Open@VT

Open Access, Open Data, and Open Educational Resources

VTechWorks Update, Fall 2020

VTechWorks homepage

VTechWorks provides global access to Virginia Tech scholarship, and offers an easy way for members of the university community to provide open access to their work. The university’s institutional repository is managed by the University Libraries, and receives theses and dissertations from the Graduate School, as well as deposits from Elements (EFARs), the faculty reporting system, eliminating the need to switch platforms.

Here are the latest VTechWorks statistics:

  • 82,000+ items, 34,000 (41%) of which are theses and dissertations
  • 2,100+ items deposited by faculty from Elements (EFARs)
  • 3,000+ file downloads per day over the last year (on average, bots excluded)
  • 530 items collectively have more than 3,000 Altmetric mentions
  • 96% open access full text repository (4% are embargoed, withheld, or legacy citation/abstract-only items)
  • 51,500 items indexed in Google Scholar (7th highest among U.S. repositories); also indexed by Unpaywall, Microsoft Academic, all major search engines, SHARE, BASE, and the VT Libraries catalog
  • 400+ items linked to from English Wikipedia
  • Top traffic sources are Google, Google Scholar, VT.edu search, and Bing
  • BASE can be used to sync items in VTechWorks to ORCiD profiles
  • Accessed globally, with the highest usage (after the U.S.) from India, China, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Canada
  • Provides a permanent URL (handle) for citing
  • Estimated 99.9% uptime

Recent items of interest (all videos):

Map of global usage for VTechWorks
VTechWorks usage by location, 2020

The easiest way for faculty to get their works into VTechWorks is to upload a file in Elements, because no registration is needed, and article metadata is often already present, which eliminates manual entry. Go to Menu > Publications and look for the upload arrow, which is the first in the row of icons underneath each entry (if you see the “double pages” icon, the item is already in VTechWorks).

upload arrow
Upload your file!
in repo
In VTechWorks

Deposit advice (such as which version you can legally deposit, and any publisher embargo) is automatically added to the deposit screen from Sherpa/Romeo, which aggregates journal policies for posting articles online. We are also happy to help anyone at VT identify which items they can legally post online – just email us at vtechworks@vt.edu. To learn more about open access, see our Open Access Guide. Students and staff should register and then email vtechworks@vt.edu and tell us which collection you would like to submit to. Faculty can also use this method if they prefer.

Recent and upcoming VTechWorks projects include:

  • Adding rights statements to the metadata for more items.
  • Improving captions for videos, which are now full text indexed.
  • Updating links to VTechWorks items in English Wikipedia.
  • Adding items to WorldCat (95% complete), which is also the discovery service for the University Libraries.
  • With the help of IT Services, we plan to test a pilot TDM studio. If implemented, it would expand usability for text and data mining.

We work every day to grow VTechWorks and provide effective global dissemination of scholarship by Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students. Contact us anytime with questions or comments at vtechworks@vt.edu.

Announcing open textbook Strategic Management

Strategic Management textbook cover

Blog written by Anita Walz, with Sarah Mease.

Strategic Management (2020) is a 343-page open textbook designed to introduce key topics and themes of strategic management to undergraduate students in a senior capstone course. The book is published by Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business in association with Virginia Tech Publishing. It is adapted by Reed Kennedy with Eli Jamison, Joseph Simpson, Pankaj Kumar, Ayenda Kemp, and Kiran Awate — all faculty of the Pamplin College of Business — and recent Pamplin graduate, Kathleen Manning. The work was deeply adapted from an existing open textbook. This project was made possible in part with support from the Pamplin College of Business and the Open Education Initiative at the University Libraries.

The text is ideal for courses which focus on how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful. Strategic Management illustrates the different management strategies used by firms today. It illustrates these strategies through examples of familiar companies and current personalities, and discusses strategy implementation. The text is applicable to students in a wide variety of business majors such as marketing, management, accounting, finance, real estate, and more. Using this material, students will learn how to conduct case analyses, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses.

Accessing this Book

This textbook is openly licensed and freely available electronically and at cost in print:

In addition, Strategic Management is indexed in OER Commons, Merlot, and the Open Textbook Library.

Additional Features of the book: 

How to Adopt this Book

Instructors reviewing, adopting, or adapting this textbook are encouraged to register their use at: http://bit.ly/strategy-interest.

