Open@VT

As part of Open Access Week, the University Libraries and the Graduate School offered a travel scholarship to OpenCon 2017, a conference for early career researchers on open access, open data, and open educational resources. From a pool of many strong essay applications, we chose Alexis Villacis, a Ph.D. student in Agricultural and Applied Economics. Alexis attended the conference in Berlin, Germany on November 11-13, and sent the report below. Be sure to check out the OpenCon 2017 highlights.

Alexis (left) at an OpenCon workshop

Alexis Villacis writes:

The progress of science and access to education varies widely geographically, and sometimes are very limited due to economic, cultural and social circumstances. Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data are key to support those who are left behind and bring empowerment to the next generation. OpenCon brings together the worldwide champions who are working towards the advancement of the Open Movement. Students, early career academic professionals, and senior researchers all come together under one roof to share their initiatives. Participants hear their inspiring stories, from Canada to Nepal, of sparking change during a three-day conference; a conference I am grateful to have had the opportunity to be part of, as a representative of Virginia Tech.

Over these three days, participants showcased how Open is being advanced around the world. The discussion centered on how often higher education models (knowledge access, research questions, and research funding, among many others) marginalize underrepresented scholars and students. It was thought-provoking and sometimes shocking to hear how our western ways of knowing have colonized access to information and how this has impacted the progress of R&D in other parts of the world.

Sharing with participants from other countries and hearing the challenges they face every day made me contrast our everyday realities and the privilege we have at VT. A privilege we take for granted in our everyday lives, where access to all types of tools, research, and content is one click away through our computers. We, as an institution of higher education, promote and share access to knowledge and new technologies throughout Virginia and beyond. The impact of these transfers is what keeps our society thriving every day, but where would we be if this access were restricted to us? Perhaps, VT as a Land Grant Institution would not exist at all, the state of Virginia would not be what it is today and neither many other parts of the US.

As I walked through the halls of the Max Planck Society, where the conference was held, I kept wondering: is this not what we are doing today? What changes are we withholding from the rest of the world by limiting access to data, knowledge, and education? The essence of this and the significance of Open Access clearly goes beyond journals and data, and it is also about social justice, equity, and the democratization of knowledge. We Hokies can make a difference in Open Access. More importantly, we are the key players called to work towards its advancement.

As research becomes increasingly digital, it’s becoming more important to ensure a findable and unchanging scholarly record.  Researchers are probably familiar with the digital object identifier (DOI), which in URL form provides a persistent link to articles (and more), and libraries and publishers provide redundant archiving to ensure  scholarship is preserved for the long term.

However, it’s also important to make sure links (other than DOIs) in articles work, and to make sure web pages represent what the author saw when she cited them.  Some journals are aware of these issues, and I’ve noticed a few authors who employ URLs from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in their manuscripts.  Thinking back to my last article, there are probably some links that won’t work five (or twenty) years from now, or links resolving to web pages that won’t accurately represent what I was referring to at the time.

These problems are usually referred to as link rot and reference rot.  Link rot means a URL can no longer be found (your browser returns a 404 error); reference rot means the information cited at a URL has either disappeared or changed.  Research has shown 50% of the links in Supreme Court decisions from 1996-2010 had reference rot, one in five articles suffers from reference rot, and three out of four URI references lead to changed content.  In the last article, the authors say these problems raise “significant concerns regarding the long term integrity of the web-based scholarly record.”  In this era of fact-checking and “fake news,”  it’s more important than ever to stabilize the evidence base built in peer-reviewed articles.

To help address this problem, Virginia Tech’s University Libraries is pleased to announce that we are now a registrar for Perma.cc, a service to provide archiving of web pages for research purposes.  Researchers at Virginia Tech will be able to archive, manage, and annotate an unlimited number of web pages with persistent shortlinks for citing, and will also receive local support.

Including a Perma.cc link in a citation or footnote may depend on the citation style you are using, but a general recommendation is to include the original URL, followed by “archived at” and the Perma.cc shortlink, for example:

36. Scott Althaus & Kalev Leetaru, Airbrushing History, American Style, Cline Center for Democracy (Nov. 25, 2008), http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/airbrushing_history, archived at http://perma.cc/G8PW-798L.

