Open@VT

Graduate and undergraduate students at Virginia Tech are encouraged to apply for one of two available travel scholarships to OpenCon 2014, the student and early career researcher conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data to be held on November 15-17, 2014 in Washington, DC.

The scholarships cover travel expenses, lodging, and some meals. One scholarship will be awarded to a graduate student, and the other will be awarded to a graduate or undergraduate student. Virginia Tech students must use the following URL to apply by Friday, September 26:

http://opencon2014.org/virginiatech

To find out more about the conference, see the conference program and the participant FAQ. This international conference offers an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the growing culture of openness in academia and how to become a participant in it. The travel scholarships are sponsored by the Graduate School and the University Libraries’ Open Access Week committee. For questions, please contact Philip Young, pyoung1@vt.edu.

Winners will be selected on the basis of their answers to the application questions, and announced on October 3. Please spread this opportunity to VT students far and wide, and good luck!

The University Libraries invites students and faculty to peruse a collection of open textbooks on display next to the reference desk on the second floor of Newman Library. Traditional textbooks tend to be very expensive, but open textbooks such as these from OpenStax College have several free online formats (the iBooks are $4.99) and are much cheaper in hardback form (the cost of printing, usually $30-$50). Students interested in reducing textbook costs can take pre-printed information from the display to give to their professors. More information is available in the OpenStax College Textbook Display FAQ. Our hard copy display should be around for a few weeks, or you can explore the books on the OpenStax website.

Open textbooks benefit faculty as well because they are offered under an open license (the Creative Commons Attribution, or CC-BY, license), allowing faculty to re-use, remix, and adapt course material to their liking. The textbooks are written and peer reviewed by subject experts (usually faculty, who are listed just inside the front cover) and are already in use at many universities, including Virginia Tech, where the Sociology textbook has been used in the SOC 1004 course. Supplemental materials are also available for faculty- for example, there are slides and a test bank for the Sociology textbook.

There are currently nine textbooks available (shown below), with four available soon (Pre-calculus, Chemistry, U.S. History, and Psychology). OpenStax College, a nonprofit publisher based at Rice University, recently announced that 21 titles will be available by 2017.

Open textbooks are just one form of open educational resources (OER), which include openly licensed online simulations, courseware, images, audio, video, tutorials, modular course components and more. Anita Walz, our OER Librarian, organized the textbook display and has created an OER Finding Guide. There will also be a library webpage on OER available soon. If you are a faculty member interested in reviewing one of these (or other) open textbooks, or are looking for other types of OER, please contact Anita at arwalz@vt.edu.

OpenStax College textbooks are available through Summon by searching for “OpenStax”, and we also offer a guide to finding specific textbooks in the library.

Registration has recently opened for the Open Knowledge MOOC, a course that introduces the concept of openness and covers open access, open science, and open education, among other open movements. Hosted on the OpenEdX platform by Stanford University, this is a semester-long course that runs from September 3 to December 12, 2014. The course material for Week 12, “Student Publishing: Lessons in Publishing, Peer Review, and Knowledge Sharing” was selected or developed by librarians at Virginia Tech, in collaboration with our partner library at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa.

I’m a member of the team at the University Libraries that worked on the “Student Publishing” module, along with Anita Walz, Paul Hover, Jennifer Nardine, and Scott Pennington. A brief presentation describing our work, “Student Publishing: An Open, Global Learning Module” was made at the Dean’s Forum on Global Engagement in March 2014. The module includes readings, videos, assignments, and classroom activities (for the blended version offered by several universities around the world). If you take the course, we would love to hear feedback about ways to improve the module.

During his visit to Virginia Tech last October, John Willinsky told us about planning for the course, and suggested that we contribute to it. We chose Student Publishing for our module, planning to reach out to student journals on campus to strengthen ties to the library. Due to time constraints, that outreach is still in progress, but one potential outcome would be hosting through our e-journal publishing services. Student journals are challenged by frequent transitions in their editorial staff, with a resulting loss of information and expertise. Library hosting would ensure that proper transfer of administrative information happens, and librarians can also advise on indexing, copyright/licensing, and preservation.

