River the whippet gets some attention from Ph.D student in apparel design Laura Kane as River’s owner, Ann Dickerson, shares some information with students. Dickerson and River are part of the local Welcome Waggers group, which brings dogs into different therapeutic situations. Date: March 14, 2013 (photo: Theresa Hogue)

Local therapy dog group Welcome Waggers spent two afternoons this week at Valley Library, letting groups of students interact with their dogs to help calm nerves and aid with stress as they prepared for finals.

This is the first time that the library and OSU Press have sponsored the event, which drew long lines, and attracted more than 200 people in two hours on the first day.

Open to students, staff and faculty, the event was a chance for animal lovers to get in a little petting, and to learn more about the varied lives of the dogs, which included the ultra-fast whippet River, an 11-year-old capable of running 24 m.p.h but who was more interested in lazing at her owner, Ann Dickerson’s, feet, and Cairo, a German shepherd mix who was also a breast cancer survivor.

Participants were asked to fill out surveys of the experience, and positive feedback may increase the chances that this could be a reoccurring event. The smiles on the faces of students indicated that it was already a grand success.

~ Theresa Hogue

Cliff Mead, Head of Special Collections for the OSU Libraries, is retiring in 2011.

Clifford Mead, an expert on the life of one of Oregon State University’s most celebrated alumni, Linus Pauling, and the man responsible for the growth of the OSU Libraries world-class collections, is retiring after 24 years at the university.

Mead, Head of Special Collections for OSU Libraries, will retire effective Jan. 1, 2011.  Mead’s expertise in special collections administration has resulted in the development and growth of a collection that serves as an outstanding resource not only for the OSU community but for scholars from across the globe.

Not only is Special Collections an ideal environment for on-campus study and research, but as OSU’s Horning Professor of Humanities and Professor of History Emeritus, Mary Jo Nye explained, Mead has dedicated himself to making the collection available to the public.

“Cliff and his staff have pioneered online website communication of historically valuable documents, photographs, films, and other resources to the public,” Nye said. “He has been a real treasure at OSU whom countless visitors have found to be their engaging and omniscient guide in Special Collections.”

The focus of OSU Special Collections is on the Ava and Linus Pauling Papers with a broader emphasis on the history of 20th century science and technology. Mead has led the Special Collections Department’s development of outstanding digital resources, especially those that provide in-depth coverage of the life and work of Linus Pauling, the only recipient of two unshared Nobel Prizes.

“In addition to Professor Mead’s leadership in developing a truly innovative and  world-renowned web presence for displaying the vast resources of the Special Collections department, he has provided exceptional opportunities for OSU students to have firsthand experience working with primary research materials, ” said Karyle Butcher, former OSU University Librarian and University Press Director.

Mead is recognized internationally as the authority on the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers.  He has authored several publications, including Thomas Pynchon:  A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (1989).  His most recent book, co-edited with Chris Petersen, is The Pauling Catalogue: Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers at Oregon State University (2006).  He also has co-edited Linus Pauling: Scientist and Peacemaker (2001) and The Pauling Symposium: A Discourse on the Art of Biography (1996). Mead received his master of library science from Syracuse University School of Information Studies, Syracuse, New York and a B.A. in English from the Utica College of Syracuse University.

Paul Farber, OSU Distinguished Professor Emeritus, said it is Mead’s personality that really drove the collection.

“Cliff has that rare combination of intelligence, organization, personality, wit and humor that makes a university collection of papers and books into a Special Collection,” Farber said. “He has been at the center of creating this major asset at OSU, one that has large portions available online, and one that brings scholars from around the world to campus.  He cannot be replaced, but he has built an institution that will persist.”

Larry Landis, University Archivist, will serve as interim director of the Special Collections beginning Jan. 1, 2011 until a permanent head is named.  Landis is an experienced library administrator, having served as the University Archivist since December 1996.  Landis started his career at OSU in January 1991 after having worked for seven years at the University of Texas at Austin at what is now the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.  Landis earned an M.A. in history from Texas Christian University and completed post- graduate work in archives

Michael Boock, Head of Digital Access Services

The open-access blogosphere was abuzz with accolades.