If you click on the Perma.cc link above, you can see how the web page looks in archived form.  In addition, the time of capture is recorded, there’s a link to the live page, and you can download the archive file (under “show record details”).  Perma.cc is intended for non-commercial scholarly and research purposes that do not infringe or violate anyone’s copyright or other rights.   Web pages to be archived should be freely available without payment or registration.  Additionally, some web pages employ a “noarchive” restriction, which Perma.cc archives but makes private.  In other words, the shortlink can be shared, but is available only to the researcher and upon request.

There are some advantages to using Perma.cc over the Wayback Machine (and the Internet Archive is a supporting partner of Perma.cc). Perma.cc provides a more thorough, accurate capture in two forms, a web archive file (WARC), and a screenshot (PNG).  Perma.cc also provides persistent shortlinks that are more convenient for citing, and enables researcher management of the links (with folders, annotation, and public/private control).

Other features of the Perma.cc system include:

• Researchers will be added as organizations, and can add other users within that organization, such as lab members or collaborators
• A bookmarklet and extension are available for easy use in a browser (users must be logged in)
• Links can be deleted within 24 hours

See more information about creating Perma.cc records and links, and check out the FAQ.  Perma.cc is built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab, and in alignment with its focus on preservation, the service has a contingency plan and is also open source.

To get started, send an email to permacc@vt.edu and request an account (or to be added as an unlimited user if you’ve already signed up).  You can also send questions and problems to this address, or you can use the Perma.cc contact form.

Authors: Philippe Gray and Anne Lawrence

Inspired by the Association of Southeastern Regional Libraries webinar, “Adding Patent Records to Clemson’s IR — Highlighting the University’s Output,” VTechWorks, Virginia Tech’s institutional repository, now offers a similar collection, Virginia Tech Patents. The collection contains 645 U.S. Patents assigned to Virginia Tech at the time of patent application. The dates of issuance span 1919-2016. The collection’s display is customized with fields, search filters, and facets particular to patents, such as patent type, inventor, assignee, patent and application numbers, and patent classifications. Our motivation for creating the collection was that a sizeable collection of useful public domain content could be harvested programmatically and that it provides an opportunity to spotlight how Virginia Tech “invents the future.”

To enable other repositories to develop a similar collection, we offer our software, Patent-Harvest, in a GitHub repository. Patent-Harvest contains a Java program written to harvest all patents with Virginia Tech as the assignee. It can be adapted to harvest patents and associated files for other organizations or search parameters.

The harvesting program uses the PatentsView API to retrieve relevant metadata for all Virginia Tech patents and outputs a CSV spreadsheet. If desired, all the corresponding files for each patent are also downloaded and logically renamed. Since most United States patent documents are image-only PDFs, a script is included that uses optical character recognition to read text content and embed it in the patent documents. This makes the text of the patent documents searchable, but doesn’t change how they appear to the reader.

Happy Open Education Week! 2017 marked the fourth year of celebrating international Open Education Week at Virginia Tech. The Open Education Week planning committee set goals to meet felt needs of faculty on campus and to encourage student communication with faculty regarding the impact of learning resources on student learning.

Cost is always an issue. The committee agreed that we wanted to do something more positive than focus on barriers to learning, so we chose the theme “The Potential of Open Education.” What is Open Education anyway?  Open Education includes pedagogies, practices, and resources which reduce barriers to learning.  “Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.” Source: Open Education Consortium

Two faculty and graduate student oriented events featured local and invited speakers, including live and live-streamed:

Seven Platforms You Should Know About: Share, Find, Author, or Adapt Creative Commons-Licensed Resources

Thanks to Kayla McNabb for setup of the video below and Neal Henshaw for editing.

Creative Commons licenses allow no-cost access, redistribution, remix, and reuse with attribution. This session is for faculty (and others) who want to know about platforms which enable sharing, finding, creating, and/or adapting of openly licensed or public domain resources. This session featured live demos by expert users or creators of VTechWorks, Merlot, the Open Textbook Library, OER Commons, VT’s Odyssey Learning Object Repository, Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTex), Pressbooks, and the Rebus Open textbook editing community.

