News

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.

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.