“Librarians have been at the vanguard of the open-access movement, often trying heroically, but in vain, to convince other faculty to deposit,” declared Stevan Harnad on his Open Access Archivangelism blog. “To the library faculty at Oregon State University, who have now put their own work where their heart (and hard work) is, kudos!”

The library’s bold move is an example of the “patchwork mandate” approach to policy change that has been gaining traction across America. Instead of waiting for whole universities to get on the green publishing bandwagon, many individual departments, laboratories and colleges are creating their own internal policies mandating deposits into their institution’s digital archive.

“The majority of mandates in the U.S. are departmental mandates,” observes Michael Boock, Head of digital access services for the Valley Library.

The OSU librarians modeled their policy after the one developed by Stanford University’s College of Education.
“We adopted Stanford’s approach of requiring deposit of the final published version of the article,” says Boock, who helped draft the policy guidelines. “Other mandates accept preprint versions, but we felt it was important to have the final published version. The formatting, tables and appendices give it weight and authority.”

It’s not surprising that OSU’s first open-access mandate originated in the library.

“The backbone of our profession is making research available to anyone who needs it,” says Boock. “Any barriers to access go against the core of what we’re about.”

~ Lee Sherman

ScholarsArchive@OSU is Oregon State University’s digital service for gathering, indexing, making available and storing the scholarly work of the Oregon State University community. It also includes materials from outside the institution in support of the university’s land, sun, sea and space grant missions and other research interests. Submitting your research to ScholarsArchive@OSU is easy. Just send us an email with your research attached, or we can arrange for you to submit it yourself. For this and other information contact scholarsarchive@oregonstate.edu.

You’re a committed eco-citizen. Your life is green from top to bottom—from the solar panels on your roof to the native plants in your yard. But what about your publisher? Is it green, too?

“Green” publishers are those that share their content far and wide without fetter, according to SHERPA RoMEO, a Web site that outlines journal publisher policies. Green publishers let authors put their articles into an electronic archive, post them on a personal Web site, or hand them out to students before and after peer review and formal publication.

Of the 600 publishers SHERPA RoMEO has rated, 60 percent allow limited self-archiving. Only 29 percent, however, qualify as truly “green.” Others are color-coded as blue, yellow and white, depending on the scope of openness.

Traversing the legalistic landscape of academic publishing can be dodgy. So OSU librarians have developed a workshop for OSU researchers who want to ensure broader electronic access to their scholarly writing. The workshop, called “Rights Well,” trains faculty and graduate students to retain more of their rights when negotiating contracts with academic publishers. Participants are surprised to learn that many so-called “copyright transfer agreements” can be finessed before signing.

“Author rights are one of the most overlooked aspects of publishing agreements,” said Andrea Wirth, OSU’s Geosciences and Environmental Sciences Librarian. “The workshop shows people how to really scrutinize the wording.”

Questions authors should ask themselves include: How might I want to reuse this article? Do I want to distribute it to students? What about depositing it in OSU’s electronic Scholars Archive, or putting it in a specialized archive within my discipline? Do I want to post it on my departmental Web site? How about my personal Web page? Do I want to link the article to my online vita? Maybe I’ll want to reuse the article as a book chapter down the road.

If an author answers yes to any or all of these questions, he or she has a couple of options: find a green publisher or work with a less-than-green publisher to get a greener contract.

Andrea Wirth

“Some publishers are very specific about the types of repositories where authors can place their work,” said Wirth. “For example, some allow submission to repositories—that is, institutional archives like OSU’s Scholars Archive, or to disciplinary archives for specific fields of study. You have to read the contract very, very carefully to make sure you don’t get surprised later.”

If a contract looks too restrictive, authors have options. An excellent tool is the SPARC Author Addendum, Wirth explains in the workshop.Developed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an international organization dedicated to open access, the addendum gives authors a way to expand their contractual rights.

