News

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.

Celebrate Open Access Week, Oct. 21-27, 2019, with the Iowa State University Library!

The Iowa State University Library is active in national and international efforts to transform scholarly communications and, in the process, to advance our own land-grant mission to share the knowledge Iowa State creates with Iowa and the rest of the world. Our library is recognized for its work around transformative open access agreements that enable our researchers’ articles to be published openly. We have invested heavily in green open access as well as in staffing and infrastructure to support the sharing of research data.

The Iowa State University Library is pleased to announce a new read and publish agreement with the Royal Society of Chemistry. Under this agreement, ISU corresponding authors can publish articles open access in Royal Society of Chemistry journals at no cost; furthermore, the Iowa State University Library will provide access for users to read all of the publisher’s journals.

The Iowa State University Library has signed the Expression of Interest to support OA2020, an international open access effort, led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, Germany, affirming the Library’s commitment to and support for this worldwide movement.

Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian, and Kyle Collins, associate dean of Online and Blended Learning for Northeast Iowa Community College, presented to the Iowa House and Senate Education Committees on Feb. 18. The purpose of this presentation was to educate the legislature about the high cost of college textbooks and to explain how open educational resources (OER) can help with these costs in some cases.

DataShare, a data repository for sharing, publishing and archiving research data created by Iowa State University scholars and researchers, completed beta testing last fall. This resource is the result of a two-year partnership between the Office of the Vice President for Research, University Library and the Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Curtis Brundy, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Communications and Collections, was invited to attend the 14th Berlin Open Access Conference as part of its U.S. delegation. The conference took place on December 3-4, 2018, at the Max Planck Society’s Harnack House in Berlin, Germany. The following is a Q and A with Brundy about the conference and his experience.