Celebrate International Open Access Week

This year’s theme for International Open Access Week (Oct. 23 – Oct. 29) is Community over Commercialization. Open Access (OA) places the value of accessible information to the public above monetary interest in knowledge dissemination. OA removes restriction from research outputs such as journal articles, books, datasets, and more. Have you ever hit a paywall in your research? Perhaps you have located the abstract for an article that sounds ideal for your project, but then you click to find a request for your credit card. Interlibrary loan is a solution for the UMass Dartmouth community in those circumstances, but what about researchers who do not have library resources available?

The free and immediate availability of academic publications online means that the research will be read and built upon by a wider and more diverse audience. With this greater exposure comes more opportunity in the academic and scientific community. This publishing model is not available for all academic research at this time, but acknowledging Open Access Week is a great way to expand awareness of OA, and to learn more.

Here are some ways to deepen your understanding of OA this week:

  • Check out a print book about OA publishing from the display in library.
  • Access books online from MIT Press Direct to Open.
  • Subscribe to our Scholarly Communications blog for OA features this week and beyond.
  • Stop by the library/MASSPIRG OA Week table from 11am – 3pm on Tuesday Oct. 24th in the library lobby.
  • Attend one of these OA Week webinars:

Research and Publishing Roundup

This blog will periodically highlight some of our UMass Dartmouth Community’s recent achievements in scholarly publishing, research, and news features. Congrats to the following UMD faculty and staff on their newsworthy work:

Professor Pingguo He (Fisheries Oceanography) and Technical Associate Christopher Rillahan (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Waiting for the right time and tide: The fine-scale migratory behavior of river herring in two coastal New England streams” in Marine and Coastal Fisheries. The study used high-resolution acoustic imaging to study river herring’s fine-scale behavior during spring spawning migration in two coastal rivers in Massachusetts.Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) was featured in an article about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in America. The article uses Anguelov’s research of data from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database.Associate Professor Gavin Fay (Fisheries Oceanography) co-published “Navigating concepts of social-ecological resilience in marine fisheries under climate change: shared challenges and recommendations from the northeast United States” in ICES Journal of Marine Science. The article discusses the challenges and ambiguity in social-ecological resilience concepts and explores implications for research and implementation.Associate Professor Mark Santow (History) published Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race. The book focuses on the community organizer’s attempts to grapple with the moral dilemma of race through his organizing efforts and writing.

Need help accessing any of these articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.

Making High Quality Videos

By Heather Tripp, Video Specialist

Whether it’s filmed with a smartphone or a professional camera, video is no longer an option in our world. Video started to take over print over a decade ago and has grown to be a requirement for businesses and organizations across the world. While we are bombarded with all kinds of images, having a video of high quality can still set yours apart.

Video has become an important medium for disseminating scholarly information. This may come in the form of video summaries of research findings or conference proceedings. Academics choose to promote their publications or scientific experiments through video to make the content more engaging and reach a wider audience. This blog will present some tips for creating quality videos:

Before you begin, a few key elements to think about are:

-What are your goals/who is your audience? This dictates the pace and feel of the video.

– Hook your viewer in the first few seconds of your video. The first six seconds are key!

– Tell a story. Stories tend to draw the viewer in and keep them watching.

One large element that can make your video easier to create and look better is to do pre-production. Things like, scouting out the area you plan on filming the day before. Look at the lighting at that time of day. How busy is it? How loud? Are there unsightly things like trash that can be removed? If you need to plug in a light source, is there an electric outlet?

This is also a good time to check out your camera and gear. Are the camera and microphone batteries charged? Do you have enough space on your card? Contact any talent and make sure they know the time and place to meet you.

High quality smartphones can take decent video and do much of the work for you, but it still needs a human touch to keep things creative and visually pleasing. One way of doing this is using the Rule of Thirds. Divide your screen into 9 cubes using 4 gridlines. By positioning key elements along the gridlines, you’ll end up with better compositions.

The rule of thirds identifies four points at the center of each grid line intersection that your subject should intersect. The subject should hit 2-3 of these points. The image above has the subject more to the side, leaving room for the addition of text.

Another trick is to use a shallow depth of field, which keeps your subject in focus, but the background is fuzzy. It’s almost always best to have a simple background, and using a shallow depth of field can make even the most distracting settings less so.

Once you have your video recorded and edited, you may want to consider adding music. Most popular social media sites have their own music library to browse through. I you want to add something of your own, keep in mind you need something either in the public domain or through a royalty free website. These can offer a single, one-time purchase, or a variety of subscriptions. Rules are different on each site, so make sure to read them.

Finally, where do you want your video to live? Popular places for horizontal videos continue to be YouTube and Vimeo. Social sites like TikTok and Instagram are best for vertical video.