The event handout “Where to find, share, author and adapt Open Educational Resources? A Selection of No-Cost Platforms” is available here; also check out links from the Seven Platforms program.

The Potential of Open Educational Resources: Virginia Tech Faculty & Student Panel Discussion

Thanks to Digital Media Services for the video below and the University Libraries’ Event Capture Service for video production.

Virginia Tech Open Educational Resource (OER) authors, adapters, and authors and several students discussed the use, benefits, challenges, and opportunities related to using or adapting openly licensed course materials for couse use. Panelists included Jane Roberson-Evia (Statistics), Mary Lipscombe (Biological Sciences), Stephen Skripak (Pamplin), and Anastasia Cortez (Pamplin). Publishing expert Peter Potter (University Libraries), and students Mayra Artiles (Doctoral student, Engineering Education), and Jonathan de Pena (Senior, Finance) also joined the panel, moderated by Anita Walz (University Libraries).

Virginia Tech’s Student Government Association (SGA) designed the Open Education Week exhibit to educate and to solicit visitor input. The interactive exhibit features a range of required student learning materials including textbooks, homework access codes, software, and clickers, visual representations of data related to course material costs and student responses, information about open education options, a new Creative Commons brochure, CC stickers, and several interactive features. Students also have the opportunity to write a personalized message on an SGA-designed postcard to their professor, department head, or whomever they want to contact.

A selection of resources used in the exhibit are linked here:

Florida Virtual Campus (October 7, 2016) 2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey. Available here.

National Association of College Stores (2011) “Where the New Textbook Dollar Goes” Used with Permission of NACS. (No updated data available). Available here.

Senack, Ethan. (January 2014) Fixing the Broken Textbook Market: How students respond to high textbook costs and demand alternatives. U.S. PIRG Education Fund & the Student PIRGs: Washington, DC. Available here.

Senack, E., Donoghue, R. (2016)Covering the cost: Why we can no longer afford to ignore high textbook prices. Student PIRGS: Washington, DC. Available here.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as quoted by Popken, B. in “College Textbook Prices Have Risen 1,041 Percent Since 1977“ NBC News (August 6, 2015). Available here.

© Anna Pope, CC BY 4.0

© Anna Pope, CC BY 4.0

SGA also hosted a Multimedia Event. This student led engagement event featured multiple interactive stations where students could discuss, answer questions, take pictures, and write postcards. Two wordcloud prompts in particular were telling: “Where would your money go if you didn’t have to buy textbooks” — with the top two answers by far reflecting daily living expenses — “food” and “rent.”

Students were also asked to reflect on how they avoid buying full price textbooks. Responses included “Rent [textbooks],” “go without,” “hope for the best,” “borrow them from a friend,” and “buy used.”

© Anna Pope, CC BY 4.0

___________________

The Open Education Week at Virginia Tech planning committee for 2017 included: Anita Walz (Chair), Kayla McNabb, Quinn Warnick, Anna Pope, Anne Brown, Kimberly Bassler, and Craig Arthur.

Exhibit curators: Virginia Tech Student Government Association: Anna Pope, Kenneth Corbett, Spencer Jones, Holly Hunter, and Sydney Thorpe with the University Libraries’: Scott Fralin and Anita Walz

Special thanks for event support: Carrie Cross, Trevor Finney, and Kayla McNabb

The University Libraries will be hosting its second Open Data Week on April 10-13 with opportunities to learn more about sharing, visualizing, finding, mining, and reusing data for research. In addition to panel discussions on open research data as well as on text and data mining, there will be two sessions on data visualization. From Tuesday through Thursday, join one or more sessions featuring guests Thomas Arrow and Stefan Kasberger from ContentMine to learn about open source tools in development for mining scholarly and research literature. ContentMine software “allows users to gather papers from many different sources, standardize the material, and process them to look up and/or search for key terms, phrases, patterns, and more.” Be sure to register for limited capacity events (Lunch on Wednesday 4/12, and the in-depth workshop on Thursday 4/13); links and full schedule below. For more information, see our Open Data Week guide, and use our hashtag, #VTODW.

