UMassD Education Professor Surpasses 10,000 Downloads for Globally Accessible Book Published with MIT Press

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September 24, 2024

11:42 pm

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Faculty Publications, News & Events, Research

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by Emma Wood

MIT Press launched its Direct to Open (D2O) model in 2021 to make a shift toward Open Access (OA) publishing. The D2O framework is one of many transformative agreements emerging in the publishing world. The idea is to change the role of subscription funds. Libraries have always paid for read access to content, but the focus now is on channeling those funds toward the production of open access books and articles. In the MIT Press agreement, participating libraries contribute a membership fee, and the members support the publication of around 90 new books per year that can be accessed freely by anyone to promote equity and sustainability in scholarly material. As an added incentive, D2O libraries have access to an archive of over 2,500 titles that would otherwise be gated. UMass Dartmouth’s Claire T. Carney Library is currently a member.

When you browse the collection, look for a popular title co-edited by Sheila Macrine, Professor in the Department of Education here at UMass Dartmouth and Jennifer Fugate, Associate Professor of Health Services Psychology (PSYD) at Kansas City University.

Sheila Macrine, PhD

MIT Press announced that they successfully reached their funding goal in 2024, and Macrine’s book was featured as one of nine OA books that have received over ten thousand downloads, and altmetrics (a system of tracking research attention) has seen 264 X posts from 154 X users, with an upper bound of 752,982 followers. The book is called Movement Matters, and according to the MIT Press description it “introduces a new model, translational learning sciences research, for interpreting and disseminating the latest empirical findings in the burgeoning field of embodied cognition. The book provides an up-to-date, inclusive, and essential resource for those involved in educational planning, design, and pedagogical approaches.”

“Movement Matters” is groundbreaking not only because it is available in an open format through a distinguished press, but because it bridges the gap between the latest neuroscience on sensorimotor integration and mirror neurons on teaching pedagogy and learning. Macrine gathered a team of top scholars to translate cutting-edge neuroscience research into practical teaching strategies that will benefit all researchers without barrier to access.

The complete book can be downloaded in PDF format, and it is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

OER Commons 101 Session

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September 4, 2024

5:34 pm

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The fall semester is officially here! And the good news is there is still time to adopt Open Educational Resources for your courses. If you are interested in how to get started locating OERs, register for an OER Commons 101 session – Thursday September 12th at 11am. 

Register Here!

To get started, take a look at some of the resources that can be found in the platform for sharing open educational resources created and adopted by faculty from Massachusetts Public Higher Education Institutions – Open Massachusetts: A Public Higher Education Repository

Research and Publishing Roundup

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August 14, 2024

2:46 pm

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Kudos to the following members of the UMass Dartmouth community on their research and publishing accomplishments:

Associate Dean of the College of Engineering Iren Valova participated in a panel on artificial intelligence at the Associated Industries of Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Conversation series. Valova joined Dell Technologies and TD Bank officials to discuss how artificial intelligence is changing the business landscape across industries and sectors of the economy.

Professor Avijit Gangopadhyay (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) co-authored “On the evidence of helico‑spiralling recirculation within coherent cores of eddies using Lagrangian approach” in Nature’s Scientific Reports. The article aims to advance comprehension of coherent eddies’ structural characteristics and their internal dynamics.

Professor Geoff McDonald (Law) was interviewed for an article about post-foreclosure evictions. Based on his research, McDonald focuses on technical bankruptcy questions and the moral basis of bankruptcy, including the interrelated issues of debt, justice, and forgiveness.

Professor Brian Williams (History) authored an article in The Conversation on Ukraine’s defeat of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet due to their superior weapons and naval tactics.

Professor Chad McGuire (Public Policy) published “Using the Legal Concept of Fault Attribution to Analyze the Effectiveness of Coastal Climate Change Adaptation in the United States” in The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Policy and Law. The article introduces the legal concept of fault attribution as a framework for assessing the effectiveness of current national coastal climate change policies.

Professor Kenneth Manning (Political Science) discussed the intricacies and “luck” involved in the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding presidential immunity and the impact on former President Trump.

