University Open Access Research Articles

The state of green open access in Canadian universities

This study investigates the use of institutional repositories for self-archiving peer-reviewed work in the U15 (an association of fifteen Canadian research-intensive universities). It relates usage with university open access (OA) policy types and publisher policy embargoes. We show that of all articles found in OpenAlex attributed to U15 researchers, 45.1 to 56.6% are available as Gold or Green OA, yet only 0.5 to 10.7% (mean 4.2%) of these can be found on their respective U15 IRs. Our investigation shows a lack of OA policies from most institutions, journal policies with embargoes exceeding 12 months, and incomplete policy information.

Mapping the Evolution of Open-Access University and Research Document Platforms: A Comprehensive Study of Senegal?s Scholarly Landscape

Mapping the Evolution of Open-Access University and Research Document Platforms: A Comprehensive Study of Senegal?s Scholarly Landscape

Self-regulation, motivation, and outcomes in HyFlex classrooms.

At a public, 4-year, open access university, students were given the choice of how they would attend class: face-to-face, online, or livestream (synchronous session in Microsoft Teams®). The 876 students in this study registered in course sections designated as face-to-face delivery yet were provided attendance flexibility due to the pandemic. This unique situation provided a research opportunity to explore the self-regulatory, motivational, and contextual factors that affected students' attendance choices as well as their academic outcomes (pass/withdrawal) and perceptions of satisfaction. Results showed that 70% of students took advantage of the opportunity to flex and strongly valued the convenience, choice, and time savings. They were satisfied with connections to instructors. They were less satisfied with connections to peers, fluency between attendance modes, and technology performance. Generally, students performed well in the HyFlex courses with pass rates and withdrawal rates of 88% and 2%, respectively, for both Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 terms. The students who were most likely to flex were first year students who lived more than 15 miles from campus; first year students comprised a disproportionately large portion of those who failed. Self-regulatory and motivational factors were explored in relation to attendance decisions. Besides COVID-related issues and work/life balance, a sizable percentage (13%) of students explained their attendance decisions in terms of quality of their learning and in this way demonstrated self-regulation. Motivation was an issue for 17% of the students, typically expressed as not attending in the way they learned best or skipping class.

Free for all, or free-for-all? A content analysis of Australian university open access policies

Introduction. The purpose of this paper is to understand the characteristics of Australian institutional open access policies and to explore the extent they represent a coherent and unified approach to delivering and promoting open access in Australia. Method. Open access policies were located using a systematic search of forty-two Australian university Websites. A formal open access policy was defined as a document with the terms "open access" and "policy" in the title, and which was located either in the institution’s policy library, or elsewhere on the main university Website. Analysis. Content analysis was employed to examine policies across fourteen categories. Results. Only twenty Australian universities were found to have a formal open access policy. There was found to be a wide variation in language used, expressed intent of the policy and expectations of researchers. Few policies mentioned monitoring or compliance. Conclusions. When policies use language which does not reflect national and international understandings, and when requirements are not clear and with consequences, policies are unlikely to contribute to understanding of open access, to uptake of the policy, or to ease of transferring understanding and practices between institutions. A more unified institutional approach to open access is recommended.

Preliminary Assessment of Outcomes From Restructuring an Undergraduate Animal Physiology Course to Adapt to the COVID‐19 Pandemic

