Scholarly Communication Commons^™

Is “Just Googling It” Good Enough For First-Year Students?, Maureen Richards

Publications and Research

This study analyzes citations by first-year students to determine what content they were citing and whether it was available through the open web or the library. Examining the role of these two places as content providers for academic work fills a gap in the literature. Most of the cited works were available through the library and the open web. As the line between content providers continues to blur, these results can help academic libraries prioritize what to teach students about information literacy, where to focus collection development efforts and how to promote the discovery of library resources.

A Party Platter Of Peer-Reviewed Oer Assignments, Elizabeth Jardine, Ece Aykol, Justin Rogers-Cooper

Publications and Research

Many colleges and universities have adopted core competencies during the last two decades. Their adoption reflects larger national trends in outcomes assessment, teaching and learning, and regional accreditation. Faculty at LaGuardia Community College sought model assignments with reflections on their design that speak to the college’s core competencies— integrative learning, inquiry and problem-solving, and global learning—and the communication abilities that students use to express them—written, oral, and digital communication abilities. In response, the college’s assessment leaders looked to the assignment library created by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) for inspiration. They developed the Learning Matters Assignment Library, …

Peel, Pare, Plate, Post: Repository Mise En Place For Collecting Faculty Articles, Adriana Palmer, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Mise en place (pronounced “meez ahn plahs”) is a term used in professional kitchens to describe the organizing and arranging of the workspace, ingredients, and equipment before beginning to cook. It translates directly from French as “to put in place” (“Mise en Place,” n.d.).

A carefully constructed mise en place is the key to this recipe for adding faculty articles to an institutional repository (IR). Step by step, this recipe details one proven way for a head chef to prepare a scholarly communication kitchen for this project: (1) identifying sous-chefs to assist in the project, (2) gathering ingredients from multiple …

Teaching Authors About Predatory Journals In The One-On-One Consultation, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

This recipe guides academic librarians through author consultations related to predatory or questionable publishers. Lists of predatory journals provide quick answers to questions but leave authors in the dark. The focus of the consultation is to closely examine negative and positive indicators for a specific journal. Although it is valuable for authors to learn the signals of predatory journals, it is equally if not more important to emphasize tools like Think.Check.Submit that stimulate critical and analytical thinking about publishing choices. The consultation will result in a more empowered and scholarly information literate colleague and provides opportunities to introduce authors to …

Jlsc Board Editorial 2021, Anne Gilliland, Rebekah Kati, Jennifer Solomon, Dave S. Ghamandi, Jill Cirasella, David Lewis, Dede Dawson

Publications and Research

It hardly needs to be said that 2020 was a difficult year for the world. COVID-19 has infected over 120 million people and killed over 2 million as of March 2021 (Johns Hopkins). At the same time, police violence against people of color continues, even as communities engage in long-overdue reckoning initiatives. Across the globe, researchers, governments, and communities needed quick, open, up-to-date information on testing for, treating, and preventing COVID-19. Our increased dependence on technology during lockdowns provided some with safety and continuity, while others experienced the widening of the digital divide. There is no greater urgency than the …

Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a website, titled Digital Occult Library, hosted by the CUNY Commons and built with WordPress. The site address is:

digitaloccultlibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu

It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics. It also hosts a forum that can be accessed and utilized by anyone, not just those registered on the Commons. The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the …

A Citation Analysis About Scholarship On Zines, Anne Hays

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION Zine scholarship is a relatively new academic field that has emerged since the late 1990’s. Now that two decades have passed since the publication of Stephen Duncombe’s seminal text, Notes From Underground, it is possible to take a landscape view of how and why zine scholars have studied zines in peer-reviewed journal publications. Knowing how scholars have studied zines can teach us about how zines and zine culture have contributed to academic knowledge. We can also learn which subjects are understudied as zine scholars continue to investigate these curious ephemeral print objects. METHODS This study uses citation analysis …

Librarians In Dissertation Deposit: Infusing An Institutional Ritual With Scholarly Communication Instruction, Roxanne Shirazi, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Most doctoral students are required to produce a dissertation that makes an original contribution to their field of study in order to fulfill their degree requirements. The scholarly nature of this requirement informs how students and faculty approach doctoral research, but universities often treat the dissertations themselves merely as student records, not scholarly contributions. Librarians, however, are uniquely situated to work with graduate students as emerging participants in the scholarly communication ecosystem and help them prepare their dissertations for an outside audience. Librarians have the expertise to advise students with questions regarding copyright, licensing, fair use, and authors’ rights, as …

It's About Time: Open Educational Resources And The Arts, Ian Mcdermott

Publications and Research

The price of textbooks and other learning materials hinder students’ ability to pursue higher education. Open educational resources (OER) provide one answer to this problem. Though well established in STEM disciplines, OER are less common in art history and other arts courses. The College Art Association (CAA) and the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) hosted panels on OER at their 2019 annual conferences. This article summarizes those panels and analyzes the speakers’ experiences within the context of OER initiatives in higher education.