Monday April 10
Open Research/Open Data Forum: Transparency, Sharing, and Reproducibility in Scholarship
6:30-8:00pm, in Torgersen Hall 1100 (NLI credit available)

Join our panelists for a discussion on challenges and opportunities related to sharing and using open data in research, including meeting funder and journal guidelines:

• Daniel Chen (Ph.D. candidate in Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology)
• Karen DePauw (Vice President and Dean for Graduate Education)
• Sally Morton (Dean, College of Science)
• Jon Petters (Data Management Consultant, University Libraries)
• David Radcliffe (English)
• Laura Sands (Center for Gerontology)

Tuesday April 11
Introduction to Content Mine – Tools for Mining Scholarly Literature
9:30-10:45am, Newman Library Multipurpose Room (NLI credit available)

Join ContentMine instructors for an overview of text and data mining, and an introduction to ContentMine tools for text and data mining of scholarly and research literature.

Tuesday April 11
Data Visualization with Tableau
10:30 am -12:00 pm, Torgersen 1100 (NLI registration)

With the Tableau data visualization software, you or your students can easily turn research data into detailed, interactive visualizations that tell the story that numbers alone struggle to express. The software can link directly to your data sources so you always have the most up-to-date data on hand without exporting manually, and easily generate hundreds of types of visualizations that include interactive elements.

Wednesday April 12
Introduction to Content Mine: Tools for Mining Scholarly Literature
9:00-9:55am, Newman Library Multipurpose Room (NLI credit available)

Join ContentMine instructors for an overview of text and data mining, and an introduction to ContentMine tools for text and data mining of scholarly and research literature.

Wednesday April 12
Making Visible the Invisible: Data Visualization and Poster Design
9:30-11:00am, Newman 207A (NLI registration)

Visually representing data helps users and readers engage with the content, understand key findings, and retain information. Exploring, creating, and presenting these visual representations is becoming critical for teaching, academic research, and professional engagement. In this session we will explore the basics of data visualization and poster design, and look at a few tools to create different kinds of visualizations. We will also discuss the academic and professional value in visualizing data.

Wednesday April 12
ContentMine and Specialized Tools for Life Sciences Research
11:15-12:05pm, Newman Library Multipurpose Room (NLI credit available)

Join students in a computational biochemistry informatics class session for an introduction to ContentMine open source tools for text and data mining to explore research literature sources, with a focus on tools related to mining and exploring content for Life Sciences research (phylogeny and and visualization).

Wednesday April 12
Lunch with ContentMine guest speakers and program participants
12:30-1:30, Location TBA (Registration required; Limit: 50 participants)

Wednesday April 12
Text and Data Mining Forum
2:30-3:45pm, Newman MultiPurpose Room (NLI credit available)

Join our panelists for a discussion about opportunities and challenges related to text and data mining, with a focus on research purposes and information access. Audience questions are encouraged.

• Tom Arrow (ContentMine)
• Tom Ewing (College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Virginia Tech)
• Weiguo (Patrick) Fan (Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech)
• Ed Fox (Computer Science, Virginia Tech)
• Leanna House (Statistics, Virginia Tech)
• Brent Huang (Computer Science, Virginia Tech)

Wednesday April 12
Introduction to Content Mine: Tools for Mining Scholarly Literature
4:00-5:15pm, Newman ScaleUp Classroom (101S) (NLI credit available)

Join ContentMine instructors for an overview of text and data mining, and an introduction to ContentMine tools for text and data mining of scholarly and research literature.

Thursday April 13
ContentMine Tools to Explore Scholarly Literature: A Full Day, Hands-On Workshop
9:00am – 4:00pm, Newman Library 207A (Registration required; also, NLI credit available; Coffee and Lunch provided)

During this workshop participants will: (1) ensure the software is functioning on their laptop computer, (2) participate in individual and group hands-on exercises to become more familiar with ContentMine tools, and (3) have the opportunity to experiment with using ContentMine tools with ContentMine instructors’ support – to mine scholarly literature and explore results specific to their own research project goals. Prior to the workshop, attendees will receive instructions to download software and make any other preparations to get the most of of the workshop.