In the Fall 2020 semester, faculty at colleges and universities across the United States changed course structures in many ways to adapt to the COVID‐19 pandemic. At our institution, a regional comprehensive open‐access university in the Midwest, campus was open for in‐person courses with specific COVID precautions in place. Faculty were given substantial flexibility in how they restructured their courses, within constraints of socially distanced classrooms and accessibility for students. In prior semesters, our upper‐division undergraduate animal physiology course met fully in‐person for three 50‐minute lecture periods and one 3‐hour lab period per week. In fall 2020, a previously planned shift to a 4‐day class week had led to a change to two 80‐minute lecture periods and one 3‐hour lab period per week. To align with COVID mitigation policies, the class was further restructured to a hybrid format as follows: For lecture, half of the students attended the first in‐person class meeting of the week, and the other half attended the second in‐person class meeting of the week. The same topics were covered in both in‐person sessions in a given week and all in‐person classes were recorded for asynchronous viewing by students who did not attend in person that week. The remaining lecture content was posted online via instructor‐produced video lectures, outside videos or animations, and online homework. For lab sessions, half of the students attended in‐person each week, and the other half were assigned activities to complete remotely, such as PhysioEx lab simulations, online documentary videos, or low‐tech hands‐on activities that could be completed at home. In the 8th week of the semester, students were surveyed about use of course resources and attitudes about the course and the fall semester in general. A high percentage of survey respondents reported that they “frequently” accessed recordings of live class sessions (14/20 respondents) and online‐only video lectures (17/21 respondents). Technology issues such as slow internet or device incompatibility were reported by 57% of respondents. In response to open‐ended questions about positives and negatives of the course structure, examples of positives included accessibility of class recordings and other materials, flexibility, and “COVID‐friendly”. The majority of negative comments about the course structure involved a general dislike of online learning. The course grade distribution was within the range of grade distributions from prior offerings of the course by the same instructor, suggesting that student learning was not significantly impaired by the change in course structure, although negative impacts on individual students cannot be ruled out. Course structure‐related comments on university student evaluation forms included “easy to maintain studies during quarantine” and “I actually really enjoyed the format”. In conclusion, the hybrid format for this course was generally well‐received by this group of upper‐division biology majors and represents a viable strategy for adapting a biology majors course to the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Conception and Implementation of an IoT System for Remote Practical Works in Open Access University’s Electronic Laboratories

The courses and disciplines in the exact sciences are based on practical work (PW) which complements the theoretical teaching. Remote Labs are a recent approach used for educating experimental manipulations by using the performance of information and communication technologies. This work aims to propose the design of an IoT system allowing several remote manipulations in analog electronics. This solution is mainly based on the Red Pitaya STEMLab board, in particular for communication and remote control for measurements and data acquisition through different protocols. The low-cost system provides an intelligent selection between the different integrated practical works on a developed board, as well as other ones carried out externally as extensions according to the professor's needs. The analysis of the integrated manipulations was done taking into account the minimum latency of the remote control as well as its portability to save time, space, and money without loss of quality and quantity. The presented results relate to a PW of analog electronics, a “RC charging and discharging circuit” has been considered for a comparison of this Remote system with the same PW performed by the classical method "hands-on laboratory". Our purpose in this study is the development of a control system to maximize the available resource as well as to improve self-learning ability in the electronic field.

Open Access Mandates and Policies: The Basics

Universities can afford to subscribe to only a small percentage of available scholarly journals. Consequently, researchers do not have access to all articles in journals pertinent to their fields of study. The Open Access (OA) movement began in response to wanting to find a solution to this “serials crisis” and the availability of the Internet to disseminate scholarly research in new and innovative ways to a larger, worldwide audience. OA mandates are policies adopted by research institutions, universities, or funders that require researchers to provide free, unrestricted access to their published research by publishing in OA journals, depositing their articles in an OA repository or both. This edition of “In Lay Terms” provides basic information about OA mandates and policies, gives an overview of university and funder OA mandates, discusses geographic differences in policies and compliance rates, and reviews United States federal funding agencies’ OA policies and Plan S.

