Scholarly Publishing Commons^™

Gray Literature In The Institutional Repository: Partnership Between The University Of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries And Two Textile Societies, Sue Ann Gardner, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Gray literature (GL) often contains valuable, unique knowledge but is sometimes difficult to source, collect, and preserve. Institutional repositories can serve as excellent platforms for such material due to their open accessibility for anyone with an internet connection. This chapter includes a brief discussion about gray literature as a material type in libraries generally and covers the partnership of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries with the Textile Society of America and the Centre for Textile Research that has resulted in the publishing of the groups’ conference papers. Together, as of mid-2022, these materials have been full-text downloaded nearly 1,500,000 times …

Evolution Of An Institutional Repository: A Case History From Nebraska, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy. Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support. Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time. A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

Your Internet Data Is Rotting, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The internet is growing, but old information continues to disappear daily.

Many MySpace users were dismayed to discover earlier this year that the social media platform lost 50 million files uploaded between 2003 and 2015. The failure of MySpace to care for and preserve its users’ content should serve as a reminder that relying on free third-party services can be risky. MySpace has probably preserved the users’ data; it just lost their content. The data was valuable to MySpace; the users’ content less so.

Preserving content or intellectual property on the internet presents a conundrum. If it’s accessible, then it …

The Scholarly Impact Of Books Acquired Via Approval Plan Selection, Librarian Orders, And Patron-Driven Acquisitions As Measured By Citation Counts, David C. Tyler, Brianna D. Hitt, Francis A. Nterful, Mckenna R. Mettling

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Patron-driven acquisition has been an important, if contentious, topic for decades, with numerous programs having been piloted, adopted, and reported on, largely favorably, in the library literature. Still, questions and doubts persist for academic libraries, especially where the composition of vendor plans and packages and the judgment of patrons are concerned. Past literature has approached the assessment of patron-driven acquisition by analyzing circulation/usage, comparing peer-library holdings, seeking patrons’ or librarians’ judgments of utility and suitability, looking for evidence of collection imbalances, and testing for overlap in patrons’ and librarians’ purchases. To contribute to this literature, this study addresses scholarly impact …

Chemists Atwitter, Raychelle Burks, Stephani Page, Kiyomi D. Deards, Joan Barnes

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Twitter can be used to promote chemists, their work, and their events to other scientists and the general public. From checklists to timelines; how to use Twitter successfully as an individual or institution is discussed. This chapter includes: examples of how the authors have used Twitter, how to find and use common subject tags, tags most used when Tweeting about chemistry and science, and a discussion about measuring success. Knowing when and how to Tweet will help chemists communicate successfully with their peers and the general public in 280 characters or less.

What Do Undergraduate Students Know About Scholarly Communication? A Mixed Methods Study, Catherine Fraser Riehle, Merinda Kaye Hensley

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Amid movements that recognize undergraduate students as knowledge creators, transformative work is being done at the intersection of information literacy and scholarly communication. Absent from the literature so far is research related to students’ perception and understanding of scholarly communication. This paper reports a mixed methods study at two major research universities in the United States, where undergraduate student researchers were surveyed and interviewed about their scholarly communication practices and perceptions. This work informs development of programming at the intersection of scholarly communication and information literacy in general, and for those involved with undergraduate research experiences in particular.

Report From The Participation In The Current System Workgroup, Nancy Davenport, Barbara Defelice, Gary Evoniuk, Pollyanne Frantz, Julie Hannaford,, Jeff Mackie-Mason, Jane Mcauliffe, Jennifer Pesanelli, Paul Royster, Crispin Taylor, Michael Wolfe

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

OSI2016 Workgroup Question: Do researchers and scientists participate in the current system of scholarly publishing because they like it, they need it, they don’t have a choice in the matter, or they don’t really care one way or another? What perceptions, considerations and incentives do academicians have for staying the course (like impact factors and tenure points), and what are their pressures and incentives for changing direction (like lowering publishing charges)?