Executive Director of Economic Development and Community Partnerships Michael Goodman was featured in the Summer 2024 issue of MassBenchmarks with his highlight titled “State of the State Economy.” The chapter discusses the Massachusetts economy’s slowing in the face of continued inflation, high interest rates, and slight downtrends in job growth.

Ethan Moyer (’25) was featured in an article for his artistic contribution to the Envision Resilience Mural Project in New Bedford. Moyer’s graphic will be turned into a mural that serves as a visual reminder of the impact of climate change

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff with your request: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

The Open Education Conference is Coming to Providence, RI!

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August 6, 2024

2:53 pm

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The Open Education Conference is an event for sharing and learning about open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open education initiatives, and it has been held annually since 2004. This gathering “celebrates the core values of open education that strive to realize education ecosystems that are accessible, affordable, equitable and inclusive to everyone, regardless of their background.” Recently the conference transitioned to leadership by a community-elected board of directors, and the conference operates within SPARC.

The 2024 OpenEd Conference will take place October 8-10th in Providence, RI. An option for virtual attendance is available as well. More information can be found at this website: https://openeducationconference.org/

Upcoming Webinar: How to Start Using OpenStax in Your College Course

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July 23, 2024

2:20 pm

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OpenStax is a well established educational initiative out of Rice University that hosts a library of free digital textbooks. Their books are known for being peer-reviewed and excellent quality. Each textbook comes with its own instructor and student resources like test banks and lecture slides. OpenStax offers a collection of about 70 books including a bestselling Organic Chemistry textbook that the author decided to openly license rather than continue producing with their regular publisher. Recently Rice’s OpenStax received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for $90 million dollars to develop SafeInsights, a hub for inclusive learning and education research.

OpenStax is hosting a webinar tomorrow for faculty who are interested in learning more about OpenStax and potentially using open textbooks in their courses. The webinar will cover:

  • The OpenStax mission
  • What open educational resources (OER) are (hint: OpenStax is an example of OER!)
  • How to access OpenStax textbooks in a variety of formats (including online, PDF, and print)
  • How to access your book’s free instructor resources (e.g., LMS integration, test banks, and lab manuals)
  • How to find education technology — like online homework, courseware, and AI tools — to use alongside your book
  • How OpenStax textbooks are made and the 10 titles they have recently added

Register for the webinar here

If you cannot attend the webinar at Noon EST tomorrow, a recording will be emailed to all registrants.

Photo by Maran Wilson licensed under CC BY 2.0

Research and Publishing Roundup

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June 24, 2024

3:34 pm

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Here is some of the most recent news in research and publishing on campus:

Professor Liudong Xing (Electrical & Computer Engineering) recently published Reliability and Resilience in the Internet of Things. The book provides state-of-the-art coverage on IoT reliability and resilience modeling, analysis, design methods, and solutions to help prevent costly malfunctions.

Associate Professor Lucas Mann (English & Communication) published an excerpt of his forthcoming book, Attachments, in Esquire.

Associate Professor Eric Larson (Crime & Justice Studies) recently published Grounding Global Justice: Race, Class, and Grassroots Globalism in the U.S. and Mexico. The book offers a transnational history of the emergence of the global justice movement in the United States and Mexico and considers how popular organizations laid the foundations for this “movement of movements.”

Physics alumni Vrutant Mehta (M.S., ’23), Jack Sullivan (B.S., ’23), Khanak Bhargava (M.S., ’21), Sudarshan Neopane (M.S., ’21) and Professor Robert Fisher (Physics) had their paper “Hydrodynamical Simulations Favor a Pure Deflagration Origin of the Near-Chandrasekhar Mass Supernova Remnant 3C 397” covered by Astrobites. In this work, the UMassD group, collaborating with space scientists from Japan, seeks to understand new data on the remnants of a stellar explosion gathered by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory.

Assistant Research Professor Adam Delargy (Fisheries Oceanography) recently co-published “Catch yield and selectivity of a modified scallop dredge to reduce seabed impact,” in PLoS ONE. The article details the need for technical gear innovations in scallop dredging and further improvements for more eco-friendly fishery approaches.

