Scholarly Publishing Commons^™

Tracking Removed And At-Risk Government Information, Molly Blake, Sanga Sung, Ben Amata, Jenny Mcburney

SJSU Open Access Conference

The current U.S. administration is intentionally undermining public access to information as well as scholarly research by removing documents, reports, datasets, images, and language from government websites. In doing so, this administration is withholding publicly-funded information that we have a right to access, including data from government-sponsored research, historical information about marginalized groups, and speech transcripts. In removing these materials, the government is also deliberately sabotaging research related to topics it does not like, such as LGBTQ health, COVID, and climate change.

It is difficult to grasp the scope of this problem: how do we know when something is gone, …

Access Denied: Defending Research In A Shrinking Scholarly Landscape, Emily Kingsland

SJSU Open Access Conference

In early 2025, the U.S. Department of Education announced a reduction in the indexing of key journals in the ERIC database. As government censorship increasingly threatens the accessibility of educational research, librarians are emerging as critical defenders of open access and research transparency. This presentation reports on the proactive efforts of a Canadian academic librarian who developed actionable workarounds to address the disappearance of articles from ERIC. These missing records pose a significant challenge to researchers conducting knowledge syntheses, who face a reporting and reproducibility crisis when search results fluctuate or shrink without explanation. The implications are profound: systematic reviews …

Navigating Nih’S Revised Public Access Policy: On-The-Ground Experiences From Librarians And Researchers, Anneliese Taylor, Katie Fortney, Tim Vollmer

SJSU Open Access Conference

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) rolled out its revised Public Access Policy on July 1, 2025, in accordance with the 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy Nelson Memo. The Nelson Memo calls on all U.S. federal funders to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to published articles and supporting datasets resulting from federal grants. On the surface, NIH’s new policy is a public good, ensuring that federally funded research outputs will no longer be held back from public access for 12 months after publication. But the implementation mechanisms of this new policy for researchers and publishers …

Closing Talk: Progress And Poverty: The Paradox Of Scholarly Communication In The Digital Age, John Wenzler

SJSU Open Access Conference

We live in an era of unprecedented scholarly productivity and vastly improved scholarly communication. Academic researchers today have immediate access to an immense volume of scholarly articles and research data that would have amazed a researchers of 25 years ago. Today, my library at a medium-sized Masters institution, offers students and faculty an online Discovery System that provides direct access to millions of articles and nearly 80,000 online journals -- increasing the amount of scholarly information available to our patrons by 20, 30, 40 times? ... I don't know -- compared to what was available to them in 1980. So, …

Images Of Agua Y Tierra: Changing The Narrative Of Chicano/Mexicano Farming, Kathryn Blackmer Reyes

SJSU Open Access Conference

This presentation will consider how almost 10,000 pictures from the Chicano/Mexicano farming communities of the Upper Rio Grande Valley of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico can contribute and alter the narrative of farm working. This digital collection documents over 30 years of farming with acequias, or communal irrigation canals, and captures themes of food production, the care of the land and environment, and water management. In a time where large-scale agribusiness is fomented by Monsanto chemicals and seed control, these farmers work to maintain acequia agriculture. The presenter will discuss how her efforts with The Acequia Institute and …

Open Access, Privacy, And Ethics, Emily K. Chan

SJSU Open Access Conference

Open access is generally touted as a beneficial good. It enables communities, especially those with the least resources, to access literature that they often would otherwise not be able to afford. It brings publicly funded studies and ensuing publications out from behind a paywall for the public good. Open data sets allow for the aggregation of studies, leading to higher statistical power and generalizability. Open data sets can also be utilized to address replication concerns.

Despite these tremendous benefits, there are existing and valid concerns about open access in a networked world. As increased quantities of materials are digitized, especially …

Life Support For The Open Access Policy, Anneliese Taylor, Teddy Gomes

SJSU Open Access Conference

UCSF faculty passed an Open Access Policy in 2012, yet it wasn’t until a partially automated research information management system (RIS) was in place in 2015 that there was any measurable increase in deposits to the institutional repository. Despite this uptick, overall engagement with the RIS as well as deposits were lower than the university wanted them to be. In an effort to increase participation with the policy, the UCSF Library embarked on a six-month project to improve the RIS search results and ramp up the deposit rate.