The Institutional Repository: A Place For Every Undergraduate Researcher’S Work, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Libraries And Their Publics In The United States, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Citations Needed: Wikidata And The Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem, Megan Wacha

Publications and Research

Since Wikidata’s launch in 2012 as an open, collaboratively edited knowledge base, it’s held great promise for the library and scholarly communication community more broadly. Institutions and individual information professionals turned Wikidatans are using Wikidata to build a community-owned infrastructure for the bibliographic ecosystem, including open source tools that generate profiles of scholars, organizations, and publications. This workshop will introduce participants to Wikidata and its linked data infrastructure, including opportunities for hands-on editing and an overview of tools that facilitate data contribution and use. Participants will leave prepared to connect with existing Wikidata initiatives, and with entry points to launch …

Digital Collaborations: A Survey Analysis Of Digital Humanities Partnerships Between Librarians And Other Academics, Jessica Wagner Webster

Publications and Research

The present study will investigate the perceptions of information professionals about their role in the work of digital humanities scholars, as well as the perceptions of digital humanities scholars on the role of information professionals in their research. While other scholarly literature has considered collaborations between these groups via surveys or interviews with small project teams, the present study will provide a large-scale analysis of collaborations using survey responses from more than 500 scholars, librarians, and archivists. Questions sought to determine the extent to which these groups collaborate with one another on project teams; how these collaborations unfold and who …

Teaching Students To Critically Evaluate Textbooks, Christopher Mchale, Ian Mcdermott, Steven Ovadia

Publications and Research

This chapter is a case study describing how library faculty combined service learning and information literacy to help students evaluate textbooks, comparing commercial ones to Open Education Resources. The underlying idea was to give students not only a scholarly grounding that would help them as they move through their academic careers but also a practical vocational orientation to help them succeed in the workforce and, hopefully, become future contributors to the free culture movement.

Local Language, Local Knowledge, And Local Publishing: What Can We Learn From Latin And South America?, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Scholarly publishing is hegemonic: a handful of international, commercial publishers dominate. Because the system favors English-language authors at well-resourced institutions, many academics and scientists are left out. But what if there was an alternate vision for scholarship that focuses on research in local languages, where research addresses issues of local concern, and open access occurs without fees to authors? In this presentation, we’ll learn more about initiatives in other countries, why bibliodiversity and local research is so important, and more about how local research is supported internationally.

Latin and South America have proven that they can “do it for themselves.” …

Cruzar Fronteras Em Espaços Acadêmicos: Transgressing “The Limits Of Translanguaging”, Brendan H. O’Connor, Katherine S. Mortimer, Lesley Bartlett, María Teresa De La Piedra, Ana Maria Rabelo Gomes, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Gabriela Novaro, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Char Ullman

Publications and Research

Scholarship on translanguaging and related concepts has challenged traditional assumptions about how people use their multiple languages, urging us to move beyond the boundaries of named linguistic codes and toward conceptualizations of multilingual language use as flexible use of a speaker’s whole linguistic repertoire. Critiques of this theoretical shift have included assertions of translanguaging’s conceptual and practical limits—limits to its transformative potential as well as limits to its practical use. This paper takes up, in particular, the question of why we academics may assert the value of translanguaging in schools and communities while still largely failing to move beyond monoglossic …

Your Ir As The Centerpiece For Scholarly Communications Outreach At Your Institution, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Getting buy-in and awareness for your institutional repository can be challenging, especially when we have limited time and staff to devote to the IR. Outreach success requires persistence, flexibility, savvy marketing, and a focus on the long view. Before our IR, Academic Works, went live in 2016, my colleagues and I gave talks and workshops on open access and other topics. With Academic Works, our efforts now have focus and coherence. A varied outreach approach has been very helpful. In particular, print marketing has been effective. We designed a poster and other media promoting our tag line “amplify your scholarship …

The Living Archive In The Anthropocene, Nora Almeida, Jen Hoyer

Publications and Research

This paper presents the concept of the living archive as a system which reflects how social behavior and cultural production are part of the Anthropocene. The authors explore how dominant narratives of both the Anthropocene and the archive work to consolidate power and maintain cultural and disciplinary divisions. The authors refute conceptions of the Anthropocene as a purely biophysical phenomenon that is alienated from cultural practice and of the archive as a comprehensive and nostalgic space. They then introduce the living archive as an alternative representational, creative, and reactive space and illustrate how the living archive can intervene in ecological …

Eighteen Blind Library Users’ Experiences With Library Websites And Search Tools In U.S. Academic Libraries: A Qualitative Study, Adina Mulliken

Publications and Research

Telephone interviews were conducted with 18 blind academic library users around the U.S. about their experiences using their library and its website. The study uses the perspective that blind users’ insights are fundamental. A common theme was that navigating a webpage is time consuming on the first visit. Issues identified include the need for “databases” to be defined on the homepage, accessibly coded search boxes, logical heading structure, and several problems to be resolved on result pages. Variations in needs depending on users’ screen reader expertise were also raised. Suggestions for libraries to address these issues are offered.

