Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

The New York Times published a story about the benefits of open data for medical research. A collaboration begun in 2003 brought together scientists from the public and private sector to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

The project sought to raise money, conduct research — and to share the research data — with the public immediately. No scientist or drug company owns the data, although private companies will have opportunities to profit from their investments in the project as new drugs or imaging tests are developed as a result of the research findings. By sharing the data, scientists in one lab have access to the findings of other scientists. The effort involved to find the biomarkers is enormous, so collaboration encouraged helped speed discovery. Version:1.0 Companies as well as academic researchers are using the data. There have been more than 3,200 downloads of the entire massive data set and almost a million downloads of the data sets containing images from brain scans.

This might signal a change in how research is funded and conducted, at least in biomedical research, although most scientists and companies are likely to remain cautious. As Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, a scientist from the University of Pennsylvania said, “It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers.”

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has established a complete digital archive of its mathematical research journals. Over 34,000 articles are available from over 100 years of high-quality mathematical research in ‘Journal of the AMS,’ ‘Mathematics of Computation,’ ‘Proceedings of the AMS,”Transactions of the AMS,’ and ‘Bulletin of the AMS.’ All back issues, starting with each journal’s inaugural issue through 2005, are now freely available in electronic format.

Researchers can browse the contents of each journal to find articles and authors in each volume and issue, and can search across the entire archive by journal or group of journals at: http://www.ams.org/joursearch/. View the abstract, references (with links to MathSciNet), bibliographic information, Mathematics Subject Classifications for each article, or view a PDF of the full article.

Each journal is unique in its offering of articles, book reviews, and reports. AMS journals have consistently been managed by editors highly prominent in their fields.

The AMS makes the digitized archive of these important research journals freely available to all mathematicians through the generosity of an anonymous donor.

The University of Central Florida (UCF), a global public research university with comprehensive graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels, has announced that their students’ electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) will soon be made available “to a much wider audience”. Beginning in Fall 2010 UCF ETD’s will be contributed to freely accessible national and international databases including the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and the Worldwide ETD Index. In addition, UCF ETDs will be made available to web crawlers to show up in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

As part of this change in administrative process, submission to the fee-based repository operated by ProQuest/UMI will not longer be required and will not be included in the University’s routine ETD submission workflow. Individual colleges or schools may continue to require that students submit their dissertation to ProQuest/UMI on their own. Additionally, students are welcome to contribute their thesis or dissertation to additional repositories including Open Thesis, Internet Archive’s Text Archive, or subject specific repositories. Further information about the University’s new ETD submission process are available from the Library website.

In making the change to fully Open Access ETD submission and publishing, UCF joins a number of other North American institutions who no longer require graduate students to send their work to a proprietary publisher. Others in this category include Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Tech, University of Tennessee (Knoxville), Louisiana State, Laval University, and the University of British Columbia.

Many library users today obtain their desired books from the convenience of their laptops or desktops computer, at most any time of the day or night and from nearly any location outside the library’s walls. Thanks to the growing e-book movement, libraries now offer thousands of current titles to their users with the click of a mouse. Additionally, libraries with historical materials from the early 20th century and back are scanning these rare (and out-of-copyright) materials for online viewing and download.

But between the contemporary e-books licensed from digital media companies such as Overdrive and netLibrary, and those locally digitized from library special collections is a large gap of books that are currently not available digitally. This class of works, representing about 90 years of book publishing, contain titles that are out-of-print and of less commercial value. Yet they may still be of great interest to library users. For this reason, a small collaborative of libraries has begun scanning their out-of-print (but still in-copyright) holdings in order to deliver them online as a service to their users. Working with the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, the libraries are uploading the digitally-reproduced books to Openlibrary, a one-stop website for checking out books.

The digitized books are available to be borrowed by one patron at a time from anywhere in the world. These books are in PDF and ePub formats, as well as Daisy for the print disabled. Users may choose the format as part of the borrowing process. The digital book loans are managed through Adobe Digital Editions, a free software application which must be downloaded and installed. Each loan expires after 2 weeks, and up to 5 books may be borrowed at a time. In consideration of copyright concerns, the library holding the physical copy from which the digital copy was scanned will avoid circulating the physical copy during the period of the digital loan.

Any user is eligible to take advantage of this innovative new service. To get started, create an Open Library account (it’s free, and minimal information is required to sign up) and get set up with the Adobe Digital Editions reader. Then go online to the Lending Library to browse and check out books.

Additional information about the program is available online. The copyright considerations underlying this program are untested and may prove to be an interesting situation to watch!

Steven J. Bell, associate university librarian at Temple University, contributed an interesting post to Inside Higher Ed recently. Titled Taming the Textbook Market, it is of particular interest to me as the Texas A&M University Libraries prepares to participate in Open Access Week in October.

Textbook costs are increasing at alarming rates, and many students wonder what can be done.  Student PIRGs (Public Research Interest Groups) have made textbook affordability one of their campaigns:  https://www.studentpirgs.org/textbooks. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are one way faculty and institutions can help control the costs of textbooks.  Learning resources can be made freely available online. Bell argues that faculty can use technology to publish open textbooks — freely available online, or available print on demand for a modest fee. And librarians’ experience with institutional repositories can help with distribution of open textbooks. Of course, there are still costs associated with online distribution, and free textbooks do not generate royalties for the author.

The Texas Digital Library is developing TxLOR, a learning object repository. TxLOR will provide the infrastructure for faculty at member institutions to make educational resources freely available.  Read more about TxLOR on the TDL wiki:  http://wikis.tdl.org/lor/Main_Page.