Do you need support with making videos for your courses or scholarly endeavors? Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

 

Research and Publishing Roundup

This blog will periodically highlight some of our UMass Dartmouth Community’s recent achievements in scholarly publishing, research, and news features. Congrats to the following UMD faculty and staff on their newsworthy work:

Professor Avijit Gangopadhyay co-published “Observed surface and subsurface Marine Heat Waves in the Bay of Bengal from in situ and high resolution satellite data” in Climate Dynamics. The paper documents that surface marine heatwaves have increased in the Bay of Bengal in number, frequency, duration, and intensity over the last two decades.Assistant Professor Jonathan Kush (Management & Marketing) co-published “Communication networks and team performance: selecting members to network positions” in Frontiers in Psychology. The paper examines how individuals come to occupy communication network positions and the effect of selection processes on group performance.Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Economic Development and Strategic Initiatives Michael Goodman was featured in an article that examined how policies and politicians in Massachusetts define how the state is viewed through a national political lens.Resident Director Kevin McGinnis published “‘All One in Christ Jesus:’ Physical and Moral Equality in Galatians 3:28″ in the Journal of Religious Competition in Antiquity. The paper argues that Paul’s letter to the Galatians was an example of Hellenistic philosophy, which saw everyone as having equal potential for cognitive clarity and moral goodness without the expectation of political equality.

Need help accessing any of these articles? Reach out to our Research and Information Literacy Services Librarians.

Books Written by Faculty in the Library Collection

by Emma Wood

UMass Dartmouth faculty members actively publish and produce scholarly products within their areas of expertise, and these research outputs come in a variety of formats such as journal articles, conference proceedings, technical reports, and of course, books. To celebrate and promote books written by our faculty, the library adds titles that come to our attention to the library collection. To note a few recent books by UMD faculty, Prof. Anguelov Nikolay of the Public Policy Department recently authored a book titled The Sustainable Fashion Quest: Innovations in Business and Policy, and Prof. Tryon Woods of Crime & Justice Studies published Pandemic Police Power, Public Health, and the Abolition Question. These titles, among others, are available in the Claire. T. Carney Library’s print collection and are searchable online.

Even without knowing the titles or faculty author names, you can still peruse the library collection for books authored by UMD faculty. An efficient method to look up those materials in the online catalog, Primo, is to enter the following keywords in the search box, displayed on the main page: “UMass Dartmouth Faculty Publication Collection.” This search will help to connect you with the books in this growing collection.

Linking Users to Open Access Articles

by Matt Sylvain

Have you given much thought to how libraries connect users with articles? If not, that’s okay. That’s what you have librarians for, and we think a lot about how to better connect our users with content. We recently added a new tool to help you locate open access articles.

Online library access is typically determined at the journal level. If the library has a subscription to a journal, then library users will be given access to the full text articles covered by that subscription. If the library doesn’t subscribe, then users are directed to interlibrary loan (ILL) through which they can request articles from other libraries for free. However, this access model falls short when you consider the recent increase in subscription publications that offer authors the ability to make their articles available open access (OA) — often for a cost. Libraries need an efficient way to connect their users with OA articles regardless of a library’s subscription status. After all, if the author paid to make an article OA, then librarians want to eliminate unnecessary obstacles to access. We don’t want you to have to submit an ILL request for something you can read immediately!

This summer, we implemented a tool called LibKey Link in our EBSCOhost and PubMed databases (ProQuest integration is forthcoming). LibKey Link identifies availability at the article level as opposed to the traditional method of determining access based on journal subscriptions. Why is this important? It enables direct linking to open access articles in journals we don’t subscribe to. There is no change to the user interface — so you need to pay close attention to notice the difference. LibKey also favors the OA version of record, only selecting the OA non-version of record if it’s the only option aside from ILL. You can read more about LibKey’s “linking waterfall” on the vendor’s website.

Perhaps the best way to understand what’s going on is to run a search. Open CINAHL and search for diabetes mellitus. You’ll notice the search results look exactly as they did before. However, when you click on “Find a Copy @ UMassD Libraries” you will be directed to the open access full text instead of being sent to Primo, the online library catalog. Besides decreasing the number of clicks needed to access the full text, LibKey is also likely to decrease the number of ILL requests for OA articles. In cases when the article isn’t available through Third Iron, users will be directed to Primo just as they have been in the past.

Image by Libby Levi for opensource.com, license CC BY-SA 2.

We’re Back!

The Scholarly Communications Committee has reconvened, and we look forward to posting content to apprise the UMass Dartmouth campus community and beyond of news and opportunities that surround Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Access, research, and publishing. We will keep a pulse on noteworthy developments in the creation, publication, dissemination, and storage of academic research.

To start, here are a couple of new UMD links to check out:

Provost’s OER page – Promotes the use of OER on campus, lists campus initiatives, provides data about the benefits of OER, and recommends links for finding OER.

Scholarly Communication LibGuide – A library guide that introduces the concept of Scholarly Communication and presents useful resources.