Some of the research comes with tongue-bending titles:
“Synchrotron microCT imaging of soft tissue in juvenile zebrafish reveals retinotectal projections.”
Other titles sound as if a scholar were up late watching Netflix: “The Rambo Mystique: Ideology and American Myth in Reagan Era Action Films.”
Like other research giants, Penn State University each year assembles a mountain of research knowledge, from strategies to prevent high-risk teenage driving to ways to control infections to earthquake research.
And, yes, serious studies involving zebrafish and action films are in the mix, too.
Produced by faculty, staff and students alike, some of the work is available publicly on an online Penn State platform, “ScholarSphere.” What’s there already could grow exponentially in the months and years ahead.
That’s because the state’s land-grant university is throwing open a wider swath of its research to the public, enacting a university-wide open access policy covering its varied scientific pursuits.
In doing so, Penn State joins scores of research hubs including those in the Ivy League and other public and private campuses coast to coast that have enacted campus-wide policies to showcase their work.
Many of the articles, studies and other work primarily will interest scholars doing research of their own. But even for armchair intellectuals, or somebody who simply has an Internet connection and some free time, the policy offers interesting information, all of it clicks away on a searchable database.
Officials said they hope the policy, which took effect with the new year, will boost the university’s research profile globally.
Provost Nicholas Jones called it a milestone.
Another official, Barbara Dewey, dean of University Libraries and Scholarly Communications, said:
“Open research benefits both researchers by increasing the availability and visibility of their work, as well as the public by making scholarship and information more widely and easily accessible. As subscription access to scholarly journals continues to steadily increase in price, we remain committed to the open and equitable access to Penn State research and scholarship.”
Under the new policy — known officially as AC02 — university researchers automatically give Penn State a non-exclusive license to display their work on ScholarSphere, the university’s open access institutional repository. It debuted in 2012.
The policy covers all Penn State researchers, including faculty and staff, university appointees, graduate and post-doctoral research assistants or fellows, and visiting scholars.
At the same time, the policy protects the academic freedom of faculty to submit their research to publications of their choosing, officials said. Should a researcher prefer to submit work to a journal that forbids archiving their work in ScholarSphere, the researcher can seek a waiver to the Penn State policy. It is automatically granted upon submission, university officials said.
The policy does not mandate payment of article processing charges, and imposes no restrictions on where university researchers may publish.
The university’s Faculty Senate gave its blessing to the policy last spring, and it was approved by Penn State President Eric Barron in August, representing the culmination of five years or so of collaborative work among Penn State’s administration, the University Libraries, faculty members, researchers and other key stakeholders across the university.
Penn State generates nearly $1 billion in research annually, including studies funded through such federal agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. A portion of the output already was available, but not in one place.
Some research will remain off limits, including work deemed as classified, Penn State officials said.
Nationally, the trend toward opening up research is being felt from coast to coast.
One source, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, counts Penn State among a growing list of U.S. and Canadian campuses that have open access policies that cover entire faculties. It says those that do not include all faculty or are opt-in or “encouragement”- based policies are identified as such.
In Pennsylvania, the list includes such institutions as the University of Pennsylvania, Allegheny College, Bucknell University and Bryn Mawr College.
Neither the University of Pittsburgh nor Carnegie Mellon University are on the MIT list, though officials with both institutions point to various efforts over the years to promote research access.
“For more than a decade, Pitt has been an active participant and supporter of open access publishing as a way for scholars, students and the public to share inquiry and knowledge,” Pitt spokesman Kevin Zwick said.
Pitt’s University Library System, he added, supports it in various ways, citing openaccess@pitt.edu.
He cited as examples:
● Operating an Open Access Author Fee Fund to help Pitt authors with the processing fees associated with open access publication;
● Publishing 40-plus open access scholarly journals from editorial teams around the globe;
● Maintaining open access scholarly repositories, including D-Scholarship@Pitt, the university’s main institutional repository.
Carnegie Mellon officials say they recently reached what the university calls a transformative agreement with the large scientific publisher Elsevier that prioritizes free and public access to the university’s research. Carnegie Mellon also joined three top universities in open access agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery, the largest scientific and educational computing society in the world.
The deals are part of an ongoing set of decisions to promote open access at CMU and within its libraries, officials said. In 2003, then-Provost Mark Kamlet signed the Budapest Open Access Initiative. In 2007, CMU’s Faculty Senate formalized this commitment with an open access resolution that strongly encouraged faculty to make their work more available to the public, they added.
Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1977 and on Twitter: @Bschackner
First Published: February 10, 2020, 11:30 a.m.