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

Roll Out the Red Carpet for OER

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May 10, 2024

1:24 pm

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By Emma Wood

MASSPIRG’s UMass Dartmouth Chapter hosted UMD’s first ever Oscars-themed awards ceremony to recognize faculty members who use free or low-cost teaching materials in their classes. MASSPIRG sought nominations from students throughout the year at tabling events, and they honored the nominees at their inaugural event one April evening with refreshments and statuettes for the winners of each category. MASSPIRG students Lily Pendergast, Topanga Pottier, and other volunteers, dedicated their time and ingenuity to planning this event to shine a spotlight on the OER work of faculty. Oscars were awarded by discipline. For example, Dr. Olubanwo took the STEM category. He uses an Openstax textbook which is available digitally at no cost to students. He recently completed the OER Adoption cohort that I lead as part of UMD’s OER initiatives. The student choice award went to Dr. Walker Downey who teaches Art Education, Art History & Media Studies.

Photo shows golden statuettes
The OER Oscars statuettes

Similar events have been held by UMass Lowell and UMass Amherst with the shared goal of recognizing professors who incorporate free and low-cost materials into their syllabi. It can take added effort for professors to locate and adopt openly licensed materials and structure their courses around them, and some faculty go even further to author their own textbooks. The benefits are well-established and worth the time. OER has shown to increase student success indicators, provide equitable access to materials, and of course, save students a financial burden. Open Educational resources are a positive option for faculty who appreciate the flexibility and potential for tailoring of content that comes with some Creative Commons licenses. The classroom experience is improved for both students and educators when course materials are easy to access and navigate from day one of class.

Photo shows group of people smiling
Faculty attendees of the OER Oscars

MASSPIRG pulled in over 80 faculty nominations for their OER Oscars event so even though only some walked away with a shiny gold statuette, it’s clear that students appreciate the OER work that faculty undertake. Some faculty resources may not fit the definition of Open Educational Materials, but still, students notice when they are paying less for their books. This might come in the form of library subscriptions or using portions of traditionally copyrighted works under Fair Use, but the impact of removing high cost from the equation is still significant. Congratulations to all the nominee on their well-deserved recognition

There was a red carpet, of course, for photo opportunities.
Consistent with the Oscars theme, there was a red carpet photo opp available.

Learn more about Open Educational Resources here: https://guides.lib.umassd.edu/oer

DOIs at UMass Dartmouth

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April 30, 2024

6:01 pm

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Journals, library services, News & Events

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By Matt Sylvain

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are an important and ubiquitous part of online scholarly communication. They help provide persistent linking through the use of unique alphanumeric strings. You’ll see them assigned to a variety of scholarly material, including journal articles, dissertations/theses, and conference proceedings. They appear in bibliographies and journal websites and are a required component of modern citations. For example, this page addresses when to include digital object identifiers (DOIs) and uniform resource locators (URLs) in APA Style references.

The benefit of DOIs to authors, researchers, and publishers is their reliability. URLs can change, while DOIs are static and a more reliable way to ensure that research traffic gets to its intended destination.

You may have noticed that DOIs follow a common syntax and all look very similar. They contain a prefix that begins with “10.” followed by the publisher’s identifier. So, a publisher’s DOI prefix is always the same and can be used to determine whether two DOIs are for works by the same publisher. For example, UMass Dartmouth’s prefix is 10.62791. All DOIs published by the University will begin with this number.

DOIs also contains a suffix, which are opaque strings created by the publisher. The prefix and suffix are often preceded by a DOI resolver. Here’s an example from the CrossRef website:

Until now, the library has helped researchers and scholars understand and use DOIs, but it has not created the identifiers. To do so, the library needed to join a registration agency. Agencies provide the oversight necessary to ensure a functioning system. For example, I can imagine publishers accidently reusing DOIs, duplicating an existing DOI, and not using a consistent prefix if agencies didn’t exist. This spring, the library joined CrossRef, a non-profit used by many universities to mint DOIs for their scholarly publications. This summer we hope to begin assigning DOIs to articles in Tagus Press’s Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, a peer-reviewed journal which is published semi-annually at UMass Dartmouth. We will eventually  expand  the identifiers to the University’s electronic theses and dissertations.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to us at libsys@umassd.edu.