When Wirth recently ran into a contract problem herself, she used the addendum to good effect. Under initial contract wording for the journal Collection Management, she would have been unable to submit her article to the OSU Scholars Archive—a huge problem, because OSU librarians recently mandated that all library faculty-written articles be archived. So Wirth sent back the contract with an addendum. The publisher countered with a whole new contract.

“We went from an exclusive agreement, giving the publisher all rights, to a nonexclusive agreement, giving the publisher first-publication rights only,” she said. “Basically, the copyright reverts back to me.”

The academic publishing paradigm is shifting.

“Some publishers are reacting positively to the growing awareness about author rights and agreeing to modify contracts,” Wirth said. “Certainly, not all of them are there yet. But authors need to ask for what they want.”

The “Rights Well” workshop is available to faculty and graduate students by request. Contact Andrea Wirth at 541-737-9903 for information.

~Lee Sherman

You can subscribe to science magazines like Seed or Discover for $19.95 a year—the price of a couple burgers and beers at McMenamin’s. But the annual fees to libraries for certain academic journals can reach tens of thousands of dollars, the price of a brand-new ride—a Honda Fit, perhaps, or a Nissan Versa. And those rates have been rising as fast as 8 percent a year, outpacing higher-ed budgets by miles.

Faye Chadwell, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Content Management, said journal subscriptions are getting too expensive for libraries. Using interlibrary loans helps, but Chadwell believes the current model of academic publishing is not sustainable. (photo courtesy OSU Libraries)

That’s why OSU’s libraries are cancelling $1.2 million in journal subscriptions over the next two years. The most expensive title going away is Surface Science ($13,399), followed by European Journal of Pharmacology ($12,444). Both are products of mega-publisher Elsevier. Another victim is International Journal of Quantum Chemistry (online license, $10,893), published by Wiley, another titan of the commercial academic presses.

Humanities will feel the pain, too, despite the comparatively modest prices for liberal arts and social sciences journals. Philosophical Studies, a Springer title, is the priciest loss ($2,459) outside the hard sciences. In the social sciences, Elsevier’s Catena ($1,706) and Wiley’s Managerial and Decision Economics ($1,668) top the chopping block for cost.
Tough as the current cuts appear, they are only the latest round of a trend that began two decades ago. Journal expenditures nationwide skyrocketed 321 percent between 1986 and 2006, according to a recent study by the Association of Research Libraries.

“This crisis has been going on for 20 years,” says Faye Chadwell, associate university librarian for Collections and Content Management. “Just since 1998, we’ve cut about 3,200 titles totaling roughly $1.75 million to $2 million. We cut out all the fat years ago. Now we’re losing access to core content.”

Library faculty worked closely with academic departments to identify high-value journals to safeguard. They also orchestrated interdisciplinary feedback across colleges.

“People took it very seriously,” says Chadwell. “There wasn’t a lot of unnecessary grumbling. It was more a sense of resignation. “
OSU Libraries have joined forces with University of Oregon and Portland State University to fight soaring journal costs. This year for the first time, the three state universities—which subscribe to many of the same journals—have made a concerted effort to jointly cut titles. By working together, the consortium is paring duplication across the Oregon University System while retaining unique content within the state. OSU students and researchers can access journals from sister institutions through Interlibrary Loan.

Such cost-cutting measures, however, won’t solve the underlying problem, according to Chadwell.

“The current model of academic publishing is just not sustainable,” she says.

As a steering committee member for the international Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Chadwell is a leader in a growing global movement to change the whole approach to scholarly communication. There’s something wrong, she says, when publicly funded universities have to pay giant fees to access publicly funded research conducted by their own faculty.

“Because of the ongoing budget stagnation, libraries lose ground every year and are able to buy less and less with their materials budgets,” Chadwell notes in Collection Management, which she edits.

She advises library collection managers “to demonstrate the vital connection between the serials content to which our users are losing access and the need for those same users to take control of their scholarship.”

~ Lee Sherman