This talk will present the scenario before the project, the methods used …

Promoting Faculty Comfort Level With Open Access Resources: The Online Faculty Workshop At Csu Stanislaus, Laura J. French, Maryann Hight

SJSU Open Access Conference

When the library first became involved with the Affordable Learning $olutions (AL$) initiative, a strategic decision was made to focus our efforts on providing faculty with the information they needed to incorporate affordable learning materials into their courses. Initially, three face-to-face workshops were offered with great success. However, time constraints on faculty was limiting participation. The decision was made by AL$ coordinators to restructure the workshop into an online format.

This presentation will address the process of adapting the in-person workshop to an online format. Feedback from the face-to-face workshops identified faculty concerns with the adoption of open access and …

Building Ethnically Diverse Digital Collections, Kathryn Blackmer Reyes, Emily K. Chan, April Gilbert

SJSU Open Access Conference

Building ethnically diverse collections has always been challenging -- either because minority communities do not see traditional institutions as keepers of their histories or librarians/archivists are not embedded sufficiently in the communities to recognize the value of their materials. And lastly, when communities do donate physical materials, processing and enabling access to these collections can often be slow, due to a myriad of reasons. The perception of a lack of public interest may lead to low processing priority, which only increases the potential for loss. Minority communities' motivation may be negatively impacted, furthering mistrust of traditional institutions and harming any …

Open Access Publishing In Southeast Asia, Zoë Mclaughlin

SJSU Open Access Conference

Throughout Southeast Asia, universities are turning to open access publishing for their journals. In Indonesia, the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education has advised all universities to use Open Journal Systems as a means for archiving and displaying their content. However, these journals and others of their kind remain poorly indexed and volatile. What is the current state of journal publishing in Southeast Asia? How can the positive aspects of open access be harnessed to allow for more discoverability and use of scholarly research from Southeast Asia? In this lightning talk, I will provide an overview of open access …

Read, Gold, And Green: California Academic Librarians And Open Access Publishing, Lana Wood

SJSU Open Access Conference

Academic librarians are often charged with providing copyright and intellectual property guidance to faculty. However, librarians are also producers of information and make decisions about where their information is published and how this affects access to their work. In this presentation, I will discuss findings from a 2016 survey of California academic librarians on their publishing and archiving practices, to better understand whether librarians “practice what they preach.”

Open Access In Health Sciences: Learning, Adapting, And Trying To Grow In Academic And Clinical Settings, Rachel K. Stark, Mickel Paris, Joy Rodriguez

SJSU Open Access Conference

Increasingly clinical doctors desire and need to publish their research. As a result, the issue of open access is moving into the clinical setting. This presents unique challenges to Health Science Librarians. In addition to working alone and with very limited library budgets, Health Science Librarians must stretch their current role to include becoming an open access expert in order to educate hospital administrators and library users, while giving proper advice and guidance to authors within their institutions. Health Sciences Librarians in academic settings also face limited budgets and increasing requests for access to materials on generally smaller budgets. Issues …

Situating Open Educational Resources For Csu Faculty And Student Success, Leslie Kennedy Edd, Lesley Farmer Phd

SJSU Open Access Conference

Economic inequity is a pervasive aspect of the population of California State University (CSU) students. There are significant differences in the ability of our students to afford the total cost of their CSU education. Not only are they afforded less access to educational materials, but they also may be disadvantaged in knowing how to take advantage of those resources.

Providing free, open, and/or low-cost options for course materials is a CSU Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) strategy to significantly reduce the impact of economic inequities. Thus, we situate open as enabling equitable academic opportunities and successful educational outcomes for all CSU …

Opening Talk: What Is Access? Thinking Beyond Online Availability To A More Just Scholarly Communication System, Charlotte Roh

SJSU Open Access Conference

We've come so far with the open access movement on the institutional, state, federal, and even international level. It's fair to say that the open access movement has in fact changed the landscape of scholarly publishing. But there are also things that haven't changed, and injustices that remain, that we need to consider in how scholarly knowledge is traditionally constructed.

