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.

For the first time, Texas A&M Libraries will join in the worldwide celebration of Open Access Week, a global event, now in its 4th year, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. The celebration takes place October 18-24, 2010 and will be marked with a variety of events at Evans and West Campus Libraries. Stop by the OA information booth to view the displays, chat with a campus OA specialist, and pick-up giveaway buttons and posters. Faculty may also request an in-class visit from Library Faculty specializing in Open Access issues including copyright, fair use, Creative Commons sharing, scholarly publishing, e-science, or digital libraries. For more information about the Open Access Week @ TAMU, please drop an email message to digital@tamu.edu.

Visit Open Access Week


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.

As reported in earlier postings, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that it will begin requiring all proposal submissions to include a data management plan in the form of a two-page supplementary document. The new requirement is expected to take effect in October 2010.

In the wake of this announcement (and the absence of any follow-up guidelines from NSF), university research administrators around the country are taking action. At a minimum, they are adding the NSF announcement (Press release 10-077) to their websites, newsletters or blogs. Most blurbs conclude with a pledge to keep the research communities informed of instructions from NSF as soon as they are made available.

In a few noteworthy cases, research offices are more proactively preparing for the new NSF requirement.

Woods Hole’s Director of Research is “planning activities through the summer of 2010 to look at shifting data management requirements from funders ” and assess “the larger data needs of WHOI scientists.” They are organizing meetings with PI’s to discussing the changing NSF policy and identify PI needs. Ultimately they aim to create a set of template data management plans that PI’s can adapt and include in their future NSF proposals. The summer plan is described on their website.

The Office of Research Integrity at University of Alaska, Fairbanks has produced a helpful Data Management page on their website that details not only principles and guidelines for data management but also University policy regarding the oversight of data collection, the transfer of data to other institutions and University requirements for the retention of data. These “local” considerations must be woven into any data management plan prepared for an outside funding agency, such as NSF.

And in an interesting example from the University of Utah, the Associate VP for Research has chosen to link the announcement about the new NSF requirement to a pitch for the university’s Institutional Repository, ‘Uspace’. Her letter to Faculty and Deans aims to raise awareness of the IR as

“a possible repository for your data at the university. Uspace (Uspace.utah.edu) is an online repository for data/software/theses/dissertations/publications/reports/etc. It is made possible by the Institutional Repository Initiative, which is a collaborative project between the libraries at the University of Utah and the University community. Their goal is to collect and archive the intellectual capital of the institution and make these scholarly materials freely available on the Internet.”/strong>

.
The letter concludes with the contact information at the Library which will provide assistance and further information.

Each of these examples demonstrates ways in which Universities can take steps now to prepare for the new NSF requirement. We’d love to hear from other Universities about your plans to prepare for October!