Tag: Open Access Publishing

Open Access Week Feature: A UMD Collaboration in an OA Journal

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October 24, 2024

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Journals, News & Events

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Cross-posted from the Claire T. Carney Library Blog

International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize free and accessible research and scholarship and to inspire scholars to engage in the advantageous OA model in publishing. The term Open Access refers to scholarly material that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Today we will highlight a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who has published along with a UMass Dartmouth student under a Creative Commons license in an Open Access journal.

Nicholas Zambrotta is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Psychology department whose research interests include morality, political polarization, and social support and health related behaviors. In early 2024 Zambrotta published an article called “Attitude Changes Among College Students Post-Pandemic” with Alex Goncalo who was working on his BS in Finance. Goncalo has since earned his MS, and has gone on to pursue his PhD in Finance at the University of South Florida. Their study “measured happiness, optimism, and psychological well-being in a sample of 182 college students via an electronic Qualtrics questionnaire to identify predictors of state optimism and examine potential differences in these variables between class rankings.” The results of their survey and analysis can be read and shared (with attribution) by any researcher thanks to the OA model of their selected publication, Modern Psychological Studies.

The journal is managed by undergraduate students at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and not only is it student-led, but Modern Psychological Studies focuses on publishing quality articles by undergraduate students. Regarding the review process, Goncalo says, “Their rigorous review process was enlightening, which contributed greatly to this undeniably invaluable experience.” Authors who choose to publish with MPS actually retain their copyright under a Non-Exclusive Distribution License. This arrangement protects freedoms of the authors, while the Creative Commons licenses applied to each article ensure that all researchers can benefit from the work. 

Kudos to Zambrotta and Goncalo on their OA publication! 

Image by Nick Shockey, licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en, available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_symbol.png

 

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.

Open Access Week Feature: Prof. Anupama Arora Published in OA South Asian Studies Journal

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October 27, 2023

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Faculty Publications, Journals, News & Events

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We close out International Open Access Week with a look at an article by Dr. Anupama Arora of the English Communications Department titled “Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven.” This article is published in the freely accessible journal, Critical South Asian Studies, which is a bi-annual (published twice a year in February and August), peer-reviewed publication that centers on literary, media and cultural studies. Additionally, Anupama serves as Executive co-Editor of an OA journal called The Journal of Feminist Scholarship.

Please see below for the abstract of “Of Women, Gay Men, and Dead Cats: The Precarity of Neoliberal Aspirations in Made in Heaven:”

ABSTRACT: Written by Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, and Alankrita Shrivastava, the first season of the nine-episode web series, Made in Heaven, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on 8 March 2019 to great acclaim, garnering praise for being both “daring and revelatory” in its “provocative exploration of gender, marriage and love” and for offering “binge-worthy television” (Qureshi). In this essay, we examine how Made in Heaven investigates women’s lives as they navigate precarity, a distinct and historically contingent condition produced by neoliberalism in India. It does so by especially paying attention to the configurations of precarity produced through the intersectional workings of gender and class simultaneously. We argue that the show maps the ubiquity of precarity as it permeates and engulfs all life but ends with offering alternatives to perpetuating neoliberal logics of precarity and precarization by suggesting other possible worlds of solidarities, love, and care.

Open Access Week Feature: A Book Chapter About the History of Portuguese Colonies by Prof. Timothy Walker

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October 25, 2023

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Faculty Publications, Uncategorized

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As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, we turn to an openly licensed book called The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World which discusses botany, medicine, religion and mining in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. UMass Dartmouth Professor Timothy Walker of the History Dept. contributed a chapter to this freely available book called “Global Cross-Cultural Dissemination of Indigenous Medical Practices through the Portuguese Colonial System: Evidence from Sixteenth to Eighteenth-Century Ethno-Botanical Manuscripts.” The book is published under a CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license which means that not only can other researchers and faculty share the material, but they can also remix, transform, and build upon it.

When asked about his thoughts on Open Access publishing, Prof. Walker said “To be most effective, and to achieve the widest possible dissemination, knowledge needs to travel freely, unimpeded by online pay walls or the practical limits of print-only distribution of publications.  Open Access publishing online democratizes information by making it available to anyone with internet access, and guarantees the broadest impact of our scholarly work.  Open Access publishing should be a central aspiration for researchers seeking to publish and disseminate their work.”

Open Access Week Feature: Two OA Journals Founded at UMassD

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October 23, 2023

2:18 pm

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International Open Access Week (October 23-29, 2023) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this publishing model in scholarship and research. OA means information that is available digitally without cost or access barriers. Today on the blog, we highlight two OA journals with UMass Dartmouth roots:

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an Open Access journal that was founded by UMD faculty members, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley, in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of University of Rhode Island. A few other UMD faculty are currently listed as co-editors.

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice a year on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes an interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, or scholars of color who have reshaped their fields. JFS has become highly regarded with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is a great resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles. The journal published a feminist criticism of paywall publishing.

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies

Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed hybrid (online and print) journal that publishes original research about the literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world from a broad range of academic, critical and theoretical approaches. Mario Pereira and Anna M. Klobucka  currently serve as co-editors. PLCS is published semi-annually by Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tagus Press is the publishing division of the UMD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, an outreach unit committed to the study of the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. With the help of the Claire T. Carney Library, the journal is available publicly through Open Journal Systems (OJS) which aims to facilitate open access, peer-reviewed publishing. OJS is open source and enables the publication of articles and issues online and indexed in global services like Google Scholar, Crossref, and many others.

Are you interested in locating more OA Journals? Take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Celebrate International Open Access Week

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October 20, 2023

3:40 pm

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News & Events, Uncategorized

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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:

How to Find Open Access Business Journals

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September 28, 2023

3:24 pm

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Journals

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by Lorraine Heffernan

Did you know that the library has a database that enables you to find open access business journals? Cabells Directory Online allows you to filter for a discipline, set the level of importance of the journal and filter for the type of open access you are looking for. Here’s the menu for filtering:

Here’s the dropdown menu for open access:

Here’s a list of top marketing journals available after an embargo period:

 

Linking Users to Open Access Articles

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September 12, 2023

1:40 pm

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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.

Celebrate Open Access Week with a Screening of “Paywall: The Business of Open Scholarship”

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October 22, 2018

5:29 pm

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News & Events

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In celebration of Open Access Week, the Scholarly Communications Committee is screening “Paywall: The Business of Open Scholarship” at the library. The documentary “questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier, and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google.”

When: Friday, October 26 2018, 11:30AM-1:00PM
Where: Library 314

Anyone interested in open access publishing is welcome! Bring lunch and questions or ideas about the future of academic publishing.

For more information about the film, visit https://paywallthemovie.com/paywall, where, in true open access form, it is available to watch in full if you cannot make it to the screening.

For more information about Open Access Week and events happening all around the world, visit http://www.openaccessweek.org/events

We hope to see you there!