of IWU content from Digital Commons, for an average of more than 333,000 downloads by users around the world each year. This is an extraordinary achievement for a small liberal arts college, and evidence of the global impact of the research conducted each year by members of the IWU community.

The 4,000,000th download, Adnan Filipovic’s “Impact of Privatization on Economic Growth” (2006), is a study of “the relationship between growth and privatization from an incentives perspective,” and has been downloaded more than 7,000 times since 2008. The article was originally published in IWU’s Undergraduate Economic Review, an open-access, peer-reviewed, undergraduate research journal. While many IWU undergraduate research journals feature the work of our own students, the UER features the work of students from around the world, and is peer-reviewed and edited by IWU students under the faculty mentorship of Professor Michael Seeborg (Economics) and Professor Stephanie Davis-Kahl (The Ames Library). IWU students also have the opportunity to publish their own research through the Park Place Economist, another open-access undergraduate research journal available through Digital Commons. On the role that publishing opportunities such as these play in undergraduate education at IWU, Undergraduate Research Advisory Committee Chair Todd Fuist (Sociology) said: “We pride ourselves on providing the kind of innovative and transformative research experiences for students that help them grow their skills and build their credentials. This milestone is illustrative of the caliber of work we help to guide students through as they conduct research at IWU.”

The 4,000,000th download was to a Digital Commons user from the University of Cambridge in England. On the importance of open access to scholarly work in Economics, Professor Seeborg said: “Open access publishing is a significant part of the economics program. We incentivize quality undergraduate research by allowing students to participate in the editorial process and submit their papers for publication …. I firmly believe that the best way to learn economics is to do economics. Our partnership with the Ames Library, and Digital Commons, promotes an active learning environment and is very important to the economics program.”

The Undergraduate Economic Review, and other undergraduate research journals, are available through Digital Commons. If you would like to learn more about open-access initiatives or library publishing, please contact Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Collections and Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Open Access Week (October 21 – 27)

The Ames Library joins libraries, museums, scholars, and scientists in celebrating efforts to provide open and equitable access to scholarship and scientific research during Open Access Week 2019.

“Open Access,” according to SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), of which Illinois Wesleyan University is a member, refers to “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” While early discussions of open access focused on access to research-based articles, the movement now encompasses open access to scholarly monographs, textbooks, and data sets through related work around “open data” and “open educational resources.” The Ames Library has made a long-term commitment to promoting open access as part of its core commitments to equity, educational affordability, pedagogical innovation, and promotion of our students’ education as content creators and managers of their own intellectual property rights. In the contemporary information environment, an understanding of the commercial environment surrounding one’s own intellectual work, as well as one’s right to manage one’s own copyrights and personal data, is an essential component of a liberal education.

Students and faculty wishing to learn more about open access, to employ open access resources in their classrooms, to share their work through open channels, or to integrate education about open access into their student learning goals, can find resources through the library’s guides to open access resources and open educational resources. You can also make your own work “OA” by contributing it to our digital repository, Digital Commons, which houses the work of IWU faculty, as well as undergraduate research projects, journals and other peer-reviewed work, and more. If you would like to integrate education about copyright, scholarly communications, or the movement toward “open” in science and scholarship into your courses, please contact Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Collections and Scholarly Communications Librarian, or your liaison librarian.

 

50 New Recordings Added to Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape

The Library of Congress has just added 50 new recordings to their free, open-access collection the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape. According to the Library of Congress, “The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape was begun in 1943 by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress to record audio recordings of poets and prose writers from Spain, Portugal, Latin America, the Caribbean and from the Hispanic Community in the United States reading from their works.” The collection includes audio from authors from Angola, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. One highlight from the newly added recordings is indigenous literature.

[The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape] also includes, for the very first time, recordings of works in indigenous languages, such as the recording of Mexican scholar Ángel María Garibay (1892-1967) who reads Aztec poetry in Nahuatl and Spanish; Mexican writer Andrés Henestrosa (1906-2008) who reads works in Zapotec, a pre-Columbian language from Oaxaca, Mexico; and poet Andrés Alencastre (1909-1984) who reads verses in Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. Another linguistic gem included in this release is a reading by Spanish writer Unai Elorriaga (1973- ) in Basque or “Euskara,” a Pre-Indo-European language spoken in northern Spain.

The recordings include audio recordings from authors like Argentine writer Griselda Gambaro. (Image copyright Diario de Cultura.)