Mapping the Publishing Challenges for an Open Access University Press

Managing a New University Press (NUP) is often a one-person operation and, with limits on time and resources, efficiency and effectiveness are key to having a successful production process and providing a high level of author, editor and reader services. This article looks at the challenges faced by open access (OA) university presses throughout the publishing journey and considers ways in which these challenges can be addressed. In particular, the article focuses on six key stages throughout the lifecycle of an open access publication: commissioning; review; production; discoverability; marketing; analytics. Approached from the point of view of the University of Huddersfield Press, this article also draws on discussions and experiences of other NUPs from community-led forums and events. By highlighting the issues faced, and the potential solutions to them, this research recognises the need for a tailored and formalised production workflow within NUPs and also provides guidance how to begin implementing possible solutions.

Building a university Open Access scholarly publishing environment

As Open Access publishing has been playing a more important role in scholarly communication, well-developed Open Access publishing infrastructure should be adopted by universities in order to make their outputs more competitive and provide its authors the immediate impact of their work. More than that, such “in-house” publications are very good starting points for early career researchers while they are joining the world of scholarly publishing. Not because of lower quality or reduced requirements, but because of extra help and guidance that might be provided to students by editorial office.
 The Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) - Central Library has developed, based on the community needs, an Open Access journal publishing environment including the complete set of publishing standards, and being linked to the global Open Access infrastructure. One university scholarly journal and proceedings series is published there by the library, the platform also hosts a number of subject-specialized journals published by smaller departments. Such hosting is essential for many editorial teams, since it provides current publishing standards that they would hardly be able to keep by their own. Furthermore, being part of a university library, the editorial office has skills to provide value-added services in full range of information and publishing skills to researchers, authors, and students.
 To capture a full scale of Open Access publishing services, an Open Access monograph platform ought to be adopted in such a manner that is able to deal with various multimedia document types and contents, live monographs etc.
 The hosting of publishing platforms and guidance in Open Access publishing, research assessment and information and publishing literacy enhances good cooperation between the library and the academic community, and also provides the community with a lot of practical added value and help in meeting the current publishing criteria to succeed in the competitive research environment.

The effects of vocational interest on study results: Student person - environment fit and program interest diversity.

The extent to which a good person-environment (PE) interest fit between student and study program leads to better study results in higher education is an ongoing debate wherein the role of the study program environment has remained inadequately studied. Unanswered questions include: how diverse study programs are in the interests of their student populations, and how this program interest diversity influences study results, in comparison to individual PE fit? The present study addressed these questions in students (N = 4,635) enrolled in open-access university education. In such an open access system, students are allowed to make study choices without prior limitations based on previous achievement or high stakes testing. Starting from the homogeneity assumption applied to this open access setting, we propose several hypotheses regarding program interest diversity, motivation, student-program interest fit, and study results. Furthermore, we applied a method of measuring interest diversity based on an existing measure of correlational person-environment fit. Results indicated that interest diversity in an open access study environment was low across study programs. Results also showed the variance present in program interest diversity was linked to autonomous and controlled motivation in the programs’ student populations. Finally, program interest diversity better explained study results than individual student fit with their program of choice. Indeed, program interest diversity explained up to 44% of the variance in the average program’s study results while individual student-program fit hardly predicted study success at all. Educational policy makers should therefore be aware of the importance of both interest fit and interest diversity during the process of study orientation.

Assessing Author Identifiers: Preparing for a Linked Data Approach to Name Authority Control in an Institutional Repository Context

Linked data solutions for name authority control in digital libraries are an area of growing interest, particularly among institutional repositories (IRs). This article first considers the shift from traditional authority files to author identifiers, highlighting some of the challenges and possibilities. An analysis of author name strings in Duke University's open access repository, DukeSpace, is conducted to identify a suitable source of author URIs for Duke's newly launched repository for research data. Does one of the three prominent international authority sources—Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF), Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), and Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID)—demonstrate the most comprehensive uptake? Finally, recommendations surrounding a technical approach to leveraging author Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) at Duke are briefly considered.

