News

For the sixth consecutive year, the majority of scholarly outputs coming from Iowa State University have been published Open Access (OA), making these works freely available for anyone in the world with an internet connection. This rise in researchers making their work open is in accordance with Iowa State University’s land-grant mission to create, share, and apply knowledge to make Iowa and the world a better place. Further, it reflects the growing support available for OA at Iowa State University. 

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A new campus wide mailing list to support open access - publishing, educational materials, and data - is now available. The mailing list will help connect ISU students and staff with peers and experts across campus. 

Join or manage your account at: https://mailman.iastate.edu/mailman/listinfo/open-access 

Libraries at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa announce a joint funding opportunity for the creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). This program is open to small teams of faculty, graduate students, and staff at any of the three public universities governed by the Board of Regents, State of Iowa.

The University Library helps researchers get access to articles, books, and other materials needed to complete research projects. Did you know that the library can help you complete and publish your work in innovative ways, too? We’ve outlined a few examples for brainstorming how you can benefit from library services.

1. Put an image on that data

Now in its fourth year of operation, the Miller Open Education Mini-Grant Program encourages instructor innovation in adopting and creating Open Educational Resources (OER), “educational materials (textbooks, syllabi, videos, software, and more) that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use.” The implementation of OER at Iowa State University has saved students more than half a million dollars during the 2020/2021 academic year.

The Iowa State University Library has signed on in support of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)'s response to the Data Repository Selection: Criteria that Matter initiative. This response addresses the concern that the Criteria that Matter guidelines put the interests of journals and publishers before those of authors and the institutions that own and manage data.

HOBOKEN, N.J. – January 14, 2020 – John Wiley and Sons, Inc. and Iowa State University today announced the signing of a three-year transitional open access agreement, among the first-of-its-kind in the United States. The agreement will advance Iowa State University’s goal to increase open access publishing and expand its open access offerings, allowing peer-reviewed articles to be read and shared immediately, and making important research broadly available. 

DataShare is Iowa State University’s open access repository for sharing, publishing, and archiving research data and is jointly funded by the University Library, Office of the Vice President for Research, and Information Technology.

Here are three reasons to make DataShare part of your plan for 2021:

The University Library works to support Open Access on campus and around the world in multiple ways. Five high-profile areas are listed here.

1. Open access publishing agreements

“There has never been such a rapid global collective effort to fight one disease” - Karen Grépin, Associate Professor of Public Health, University of Hong Kong (IHE) 

Before COVID (2017- Spring 2020) 

The theme of 2020 International Open Access Week is Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion. Academic publishing is one of the primary ways in which new knowledge is shared with the world. By undergoing editorial and peer review, research and scholarship is evaluated for originality, quality, and accuracy before publication.  

Following the end of the spring 2020 semester, the library announced the implementation of a new interface for controlling access to library e-resources. The new system is called OpenAthens.

Each spring, the Iowa State University library, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and the Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost support the Miller Open Education Mini-Grant Program to encourage instructor innovation in adopting Open Educational Resources (OER). Iowa State University utilizes the SPARC definition of OER: “educational materials that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use.” An OER can be any type of teaching material used within a course, provided that it is free to access and openly licensed.

At their meetings in January, ISU Graduate and Professional Student Senate and ISU Student Government became the second and third ISU governing bodies to pass resolutions in support of the University Library's

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, entered into transformative open access agreements with several of its largest institutional customers, including the University of California (UC), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Iowa State University (ISU).

The University Library is in license renewal negotiations with Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scholarly journals. Consistent with the Library’s Principles for Advancing Openness through Journal Negotiations, at issue is significant concern over how Iowa State is priced as well as our need for greater transparency and progress towards open access.

The Iowa State University Library offers a new service for Open Access publishing. The Iowa State University Digital Press supports the land-grant mission to share knowledge beyond campus borders and the University Library’s Open Initiatives strategic priority.

Oxford University Press is delighted to announce its first Read & Publish deal with a US institution, having reached an agreement in principle with the Iowa State University Library. The parties hope to finalize the details of the agreement by the end of the year. This is OUP’s first Read & Publish deal outside of Europe and will include access to the full OUP journals collection, including over 300 journals with an Open Access publishing option, and more than 60 fully Open Access journals. Researchers at Iowa State will be able to publish their articles via Open Access immediately upon publication in an OUP journal.

On October 15, the Iowa State University Faculty Senate unanimously passed a resolution that supports the University Library's Principles for Advancing Openness through Journal Negotiations.

The journal negotiation principles, adopted this summer, help the University Library advance openness and achieve financial sustainability and greater transparency.