Scholarly Communication @Texas A&M

The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) has been busily setting up shop in College Station. Launched with Landmark Research Area funding, IDHMC is “in the early stages of development and hope[s] soon to become a full-fledged institute.”

In its nascent months, the Institute has already hosted an OCR Summit Meeting, drawing international participants, as well as a meeting between representatives of ARC (Advanced Research Consortium) and the ARC node MESA (Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance). With a commitment to going beyond Digital Humanities to incorporate a “shared focus on the interplay of computing and culture, and the distinct ways in which various disciplines approach that interplay,” the Institute deepens its focus on interdisciplinarity, computing, and cyberinfrastructure. Additionally, Institute Director Laura Mandell has signalled a dedication to considering questions of P&T equivalencies for digital scholarship and publications (see the (openly accessible) section “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” in the winter issue of the MLA journal Profession 2011).

Libraries have long partnered with digital humanities initiatives on university campuses, whether as the primary hosts or bases of centers or as homes for relevant expertise and/or equipment. The variety of partnerships is illustrated in the newly available ARL SPEC Kit 326, which looks at Digital Humanities from the perspective of the research library.

Why choose to make your research and publications available through open access? Because you never know who might find the work you’ve deposited in the repository.

At the 2011 Berlin 9 Open Access conference, held in Bethesda, Maryland, in November, presenters made strong arguments for the impact value of research made freely, and quickly, available (for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s report on the conference, click here).

In a blog post reflecting on Berlin 9, Duke University Scholarly Communication Officer Kevin Smith emphasized the conference’s focus on “unexpected readers.” It was always a fallacy, he notes, to assume that everyone who would read your work had access through journal subscriptions. But Open Access has promoted innovation by drawing readers from other disciplines, nonspecialists, and the unaffiliated to find and apply research. Notably, it has also opened the door to computational analysis of text corpuses and data that might otherwise by walled, allowing connections to be drawn and patterns discovered at scales larger than those comfortably handled by an individual reader or scholar.

By sharing your research through Open Access, you can reach those in your field as well as those who wouldn’t otherwise find or have institutional access to scholarly journals. In so doing, you may spark innovation and see the impact of your own work grow.

Thanks to a collaborative of libraries and data curation centers in the U.S. and U.K, researchers now have available a handy tool to help produce a Data Management Plan. According to this group,

“The DMPTool is open source, freely available and easily configurable to reflect an institution’s local policies and information. Users of the DMPTool can view sample plans, preview funder requirements and view the latest changes to their plans. It permits the user to create an editable document for submission to a funding agency and can accommodate different versions as funding requirements change. Not only can researchers use the tool to generate plans compliant to funder requirements, but institutions also can use the tool to present information and policies relevant to data management and to foster collaboration among faculty, the institutional libraries, contracts and grants offices, and academic computing.”

The online DMPTool and information about how to use it is available online care of the California Digital Library at https://dmp.cdlib.org/. Users interested in using the tool do not have to belong to one of the sponsoring institutions, and there is no cost for the service. The first step to getting started is to create an account, login, and then ‘Create a New Plan’ by following a series of easy-to-use templates. Entered information can be saved at anytime for updating later. A completed plan is readily exported from the DMPtool site to a rich-text file for reformatting, adding to a proposal document and submission to a funding agency.

More information about the DMPTool is available from the detailed DMP Tool Guide.

Another university — this time, Princeton– has passed an Open Access policy. An article in The Daily Princetonian reports that the policy was approved on September 19 by unanimous vote of the faculty. According The Conversation, the new policy grants Princeton “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.” Princeton does not (yet) have a university digital repository; it will be interesting to see whether they build one to accommodate the policy, as was the case at Harvard University.

It has been a while since the last US university made a clear OA policy announcement. After Harvard’s announcement in 2008, several other institutions followed with their own open access policies in 2009 and 2010. So far in 2011, Emory University and Lafayette College faculties have passed policies that grant their university the right to make copies of their publications available Open Access. However, the policies appear to be more “opt in” than “opt out.” The University of North Texas’ and Princeton University’s policies both require faculty-authors to opt out the policy on a per-publication basis.

Who will next pass a policy on open access? What are the factors needed to ensure an open access policy will secure the vote of the faculty? SPARC has some ideas, but I think it takes (at least one) respected scholar on the faculty of the institution who is willing to act as a spokesperson, a faculty governance body willing to consider such a policy, and a supportive administration and library. Most importantly, all of these factors need to be in place at the same time. That explains why some of these open access policies are years in the making.

Congratulations, Princeton.