A modularized tablet-based approach to preparation for remedial mathematics

ABSTRACTBasic arithmetic forms the foundation of the math courses that students will face in their undergraduate careers. It is therefore crucial that students have a solid understanding of these fundamental concepts. At an open-access university offering both two-year and four-year degrees, incoming freshmen who were identified as lacking in basic arithmetic skills were engaged in an experimental technology-enhanced workshop designed to provide them with a deeper understanding of arithmetic prior to their initial remedial coursework. Customized online content was created specifically for this experiment, and the first implementation (n = 27) yielded statistically significant improvement, not only from pre-test to post-test, but also in the subsequent remedial course. This paper also analyses the accuracy of students’ self-assessment from pre-test to post-test, as well as student attitudes about this experimental approach.

Open access repositories on open educational resources

Purpose Triggered by the advancement of information and communications technology, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. In the context of openness to a wider community to access free resources, Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO. Design/methodology/approach The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities’ digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users. Findings Positive results emanating from the university open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching. Research limitations/implications Developing further programmes to encourage, influence faculty members and prospective stakeholders to use and contribute content to the valuable repositories is indeed a challenging task. Originality/value This paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries. This paper also describes future collaboration work with institutions in sharing their open access resources.

Examining brain activity while playing computer games

In this paper, an investigation and its results towards brain activity pattern recognition while playing computer games using a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) device is presented. The main aim of the study was to analyse data recorded while participants were engaged in playing popular computer games. The major contribution of the analysis presented is the confirmation of the hypothesis that there is a connection between activities in the brain and the different categories of computer games. Three different popular computer games were used, and the recordings took place under the conditions imposed by two different environments, a noisy one (a typical open-access university computer lab) and a quiet one (a typical controlled-access university computer lab under controlled environmental parameters). Initial results, obtained after analysing the raw electro-encephalography (EEG) recorded data, suggest that there might be a significant connection between the type of activity taking place in the human brain and the type of computer game a player is engaging with.

Utility of a dermatology interest group blog: the impact of medical student interest groups and Web 2.0 tools as educational resources.

The open access University of Texas Dermatology Interest Group blog was established in 2004 for the purposes of increasing communication and collaboration between medical students and dermatology faculty, residents, and alumni, as well as to promote educational opportunities and the missions for which the interest group was created. This blog is unique because of its longevity and continuous postings directed toward the educational and professional needs of medical students and residents. A blog user survey was performed to assess viewers’ thoughts, purpose of viewing, demographic profile, subscriber status, usage of the blog and other Web 2.0 tools (forums, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, podcasts), and perceived usefulness. Sixty-one anonymous online surveys were completed during a 1-month period. Statistical analyses of the responses demonstrated that the utilization of web-based tools and the blog were valuable resources for students, especially for blog subscribers, those more involved in an interest group, and those reading the blog for a longer period of time. The usefulness and impact of this method of communication and dissemination of information in medical education may encourage other student groups, faculty advisors, and educators to implement similar educational tools at their institutions.

Open access in Australia: an odyssey of sorts?

Scholarly communication change and open access (OA) initiatives in Australia have followed an Odyssean path in the last decade. The stop-start nature of early initiatives demonstrates that institutional leadership is essential for the successful deposit of academic content in an institutional repository. Similarly, OA policies from the two Australian Research Councils were delayed for nearly a decade, partly due to publisher pressure and bureaucratic conservatism. More successful has been the development of full, or hybrid, open access university e-presses. These presses, usually embedded in the scholarly infrastructure of the university, provide monographic models for wider global consideration. Australian universities are now reflecting, partly through recent Research Council edicts and monitoring global OA developments, greater awareness of the need for action in scholarly communication change.

A comparison of an open access university press with traditional presses: Two years later1

This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional non-open access Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way ANOVA analyses show that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AUPress in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AUPress, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by the number of downloads of the open electronic versions.