About the Contributors

Reed B. Kennedy is an Associate Professor of Management Practice in the Management Department, Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech where he teaches management courses. He began his career as a naval officer before entering his primary career in healthcare administration, where he served in senior executive roles in various hospitals for over 20 years. He then worked as a business consultant for the Small Business Development Center for the New River Valley at Radford University. His education includes a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, a Masters of Healthcare Administration from Medical College of Virginia / Virginia Commonwealth University, a Masters in Public Health and a Graduate Certificate in Global Planning and International Development from Virginia Tech. Reed served as the chief textbook reviser on this project. He worked with the contributor and editorial teams from project start to completion.

Other Contributors from Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech
Eli Jamison, Assistant Professor of Practice
Joseph Simpson, Colleagiate Assistant Professor
Pankaj Kumar, Assistant Professor
Ayenda Kemp, Assistant Professor
Kiran Awate, Assistant Professor
Kathleen (Katie) Manning, recent Pamplin graduate, and Research and Editorial Assistant

Editorial and Production Teams at the University Libraries at Virginia Tech
Grace Baggett, Copyeditor
Robert Browder, Digital Publishing Specialist
Kindred Grey, Design Specialist
Lauren Holt, Copyeditor
Kathleen (Katie) Manning, Research and Editorial Assistant
Anita Walz, Managing Editor

An Update on the Proposed Open Access Policy at Virginia Tech

The proposed open access policy at Virginia Tech has recently changed in two important ways. First, as a result of meetings with University Counsel, the working group will propose adding language to the university’s existing Policy on Intellectual Property, No. 13000, rather than proposing a separate policy. Second, the proposed language now includes all Virginia Tech authors of scholarly articles, not just faculty. This change came at the suggestion of the Commission on Graduate Studies and Policies, and the working group is now reaching out to undergraduate and staff representatives for input. See the working group’s policy page for details, including the resolution and marked-up Policy 13000, FAQ, and more.  The resolution will be presented at the Commission on Research this fall.  If it successfully passes through university governance, it would go into effect on July 1, 2021.

Policy homepage

Questions? Check the policy homepage

While no longer a free-standing proposal, the new language retains the core elements of a Harvard-style open access policy, namely the grant of a non-exclusive license to the university to allow hosting accepted manuscripts, an embargo option, and a per-article waiver. These elements allow authors to share their accepted manuscript from the day of its acceptance, without concern about violating the terms of their publishing contract. Similar policies have been in place at more than 50 U.S. universities for more than ten years.  The policy will help level the playing field with some of our SCHEV peers who already have policies, and who therefore have a greater ability to share research than Virginia Tech authors.

The importance of open access has been underlined by the coronavirus epidemic, not just for directly related research, but for all types of research. Copyright has never been a good fit for scholarly articles, which we freely give to journals, only to have access restricted.  It has never made sense that our research is out of reach for colleagues at some universities, scholars in low- and middle-income countries, taxpayers, policymakers, and our own alumni.

Open Access symbol "unlock"

The proposed policy is an important opportunity for Virginia Tech authors, but it will only matter if authors take advantage of it.  In the working group’s outreach over the past three years, the proposal consistently received a positive response.  We hope you will convey your support to your representatives in university governance.

If your question isn’t answered in our FAQ, feel free to email the working group at openaccess@vt.edu, or comment on this blog post (comments are open for 30 days).

A Big Deal Update

This Open@VT blogpost is part of an ongoing series on Virginia Tech’s pending negotiations with the scholarly publishing giant Elsevier. Virginia Tech is one of seven research universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia that negotiates collectively with Elsevier and other large publishers to license access to thousands of scholarly journals through what are commonly called “big deals.” (The other schools are George Mason University, James Madison University, Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, and College of William and Mary.) The current big deal agreement with Elsevier is set to expire at the end of 2021. As this deadline approaches, we are eager to engage the VT community in a conversation about the best path forward.

Two men standing, backs turned, at a reading table in a medieval library

University of Leiden Library, 1610 (Public Domain image)

More than a year has passed since the University of California terminated its multi-million-dollar bundled journal subscription agreement with Elsevier. The news was startling at the time, even more so given the size and importance of the UC system to Elsevier and to scientific research in general. So it is perhaps just as startling that the stalemate has continued, with no immediate signs of a resolution on the horizon. This post provides a brief update on the UC-Elsevier situation and then points to related developments elsewhere that, taken together, shed light on where big deal negotiations in general are headed.  

After negotiations between UC and Elsevier broke down in February, it wasn’t until July that Elsevier officially cut off UC’s access to new journal content on the ScienceDirect platform. Since then, UC has been working to ensure that faculty and students have alternative means of access to this new journal content.

