Open@VT

The Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce a new peer-reviewed open textbook, Sustainable Property Management (2023) by Erin A. Hopkins, Ph.D. of Virginia Tech https://doi.org/10.21061/sustainable_property_management 

Are you an instructor reviewing or adopting this book for an instructional purpose?
Instructors adopting or reviewing this text are encouraged to record their use at https://bit.ly/interest_sustainable_property_management. This helps the book’s sponsors to understand this open textbook’s impact.

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The Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce a new peer-reviewed open textbook, Original Études for the Developing Conductor (2023), edited by Jonathan Caldwell and Derek Shapiro respectively of University of North Carolina – Greensboro and Virginia Tech and available at https://doi.org/10.21061/conducting.

Are you an instructor reviewing or adopting this book for an instructional purpose?
Instructors adopting or reviewing this text are encouraged to record their use at https://bit.ly/original-etudes-interest. This helps the book’s sponsors to understand this open textbook’s impact.

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The Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce a newly-adapted work by Dr. Laura Neser. Introduction to Earth Science is a 530+ page open textbook designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to Earth Science that can be freely accessed online, read offline, printed, or purchased as a print-on-demand book. It is intended for a typical 1000-level university introductory course in the Geosciences, although its contents could be applied to many other related courses.

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What percentage of Virginia Tech’s published research articles are open access in some form, and how do we compare with other universities?  The answers, using four sources, are “around 50%” and “not well,” respectively.

The sources used are CWTS Leiden Ranking, COKI (both openly available), SciVal/Scopus, and Dimensions (both proprietary).  All cover the years 2017-2020, except for COKI, which is 2020 only.  Virginia Tech’s percentage of open access articles was highest in CWTS (54.7%) and lowest in SciVal (44.1%).  Results from the four data sources were entered into a spreadsheet to show how Virginia Tech compares to its 25 SCHEV peers, as well as to other Virginia universities.  For SCHEV peers, the presence of an open access policy and an open access fund are also noted where information was available.

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It’s been well over a year since Virginia Tech’s open access policy was approved by the Board of Visitors on March 22, 2021.  So how many article deposits has VTechWorks received under the policy?  For the purposes of recording statistics, we’ll define the year as July 1 through June 30.  Because the policy went into effect in late March, we’ll define the first “year” as March 22, 2021 through June 30, 2022 (15 months).  For this time period, 196 accepted versions were deposited into VTechWorks (almost all through Elements). Continue reading