Head on over to the archive to listen to check out this wealth of almost 800 recordings from well-known authors like Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as new favorites like Griselda Gambaro, Beatriz Guido, and Denise Chávez.

Free Digital Archive of Black Newspapers Goes Live

As of June 2018, the Obsidian Collection Archives is now available online. This digital collection of historic black newspaper archives was started when executive director Angela Ford realized that physical archives of papers like Chicago Defender were rapidly deteriorating and in need of preservation. ”To make matters worse, when she told her son about newsworthy things that had happened when she was growing up, he often found there was no record of those, either. ‘He’d go to Google it, and it wasn’t there,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘Wait, what?… My past was disintegrating. That’s how I got involved: to save black history and to save myself.'” (Source)

Eight exhibitions are now live, with many more to be added.

Woman and girls on Maxwell Street, Shakir Karriem, Photographer 1983-08. From the collection of
The Obsidian Collection Archives.

From the Obsidian Collection’s mission statement:

Our primary goal is to preserve and share images from African American newspapers to future generations. As Black people moved about the country, the documentation of their lives was recorded on very few mediums. The African American Newspapers were of the few published tools of the first half of the twentieth century to capture any record of our lives, our goals, our suffering and our strength.

The list of partner newspapers can be accessed here, and you can read more about the project at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian.com.

Best Gateway Essay Contest Winners

Congratulations to this year’s winners of the annual Best Gateway Essay Contest, Aaron Manuel, Kalen Gray, and Haley Steward!

Each year, Gateway instructors are invited to nominate up to three student essays from their Gateway sections. The papers submitted by students for the contest were evaluated first by teams of Writing Center tutors. The Writing Committee then reviewed these and selected a winner and two runners-up. The winner will receive $150, and the runners-up will receive $75 each. Associate Dean of Curricular and Faculty Development Kevin Sullivan provides the funds for these awards.

The 2016-17 Winners are:
Winner: Aaron Manuel, for his essay, “Goldman’s Paradox: Imperfect Perfection,” nominated by Prof. Mark Criley from his Gateway section, “Punishment.”

Runner-up: Kalen Gray, for his essay, “The New Face of Civil Revolution,” nominated by Prof. Nawaraj Chaulagain from his Gateway section, “Peace and War.”

Runner-up: Haley Steward, for her essay, “Mary Tyler Moore and her role in the feminist movement,” nominated by Prof. Jim Plath from his Gateway section, “Sitcoms and Society.”

Source: https://www.iwu.edu/news/2018/gateway-essay-winners.html

The winning essays are now available and free to download through the Digital Commons @ IWU. We encourage you to take some time out to read them!

Student Scholarship at IWU Earns Millions of Downloads!

You may have noticed a headline in the October 23rd Campus Weekly reading “Digital Commons @ IWU Exceeds 3 Million Downloads.” Digital Commons is Illinois Wesleyan University’s institutional repository, and it is here that students can deposit faculty- or peer-reviewed research. Additionally, Digital Commons also contains selected works from faculty, staff, and university departments, offices, and programs.

So what kinds of materials are available for download through Digital Commons?

“Student work deemed outstanding will be included in DC@IWU. These include honors theses, work presented at the John Wesley Powell Undergraduate Research Conference, works published in peer-reviewed IWU student journals and outstanding creative works as determined by faculty in a sponsoring department. Acceptable formats include text, images, video and audio files.”

http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/student_guidelines.html

“The DC@IWU accepts a wide range of materials including text, images, video and audio files. Examples of content include, but are not limited to:

  • Articles, pre-prints and post-prints (distribution rights permitting; please see SHERPA/RoMEO for more information
  • Book chapters (distribution rights permitting; please contact publisher for permission. Templates with suggested language for communicating with publishers are available for your convenience.)
  • Audio files
  • Conference papers
  • Dance performances
  • Datasets
  • Faculty course related output
  • Musical scores and composition recordings
  • Poetry and creative writing
  • University produced journals
  • Video files”

http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/faculty_guidelines.html

Student work has comprised much of the 3 million downloads between 2008 and 2017. If you’re interested in making your own research available through Digital Commons, you can find the guidelines for submission here.

A live map of the downloads in real time is located at the bottom of the Digital Commons homepage: http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/. In the past week alone, users from places as far-flung as India, China, Africa, Finland, and Australia have downloaded IWU student research!

Read more about the 3-million download milestone here: https://www.iwu.edu/news/2017/digital-commons-at-iwu-exceeds-3-million-downloads.html