The third Ohio Institutional Repository (IR) Day on Friday, October 23, 2015, focused on open access topics and was a great finish to Open Access Week.
The morning began with introductions around the room, with many new attendees, some of who are starting to set up IRs. It is always interesting to hear about concerns and questions from people beginning IRs. While some of it is technical, gaining support and driving use are crucial to success as well.
For the keynote, Dave Stout (Bepress) announced the new Ohio Research Commons, a free resource that complies all Ohio Bepress IRs into a single resource for searching. In addition to statewide collections, there are also legal resources, open educational resources (OER), and many other topics that Bepress is creating.
The lightening round presentations covered an array of open access topics, from advice from those just beginning to integrating an IR into other systems on campus. Alan Boyd (Oberlin College) began the round with his talk about Oberlin’s open access policy and how they were able to put it into place. Along with his advice, he acknowledged that every campus has a different culture which should factor into how schools wanting to discuss or set up such a policy must take into account.
Anne Davies, Michelle Early, and Alison Morgan (Xavier University) spoke about adding syllabi to their IR. While this might sound straight forward, they faced challenges with making them open access since it isn’t a true publication of the professors and many were cautious with having it freely available when they worked to make their courses unique. As a compromise, the syllabi are limited to campus access or by request for non-campus users.
Eric Johnson (Miami University) presented on their Scholar’s Portal, which serves as a bibliography page for their campus. Since the capabilities stretch beyond their IR, it took additional software and programming skills to set it up. Unveiled the week before, they are now promoting it and even have short how-to videos that explain how to create and populate a profile.
Amy Koshoffer (University of Cincinnati) discussed self-submission of researcher data into their IR. While convenient for those running the IR, they found that there needs to be education around how to submit so that their faculty enter their work with the most benefit to themselves, with complete description to help others find and use their work. Also, UC created short videos of their faculty proponents to promote the library’s preservation services with Scholars@UC.
Cindy Kristof (Kent State University) gave an overview of open access, the different types of OA and copyright. She even detailed specifics of copyright law and was a great review for those already familiar in addition to being a helpful introduction for those new to it.
The day wrapped up with birds of a feathers conversations, which are always interesting discussions. The six topics as focused on particular OA access aspects, from creating a campus policy to how public domain factors relates to OA.
Slides for all presentations are available in the WSU IR.
ReadWriteLib - Emily Alinder Flynn 