The next move came in August when a group of prominent UC faculty pledged to step down from the editorial boards of Elsevier journals until the publisher agreed to return to the negotiating table. This, however, appears not to have had its desired effect. According to the UC Office of Scholarly Communication website, the parties have only engaged in “informal conversations” through the end of 2019. And while there were plans to “explore reopening negotiations” during the first quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak may very well have disrupted those plans.

Meanwhile, neither UC nor Elsevier has been waiting passively on the sidelines. Far from it.

In California the UC system has successfully negotiated open access publishing deals with several other scholarly publishers including Cambridge University Press, PLOS, and ACM. These deals all incorporate key elements of what UC is seeking from Elsevier. That is, they do more than simply curb the rising costs of journal subscriptions. They support, in one form or another, open access publishing for UC authors. This cost-access nexus makes them “transformative” agreements.

For its part, Elsevier has been negotiating new license agreements with institutions and consortia both here and in Europe. In some of these agreements institutions are opting out of big deals, replacing their existing bundled journals packages with smaller, a la carte journals packages targeted to the specific needs of their campuses. 

For instance, earlier this month the State University of New York Libraries Consortium and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced their decisions not to renew their big deals with Elsevier, making them part of a growing list of institutions opting out of big deals. (An up-to-date list can be found here.)

According to SUNY’s April 7 announcement, “While both parties negotiated in earnest and tried to come to acceptable terms for SUNY to maintain access to the full ScienceDirect package, in the end there was considerable disagreement around the value proposition of the ‘big deal.’” 

UNC Library tweets, 4 April 2020

The calculus was similar for UNC, which announced its decision on April 9. “I tried to work with Elsevier but we had no choice but to break our big deal,” tweeted University Librarian Elaine Westbrooks. “We are free to select what titles we want. No more ‘cable packages’ of journals that we don’t read or value.”

The virtue of replacing a “cable package” with an a la carte package is that it addresses the immediate problem of exponential cost increases. SUNY expects to save as much as $7 million from the $10 million it currently spends annually. UNC expects to save approximately $1 million from the current $2.6 million deal. On the other hand, Elsevier’s pricing structure is such that institutions are paying significantly more money per title, which means fewer titles. The full ScienceDirect package contains over 2,500 journals, but SUNY is subscribing to only 248. For UNC, the number is 395.

Few if any librarians would argue that such an agreement is a long-term solution to the problem posed by the big deal. One might even call these “little deals” because, although they address the immediate problem of escalating costs, they fail to deal with what most would agree is the bigger and more entrenched problem––that of opening access to a growing body of scholarly research that currently sits behind a paywall. In short, they are not transformative.

Meanwhile, Elsevier has been doing much more than just signing smaller subscription agreements with schools such as SUNY and UNC. They are, in fact, piloting new subscription agreement models that are, at least in part, transformative in that they combine subscriptions and open-access publishing fees into one price. Such agreements are now in place in Sweden and Ireland. Here in the US, at least two universities have reached transformative agreements with Elsevier: Carnegie Mellon University and, perhaps surprisingly, Cal State University

Under the terms of the Carnegie Mellon agreement, which became effective Jan. 1, 2020, CMU is no longer paying separately to access Elsevier’s catalog of paywalled content and to publish open-access articles in Elsevier journals. Carnegie Mellon scholars will have access to all Elsevier academic journals, and all articles with a corresponding CMU author published through Elsevier also will be open access.

According to the Cal State announcement, its agreement “offers excellent content for a fair price, purposefully equalizes access across all 23 campuses, and sets the stage for the CSU faculty to more fully engage in Open Access publishing in ways that make sense for them and their fields of research.”

Unfortunately, only certain details of these agreements are made public, and the devil is in the details. For instance, a price might seem fair at the outset but if the amount of money Elsevier collects depends on the number of faculty that publish in Elsevier journals, cost containment will continue to be a problem for libraries, which again will be caught in the big deal bind of uncontrollable cost increases.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Elsevier has changed its position somewhat over the course of the past year and is now willing to accept transformative agreements in principle. This, of course, is what UC has been asking for all along, so let’s hope that a resolution to the UC-Elsevier stalemate is coming soon. 