The vagueness of the term “open” combined with a lack of critical examination leaves plenty of room for openwashing, and MOOCs are no exception. Given its subject, it is particularly important that the Open Knowledge course embody open practices rather than merely suggest them. This course is different from traditional MOOCs in its connectivist approach (see xMOOC vs. cMOOC), its Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) licensing, its crowdsourced content, and its emphasis on the re-use of existing openly licensed educational resources. In addition, course modules will remain accessible afterward, unlike proprietary MOOCs. It’s as open as we could make it, so I hope you’ll give it a try.

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech is now supporting two innovative open access efforts, Knowledge Unlatched and PeerJ. Knowledge Unlatched enables open access for books in the humanities and social sciences, while PeerJ is an open access journal in the life sciences.

Open access journals are hardly new, but PeerJ is pioneering a new pricing model that dispenses with article processing charges (APCs) in the thousands of dollars. Instead, it charges for lifetime memberships in three tiers. The University Libraries is now automatically covering these fees for Virginia Tech authors. The fees are slightly different since payment only occurs upon article acceptance, and there is a discount for purchasing memberships in bulk. Prices are radically lower than the APCs charged by other journals, and PeerJ has received positive reviews, especially for its fast peer review process. We hope our authors in the biological, medical, and health sciences will benefit from this arrangement.

The University Libraries is also a charter member of Knowledge Unlatched and provided support for its pilot collection of 28 open access monographs (at this writing 22 have been made available). PDFs of the books will be available (with no DRM) under a Creative Commons license. The project benefits all involved, and the Featured Authors section is particularly worth reading. Given the strain that scholarly monograph publishing has been under in recent years, Knowledge Unlatched and other open monograph initiatives have the potential to begin turning things around. While this support for KU does not provide direct aid to Virginia Tech authors, it does reduce the pressure on academic presses, and hopefully more books in the humanities and social sciences can be published.

John Willinsky, Distinguished Innovator in Residence, gave the keynote address for Open Access Week at Virginia Tech Thursday night in the Graduate Life Center auditorium. “What Is It About the History of Learning that Calls Out for Open Access to Research and Scholarship?” revealed not only historical aspects of scholarship in general but connections between Virginia Tech and his founding of the Public Knowledge Project.

John Willinsky, Open Access Week 2013 keynote at Virginia Tech

When Virginia Tech became the first university to require electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in 1997, the software for presenting them online was made freely available. Willinsky used the software to post ETDs online (with their authors’ permission, of course), though he discovered that implementation was not as easy as it could have been. This concept of providing freely available software for the purpose of open dissemination of research inspired his founding of the Public Knowledge Project, which provides open source software for producing open access journals, monographs, and conference proceedings. (Today there are 5,000 journals using PKP’s Open Journal Systems, about half of them in the developing world.)

Not only is there a human right to knowledge, any knowledge claim depends on being public. To investigate the nature of knowledge we must address the concept of intellectual property, which is culturally pervasive yet rarely taught or examined in our universities. A university’s relationship to intellectual property is different due to its public or non-profit legal status, and its educational purpose affords it status in the evaluation of the fair use principles of copyright, for example. The tax exempt status of universities recognizes that they produce a different kind of property, particularly in the case of a land-grant institution like Virginia Tech. There is a social contract between society and the university.

Historically, the exchange of real property for another kind of property goes back to the monasteries. Noblemen (and women) gave land (symbolically, a chunk of turf was placed on an altar) so that they, through the monastery, could be closer to God and have a surer path to heaven (and for certainty’s sake, nobles were buried on monastery grounds– here Willinsky noted that Leland Stanford is buried on the grounds of Stanford University). But personal patronage of this kind was not lasting. So today we have democratically elected governments who, on behalf of the public, provide patronage for the advancement of humanity through land grants (the Morrill Act of 1862), tax support, and tax exemption. The knowledge produced in universities is public. The audience was deputized to spread the word.

Thanks to the University Libraries’ Event Capture Service for the video below. [Edit 2/28/14]