The popularity of ResearchGate and Academia.edu indicates that scholars want to share their work, yet to librarians tasked with implementing an Open Access policy, it can appear as though faculty are willing to invest more time uploading articles to academic social networks—often in violation of publisher policies—than in submitting articles for deposit in the institutional repository. In this lightning talk, we will present the results of a population study and survey that revealed the practices, attitudes, and motivations of faculty at the University of Rhode Island around depositing their work in ResearchGate and complying with our permissions-based Open Access Policy. While the majority of URI faculty do not use either service, we were surprised to find that faculty who share articles through ResearchGate are more likely to comply with the Open Access Policy, not less, suggesting that librarians should not view academic social networks as a threat. We discovered that a significant barrier to compliance with the OA Policy is the fact that it targets the author’s accepted manuscript version of articles and that misunderstandings about copyright leave authors confused about options for legally sharing their work.

A brief overview of the ways in which we’re trying to work with emeritus faculty to gather all of their scholarship into ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst while at the same time creating faculty researcher profile pages using SelectedWorks.

This case study explores the evolution of the library published Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB), as it evolves to continue to serve librarians faced with the many challenges of a data driven environment. JeSLIB is an open access, peer-reviewed journal published by the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The library publishes JeSLIB through its eScholarship@UMMS repository on the bepress Digital Commons platform. JeSLIB was at the forefront of thinking about the “library as scholarly publisher” and sought to fill a need for librarians to learn about new challenges related to scientific research data. The journal provides mechanisms for authors to confidently share their work under an appropriately selected Creative Commons license. JeSLIB is also committed to spreading the scholarly work of the profession, and uses Altmetrics to track where readers are sharing articles to. Additionally, the adoption of social media platforms, including YouTube and Twitter, has allowed the journal to interact with readers and authors in new ways. The journal’s team of librarian editors has acquired new skills and expertise in all facets of scholarly publishing to the benefit of the library. Running a publishing program can serve as a critical tool to help librarians cultivate new partnerships and roles. Since starting the journal five years ago, the editorial team has reworked its scope to include newer developments within data science. In thinking about reframing the journal to remain relevant and current, the editors recently conducted an extensive review and revision of the journal’s policies as well as updating the journal’s website. Through this presentation, the editors will share their experiences supporting open access of research, rethinking scholarly publishing, and advancing scientific communication.

Rhode Island School of Design launched its Digital Commons institutional repository in 2015 following a multi-year period of research and investigation with digital content already administered by the Fleet Library. The two years since then have led to uploading nearly four thousand items from stakeholder offices and departments including the school’s strategic plan, commencement addresses, and other speakers and symposia as well as unforeseeable developments such as ephemera from a Cabaret performance-based class (offered 1987-2000) and a faculty-edited journal. Along the way, Digital Commons @ RISD has been presented at faculty meetings, to the school’s Board of Trustees, and stands to contribute to faculty promotion and tenure dossiers while already landing the school into the top downloads for a handful of disciplines at any given time. This presentation will detail the considerations leading to Digital Commons @ RISD and the processes of identifying and building communities across the school, targeting and soliciting their content, digital workflows, content types for differing media, as well as copyright challenges while forcing a much-needed conversation for digital content access and preservation in general.

DigitalCommons@UMaine has seen it all with our Electronic Theses and Dissertations community: migrating content from a legacy site, batch loading, filtering content into other communities, building integrated workflows for multiple departments and finally realizing the goal of student/author direct postings. Our ETD is one of the most popular series in our institutional repository with great support along the way from the bepress team.