The Role of an Entity Registry in Scholarly Communication: Exploring Creative Uses of Research Activity Data

The Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) is the University's open access repository for research outputs. To simplify deposit in ORA, a registry has been created containing data harvested from existing sources to be used as repository metadata. The registry stores publicly available research activity data, that is, data about research including people, projects, and funders. Data held in the registry are available for purposes beyond the repository, particularly as the registry uses semantic web technologies which expedite data sharing. Value is added by aggregating disparate data for discovery, by making creative use of data such as revealing connections between entities and recording data provenance. This article describes the entity registry, its role within ORA, and as a tool to support scholarly communication. The advantages of storing data as entities and gathering, aggregating, and displaying research activity data to assist dissemination of research are explained. Examples of use of the registry and its data are provided that enable easy discovery of researchers and their activities and reveals hidden connections between them, thereby, encouraging communication and collaboration between different subject areas. Development of the registry and examples has been underpinned by extensive stakeholder analysis and user testing.

Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through <i>the Good the Bad and the Innocent</i>

Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through the Good the Bad and the Innocent Jessi Lee Jackson (bio) and Erica R. Meiners (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Kinnari Jivani , “Emancipation” (2009) Example # 1, from Jessi: It is the 8th week of English class in our adult high school completion program, and we have just read a short excerpt from Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? As a class, we review vocabulary words, and then, piece by piece, work to understand Davis’s argument for prison abolition. All of the students have firsthand experience of the system, and they agree that the prison system is clearly racist in its impact. But when we get to the point of discussing abolition—of shutting down prisons—the class quiets. The disagreements start. “I agree with abolishing the death penalty, but . . .” “But some people need to get locked up.” “I agree we need to change the system, but getting rid of prisons entirely . . .” “It’s too much . . .” “I don’t think we need to go that far . . .” I find myself in the awkward position of being the only person without direct experience of being locked up, and the only vocal abolitionist. By the end of our conversation, I perceive that students have made up their minds and are united in their analysis: the prison system is messed up, but abolition is “going too far.” I wonder to myself what went wrong in our conversation. Why was I not able to present abolition in a way that challenged people to go further or question their assumptions about the necessity of prisons? Example #2: from Erica: I am teaching a Feminist Activism class at my public, urban, relatively open-access university. We are in the last third of the semester and the course has centered on anti-prison organizing. Students in the course all identify as women, many are mothers, and a few have named friends and relatives who are locked up. All are working full-time or part-time, most are the first in their family to attend college, and the majority are Latinas. They are women who enlisted in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) in high school because it offered a way out of their neighborhood, and they are taking six years to complete an undergraduate degree. For me, our term together has been smart, often funny, full of good, thick conversations, and we have hosted a few guest speakers who are engaged in small-scale anti-prison work across the city of Chicago. The course has included a range of [End Page 20] readings this semester—from Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? to “The Critical Resistance-INCITE statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex” to selections from Bissonette’s When the Prisoners Ran Walpole—and while many admit that the system targets them and their families, and that it does not make their communities safer, the ending discussions, to me, seem to always fall flat. We circulate around “what about the really bad people?”: the child molesters? rapists? those who really belong in prison? I am the one sitting—yes in the front of the room, with my coffee cup, waiting, waiting, wondering. Yes, what about the bad people, Erica? Signing up as a card-carrying abolitionist and admitting there are no “bad people” seems hard for those of us that have experienced violence, or perpetrated violence. As colleagues and friends involved in working and thinking through anti-prison engagements, we are motivated to write this article because of our commitment to resisting our nation’s punishing carceral logic and our similar perceptions of our failures in teaching and learning abolition. We offer these examples because they are immediate, and because, as the people in the classroom were closer to incarceration than most populations in the United States perceive themselves to be, we naively thought that conversations might be different. We teach and learn about abolition in a variety of contexts. Both of us teach in a small community-based free adult high school completion program for formerly incarcerated adults (Erica for ten years, Jessi for three). Housed in a vocational training center that...

Athabasca University's Open Access Week Presentations

Athabasca University's Open Access Week Presentations