Outreach To Campus Administrators On Open Access Initiatives, Ryne Leuzinger, Jacqui Grallo

SJSU Open Access Conference

As librarians work to develop and support open access (OA) initiatives, it is essential that they communicate effectively with administrators, from the head of the library to the president or chancellor of their university. Librarians often find themselves at the nexus of OA initiatives and are well-positioned to bring together the interests of various units on campus and advocate for a given initiative to campus administration. In this presentation, which will be applicable to a broad range of higher education institutions, we will discuss effective practices and key takeaways from an open access initiative at CSUMB that focused on textbook …

Introducing “Cora,” The Community Of Online Research Assignments Repository, Susan G. Archambault, Lindsey Mclean

SJSU Open Access Conference

This session will introduce CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments), a pilot open access educational resource developed for faculty and librarians in higher education. Librarians at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) received a Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) Project Initiatives Fund grant to create an online open access repository of user contributed research and information literacy assignments targeted to SCELC institutions. This session will cover the timeline of events during the first year of development, ending with a demo of the live online prototype. LMU faculty provided input on the characteristics of effective research assignments and the desired features in …

Open Access And The Logic Of Collective Action, John Wenzler

SJSU Open Access Conference

In the digital age, academic libraries confront the dilemma of collective action. In the era of print, each library stored, organized and provided access to a collection of scholarly resources for researchers at a local institution. On an integrated electronic network, all of these tasks become shared endeavors. One copy of a journal article housed on an Internet server provides faster and more convenient access to the scholarly community than 1,000 printed copies scattered across the country. Thus, the work of maintaining the article and making it discoverable can be done by one organization for the entire community instead of …

Moving From Binders To Bytes: Processing, Digitizing, And Publishing A Paper-Based Archive To An Institutional Repository, Emily K. Chan, April M. Gilbert, Amanda L. Mellinger

SJSU Open Access Conference

At San Jose State University, a paper-based archive centering on library and information science history is being processed, organized, and uploaded onto ScholarWorks, the campus institutional repository. Prior to its digitization, the presenters grappled with many questions. What platform should be used to house the archive? What entry points would researchers expect in order to access the collection? What research purposes would this collection satisfy? The presenters will discuss their rationale for their decision-making in transferring 300 binders to an open access, digital format. Among the individuals who are involved in making this detail-rich collection openly accessible online and searchable …

The California Open Educational Resources Council: From Curation To Adoption, Katherine D. Harris, Diego Bonilla

SJSU Open Access Conference

California’s three public higher education systems (University of California, California State University, the California Community College System) enroll nearly 3 million undergraduate students and employ almost 100 thousand faculty. In 2012, the California State Legislature directed the three systems to create an online library of open educational resources to encourage the use of free or affordable textbooks and other materials throughout California’s public higher education system. Composed of faculty representatives from each of the three systems, the California Open Educational Resources Council (CAOERC) was formed and charged in January, 2014, with collecting, peer-reviewing, helping to curate, publicizing, and cultivating the …

It Takes A University: Oer And The Portland State University Reducing Student Costs Initiative, Marilyn K. Moody

SJSU Open Access Conference

OER have a major role to play in student affordability efforts. Portland State University’s Reducing Student Costs Initiative is a broad-based effort to reduce student textbook and course materials costs. This presentation looks at the opportunities and challenges of involving stakeholders from across the campus in this initiative, including faculty, staff, students, administrators, donors, and external partners. OER related strategies of the Initiative, including plans for increasing OER use in courses and programs are described.

The Initiative’s work and implementation plans involving the adoption, use, and creation of OER include:

• Developing courses and programs that utilize OER, including online flexible …

Creating An Open Access Course Reserves (When An Oa Textbook Isn't Enough), Jessica Bell

SJSU Open Access Conference

The search for alternatives to high priced textbooks endures. The librarians at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, with the help of an IMLS Sparks! Ignition grant, decided to jump into the fray by creating the Open Access Course Reserves. It is a publicly available, curated repository that provides ready-made reading lists of free, copyright compliant (open access when possible), educational materials. The materials are selected to match typical syllabi and textbook contents and organized by discipline and course. The goal of the project is to create a place for faculty of any higher education course from anywhere in the …