Research and Publishing Roundup

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April 25, 2024

5:29 pm

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Kudos to the following members of our UMass Dartmouth community on their research or publishing accomplishment:

Kevin Stokesbury, Dean of the School for Marine Science & Technology, was featured in an article about a controversial new compensation program for fishermen in Massachusetts who fish within offshore wind farms.

Debra Duarte (SMAST Doctoral Candidate) and Professor Steve Cadrin (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Review of methodologies for detecting an observer effect in commercial fisheries data” in Fisheries Research. Based on Duarte’s doctoral dissertation, the article examines the power and error rate of several published methods for detecting an observer effect using a simulation of observer and deployment effects at varying sampling ratios for several sample statistics.

An article written by the College of Nursing & Health Sciences faculty and published in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship ranked in the top 10% of papers downloaded. The article “Perceived stigma, barriers, and facilitators experienced by members of the opioid use disorder community when seeking healthcare” was written by the NO STIGMA team, led by Professor Mary McCurry, and including co-authors Assistant Professor Shannon Avery-Desmarais, Associate Professor Monika Schuler, Associate Professor Jennifer Viveiros, Assistant Professor Mirinda Tyo, and Brianna Kauranen (Psychology MA Candidate). The article focuses on the perceived stigma, barriers, and facilitators faced by members of the opioid disorder community when seeking healthcare.

Professor Chad McGuire (Public Policy) participated in the panel “Rising Seas and How We Adapt.” The panel discussed climate change-induced rising seas and how to adapt to extreme environmental changes.

Professor Brian Williams (History) commented on the interview between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin. Williams provided an analysis of the current state of the Ukraine War and how it could change due to the upcoming American presidential election.

Research Assistant Drake Ssempijja (SMAST Doctoral Candidate) and Professor Pingguo He (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Abandoned, lost, and otherwise discarded fishing gear in world’s inland fisheries” in the Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries. The article describes how abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear in inland fisheries remains a highly understudied area of aquatic plastic pollution.

Professor Emeritus James J. Bisagni (Estuarine & Ocean Sciences) recently published “Surface Eddy Kinetic Energy Variability of the Western North Atlantic Slope Sea” in Continental Shelf Research. This work analyzed satellite altimeter-derived changes in eddy kinetic energy to better understand the seasonal and interannual variation of Gulf Stream warm-core rings within the Slope Sea.

Michael S. Cahill (’21) and Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) co-published “Hedonic analysis of willingness to pay for dam removal: evidence from Plymouth, Massachusetts” in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. The article investigates how the removal of small dams and subsequent river restoration investments affect residential housing prices in Plymouth. The article is based on Cahill’s capstone project.

Do you need help accessing any of these publications? The librarians have you covered. Contact our reference staff: https://lib.umassd.edu/about/staff-directory/contact-rils/

Enhance Your Academic Writing with Citation Tools

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April 19, 2024

2:33 pm

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Journals, library services, Research

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by Kari Mofford

While it would be nice if all the academic leaders in APA, MLA, Chicago…etc. could all get together and create one citation style to rule them all…it probably won’t happen soon.  In the meantime, we do have tools to help us figure out these styles.  While citation generators like Citation Machine are great, they should be checked for accuracy, as it’s not unheard of for them to have typos, issues with capitalization, or other mistakes.  They are just pulling information from fields and their data is only as good as what they harvest.  Check out our Libguide for some good sources on many of the styles.

Another tool that can be very helpful is a Citation Management system. This is a great thing to have if you are gathering multiple citations for your thesis, dissertation, research paper, etc.  Here at the Claire T. Carney Library we support Zotero, which is free!  We have a Libguide on how to download it onto your laptop and lots of information to set up your account.  It makes it very easy to capture your citations, organize them, and create in-text citations and bibliographies.  Like citation generators, you should still double check the citations after they are in Zotero for accuracy, but it’s a great product and invaluable for projects requiring the gathering of many, many citations.  Don’t hesitate to reach out to your librarian to ask for assistance with any citation questions!