Finally, let me offer a few takeaways from these developments:

  1. After years of threatening to step away from the big deal, libraries are now actually doing it. And they are finding seemingly palatable ways to replace bundled packages with much smaller, a-la-carte packages—even if it means paying significantly more money per title. In short, this option is on the table when it comes time for Virginia’s schools to negotiate with Elsevier.
  2. Libraries are successfully engaging their campuses in these decisions rather than going it alone. At SUNY and UNC, the final list of titles was arrived at through faculty and librarian consultations, together with analytics gathered from tools such as Unpaywall. As a result, all indications are that campus support is high. See, for instance, the responses from UNC faculty on the UNC Library twitter feed. (And, of course, at UC the negotiating team was remarkably inclusive, bringing together members of the Academic (faculty) Senate, the UC (campus) Libraries, and the California Digital Library.) Here in Virginia, we are committed to this same level of engagement.  
  3. The more one digs into the data, the less of a “good deal” big deals prove to be. The fact that libraries are able to drop so many titles from their subscription packages and still retain faculty support tells us something significant about how many of the titles in these packages are truly indispensable. As an illustration, here at Virginia Tech our statistics show that 40% of Elsevier titles get 50 or fewer downloads per year.
  4. There is no roadmap yet for institutions to follow in negotiations with Elsevier. Agreeing to a smaller subscription package is not a long-term solution. And while Elsevier may have budged somewhat in its stance on transformative agreements, the publisher has proved again and again that it knows how to maintain its profit margin in any deal it makes. In short, it seems unlikely that Elsevier’s idea of a transformative agreement will look anything like what higher ed institutions have in mind. 

VTechWorks Update, Spring 2020

VTechWorks homepageVTechWorks is Virginia Tech’s institutional repository, providing global access to the scholarship of faculty, staff, and students, as well as hosting many university publications, images, and more.  Managed by the University Libraries, VTechWorks receives theses and dissertations from the Graduate School, and has a two-way connection to Elements, the faculty reporting system, allowing the deposit of files to the repository without the need to switch platforms.

Here are the latest VTechWorks statistics:

  • 79,000+ items, 33,800 (43%) of which are theses and dissertations
  • 2,000+ items deposited by faculty from Elements
  • 2,000+ file downloads per day over the last year (on average, bots excluded)
  • 313 items collectively have more than 2,000 Altmetric mentions
  • 96% open access full text repository (4% are embargoed, withheld, or legacy citation/abstract-only items)
  • 49,900 items indexed in Google Scholar (7th highest among U.S. repositories); also indexed by Unpaywall, Microsoft Academic, all major search engines, SHARE, BASE, and the VT Libraries catalog
  • Top traffic sources are Google, Google Scholar, VT web search, and Bing
  • BASE can be used to sync items in VTechWorks to ORCiD profiles
  • Accessed globally, with the highest usage (after the U.S.) from India, China, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and Canada
  • Provides a permanent URL (handle) for citing
  • Estimated 99.9% uptime

Map of global usage for VTechWorks

VTechWorks usage by location, 2019

The easiest way for faculty to get their works into VTechWorks is to upload a file in Elements, because no registration is needed, and article metadata is often already present, which eliminates manual entry.  Go to Menu > Publications and look for the upload arrow, which is the first in the row of icons underneath each entry (if you see the “double pages” icon, the item is already in VTechWorks — please don’t add a duplicate).

upload arrow

Upload your file!

in repo

In VTechWorks

Deposit advice (such as which version you  can legally deposit, and any publisher embargo) is automatically added to the deposit screen from Sherpa/Romeo, which aggregates journal policies for posting articles online.  We are also happy to help anyone at VT identify which items they can legally post online – just email us at vtechworks@vt.edu.  To learn more about open access, see our Open Access Guide.  VTechWorks staff add some open access and public domain articles to the repository, but we cannot find them all.  Please do add open access articles after ensuring they are not already in VTechWorks.  Why? Publisher websites go down occasionally, and presence in the repository presents a better picture of research done at Virginia Tech (and is searchable from the the university’s homepage, vt.edu).

Students and staff should register and then email vtechworks@vt.edu and ask to be added to a collection as a submitter.  We would like to add more items to Student Works, where there are several collections to accommodate a variety of works from graduate or undergraduate students.  We’re especially interested in providing access to undergraduate theses and master’s projects, for those students who would like to make them available.

Recent and upcoming VTechWorks projects include:

  • Identifying  and removing duplicate items
  • Improving accessibility by using third-party captioning for our videos, and identifying any items lacking optical character recognition (OCR)
  • Providing better documentation for using VTechWorks as a research corpus, including accommodations for text and data mining (TDM) using the REST API (some documentation is on the DSpace wiki, and there are Python scripts for using the DSpace API)
  • Evaluating repository platforms for an expected migration in the next year (or two), which will also provide improvements in the user interface

We work every day to grow VTechWorks and provide effective global dissemination of scholarship by Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students.  Contact us anytime with questions or comments at vtechworks@vt.edu.

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