The authors of scholarly works play a critical role in the scholarly communications system: authors are the original content creators, and in many or most cases are the original …

Digital Humanities And Librarians: A Team-Based Approach To Learning, Casey D. Hoeve, Lis Pankl, Mark Crosby

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This chapter details the development and implementation of an Introduction to Digital Humanities course (ENGL 695) at Kansas State University (K-State). The course originated with a tenure-track professor with a research specialty in British Romantic-period Literature and the digital humanities. In conjunction with a host of librarians at K-State Libraries, a course was developed that drew on both library resources and librarian knowledges and skills. Over the course of the semester, the professor and the students worked closely with librarians in many areas of the library, including public services, technical services and special collections. The result was four innovative and …

Response To David S. Lindsay Regarding “Self-Archiving Of Publications From The Journal Of Parasitology”, Sue Ann Gardner

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Response to ASP President, David S. Lindsay, regarding his editorial in volume 36, numbers 3-4, of the ASP Newsletter, titled “Self-archiving of publications from the Journal of Parasitology.” Concludes that the Society's contract with Allen Press will expire at some point and, in the interim, there is an opportunity renegotiate with them thoughtfully, or to look for a better outlet for the time-honored Journal of Parasitology. There are many publishing ventures arising from universities themselves, in libraries and academic departments, on viable and stable electronic platforms, that require very little overhead to administer. If even a fraction …

A Library Publishing Manifesto, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This is an invited piece (solicited by Bob Nardini) for a special issue of Against the Grain on libraries and university presses. Bob writes:

Wait till you read Paul Royster, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Paul, in “A Library Publishing Manifesto,” explains exactly why he thinks library publishing is needed to atone for the “sins” of commercial publishers and what he counts as the failings of university presses. If readers find his contribution “overly rhetorical” or “hyperbolic,” as he admits they might, they’ll be clear on where Paul stands. They’ll also find as vigorous an argument for the value of …

Library Publishing Is Special: Selection And Eligibility In Library Publishing, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Traditional publishing is based on ownership, commerce, paid exchanges, and scholarship as a commodity, while library activities are based on a service model of sharing resources and free exchange. I believe library publishing should be based on those values and should not duplicate or emulate traditional publishing. University presses have mixed views of library publishing, and libraries should not adopt those attitudes. Library publishers are not gatekeepers; their mission is dissemination. Libraries need to publish because traditional publishing suffers from high rejection rates, required surrender of intellectual property, long production schedules, high cost of products, and limited dissemination. Nebraska’s Zea …

Librarians Going Mobile: Applying “Threshold Concepts” To The Design Of E-Booklets For Library Instruction., Lorna M. Dawes

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Assuming that students no longer read printed handouts, many librarians have stopped producing printed handouts after observing the piles of paper that remain after library sessions. Libraries have transitioned comfortably to providing online access to handout information via subject and course guides, and now need to make a more complete transition to making them mobile. Although only four in ten college students own a tablet, 75% own a smart phone, and over a third of students intend to purchase either a tablet or a smart phone in the next six months. (“Pearson Student Mobile” 7). Librarians are all aware that …

Foxes Propose New Guidelines For Henhouse Design: Comments On Niso’S Proposed Open Access Metadata Standards, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This commentary is in response to: NISO RP-22-201x, Open Access Metadata and Indicators (draft for comment), which is available at: http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/document.php?document_id=12047

NISO is the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit industry organization whose mission statement reads: “NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning.” Their recently-issued proposed guidelines for new metadata fields to be attached to scholarly works purport to address and clarify issues of access and re-licensing surrounding the electronic distribution of journal articles. Briefly, they …

Tei Texts That Play Nicely: Lessons From The Monk Project, Brian Pytlik Zillig

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Text curation, like most human endeavors, requires tools. A technique developed for the MONK Project, schema harvesting, provides a useful platform for facilitating the digital conversion and curation of text corpora. The author describes Abbot, an XSLT-based application that has had success in converting various Text Creation Partnership collections, and others, during and after MONK.