A new open access policy at Penn State, recently endorsed by the University Faculty Senate, will greatly increase public availability of original, peer-reviewed Penn State scholarly research in support of the University’s land-grant mission.
The Penn State Faculty Senate took a major step to affirm the University’s commitment to making Penn State research widely available to the public by endorsing a proposed policy supporting research submissions to open access journals.
Penn State is among the first universities to commit funds to an initiative designed to support the peer-reviewed, open access monographs known as Toward Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME). $45,000 in funding is to be split among up to three subvention grants to support publishing open access monographs each year for five years (2018-2023). Each grant will be contributed directly to a press participating in the program for an open access publication of an eligible Penn State faculty-authored work.
The high cost of some course materials can impede students’ academic success, especially because the price tag prompts many students to avoid purchasing them. A workshop on Oct. 24, accessible to all faculty instructors, aims to lower students’ textbook costs and any perceived obstacles in favor of adopting high-quality, free or low-cost open educational resources.
Penn State University Libraries is joining the Open Textbook Network to help support Penn State faculty’s use of and students’ availability to free, openly licensed academic course content.
The Interinstitutional Center for Indigenous Knowledge (ICIK) and the Penn State University Libraries’ latest volume of its peer-reviewed, open access journal, IK: Other Ways of Knowing, examines current issues facing indigenous persons and peoples.
Penn State University Libraries and Penn State’s Office of the Vice Provost for Information Technology recently agreed to transfer the development team from Services and Solutions (SaS) and their existing roles this fall to the University Libraries. SaS employees worked alongside Libraries Technology staff previously under the former department name Digital Library Technologies.
The Interinstitutional Center for Indigenous Knowledge (ICIK) and the Penn State University Libraries have published the second issue of its peer-reviewed publication, IK: Other Ways of Knowing. This edition includes three peer-reviewed articles dealing with a variety of issues related to traditional ecological knowledge, intellectual property rights, and agrobiodiversity, as well as three reports from award-winning student researchers and a multimedia-enhanced section called "Other Ways of Communicating."
Penn State's Faculty Senate passed an open access resolution at its April 28 meeting that could broaden the reach of scholarly work produced at the University.
Penn State University Libraries faculty voted recently to embrace open access principles when publishing their scholarly articles. The Open Access Policy, passed into legislation at the Feb. 11 Library Faculty Organization meeting, preserves the right of library faculty to publish where they wish, but encourages authors to take advantage of open access opportunities whenever feasible.
Charles E. Jones, the Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities in the University Libraries at Penn State, has received the 2015 Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology Award from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA).
Katherine Rowe, professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, will give a presentation, "A Walking Guide to Virtual Shakespeare," from 2 to 3 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 23, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library. In her talk Rowe will explore the rhetoric of scholarly walking in the context of a small set of virtual Shakespearean locales — thereby creating a distinctive motor connection to the design of these virtual environments.
Barbara I. Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications at Penn State has been elected to the Steering Committee of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).
SPARC is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to improve the scholarly publishing system by educating policy-makers and researchers, advocating change and providing support for emerging modes of scholarly research and publishing. Among its areas of exploration are the economic imbalances that put pressure on scholarly publishers and libraries, campus-based publishing partnerships, and open-access journal publishing -- areas of special interest for Dewey, who has oversight of the Penn State Press as well as the Libraries.
Now in its seventh year, International Open Access Week is Oct. 21 to 27, and activities at Penn State University Libraries will include two speakers presenting perspectives on open access as well as a live webcast from Washington, D.C. The program will be held in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library.
In the last 10 years, a number of prestigious universities and individual disciplines of higher education have moved toward supporting open access principles as they relate to journal publishing and the role of scholarly societies in publishing. Made possible by the Internet and the consent of the author or copyright holder, open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Radically changing the distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature, open access offers free and unrestricted access by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students and other curious minds.
Now in its sixth year, International Open Access Week is October 24-30, and activities at Penn State University Libraries will include two noteworthy speakers presenting scholarly perspectives on open access from the humanities and from the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) communities.