Responsible Use Of Materials For Oer: A Hands-On Workshop For Faculty, Madeline Cohen

Publications and Research

This lightening talk will give an overview of an active-learning workshop at Lehman College for faculty developing OER. The goals of the 90 minute workshop are to provide practical exercises through which faculty learn how to identify, provide attribution for, and reuse materials that are under copyright, open access (public domain) or under Creative Commons licenses. Research Guides and tutorials on copyright and Creative Commons have been provided to faculty, but the content can be difficult for the novice to absorb. In fact, faculty often think of copyright and Creative Commons as more confusing than they are in practice.Therefore, the …

Opting Out Is Not An Option: Why All Academic Librarians Must Understand Open Access, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation challenges the still-too-prevalent notion that scholarly communication competencies are essential only for scholarly communication librarians and optional for other academic librarians. It focuses on one competency in particular: a robust understanding of open access.

Global North And South In Scholarly Publishing: The Affiliations Of Authors And The Situating Of Journals, Beth Evans, Beth Evans, Nanette Johnson

Publications and Research

An important goal of the open access movement in scholarly publishing has been to broaden access to research globally. Electronic delivery and removing paywalls has allowed published, open access research to flow more readily across borders. Furthermore, although subscription publishing platforms continue to be maintained as they have been historically in the Global North (GN), new publishers, often located in the Global South (GS), have seen an opportunity to offer platforms of their own that publish in an open access environment. Journals situated in the GS, nonetheless, have often been suspected as being predatory, in part, because of their unfamiliar …

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

Reaching Faculty Where They Are: Lessons Learned On Outreach, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Successful scholarly communications outreach centers on a consistent, flexible, and holistic approach. We provide training and support throughout the lifecycle of scholarly communications. Our work has had a strong, positive impact at our college and our institutional repository is the centerpiece of our work.

The value of one-on-one is critical. We reach out to faculty when receiving a Google Scholar alert for new publications. Encouraging self-depositing allows us to train on using the IR and discuss author’s rights and using the SPARC Addendum. We have taken the approach that educating faculty is our ultimate goal.

Buy-in from administration has been …

Transformed, I'M Sure: A (Polite) Introduction To Fair Use In Dh, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation looks at how the words "including" and "such as" in the fair use section of United States copyright law (i.e., Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code) allow for unforeseen fair uses, including transformative works made by digital humanists.

Ya Banned Books Analysis, Amanda Birro, Jennifer Pappas, Briana Cimino

Student Theses

Book banning or challenging is a complex issue, in which a person takes issue with a book in the library‟s collection, complains to the librarian, and sometimes demands that the book be removed from the collection entirely. Books for young adult audiences are especially at risk, and the reasons why these books are challenged or banned are numerous. By reading fifteen different young adult books from between the years of 1990 and 2016, the researchers performed a content analysis to look at the reasons why books may be challenged or banned. They also looked for trends or patterns in books …

Fair Use As Creative Muse: An Ongoing Case Study, Malin Abrahamsson, Stephanie Margolin

Publications and Research

In this chapter, the authors describe various copyright-related lessons that they've presented to faculty and students at their institution.

The Doctoral Dissertation And Scholarly Communication: Adapting To Changing Publication Practices Among Graduate Students, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

As graduate students begin to publish earlier in their careers, the relationship between the doctoral dissertation and scholarly publishing is evolving. Many students now include their own previously published work in a dissertation, requiring instruction in publication contracts and copyright transfer agreements at the point of submission to the graduate school. There are repercussions to publishing as a graduate student for which our institutions are not well prepared, and to which librarian could apply our expertise. This article briefly reviews the history of dissertation publishing and introduces issues surrounding the use of previously published materials in doctoral dissertations.

Transcription Activator Like Effector Nucleases (Talens): A New, Important, And Versatile Gene Editing Technique With A Growing Literature, Philip Barnett

Publications and Research

Transcription activator like effector nucleases (TALENs) is a new and powerful technique in genetic engineering that can delete deleterious genes or add beneficial genes to organisms. It is being widely studied to improve crops and livestock, and is also being investigated clinically. Comparing the details of how both TALENs and its competitor, CRISPR-Cas9, function, reveals the potential advantages of TALENs. The growing literature, besides covering the scientific and technical aspects of TALENs, also includes pertinent information on regulatory aspects and the public’s perception and acceptance of TALENs.

Amplifying Cuny Voices With Cuny Academic Works, Jill Cirasella, Adriana Palmer, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

While most conversations about open access literature center on journal articles and books, research takes many other forms. CUNY Academic Works provides a platform for, and public access to, a wide range of CUNY-created scholarship. In this presentation, we discuss the importance of including Women's Studies Newsletter (the predecessor of Women's Studies Quarterly), Latino Data Project Reports, and theses and dissertations in Academic Works, and report on a recent census of journals published by the CUNY community.