In honor of Open Access Week, check out these library-supported services and resources from UTC Scholar! Open Access Week promotes and celebrates the availability of open access literature, loosely defined as scholarly material that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. As the university’s institutional repository, UTC Scholar contains a variety of open access materials that capture the academic and creative output of the campus community. In the last 12 months, materials in UTC Scholar have been downloaded over 204,500 times by researchers from all around the world–that’s an average of over 134 downloads per item! A few of these resources are described below.
- Open Educational Resource (OER) Publishing Services
- The library supports authorship of OER by UTC faculty by providing technical support and a publishing platform in the UTC Scholar Open Educational Resources series. Open Educational Resources (OER) are shared under open licensing, which allows users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute materials. The UTC Library’s Affordable Course Materials Initiative supports faculty awareness of OER materials. Faculty are encouraged to assess and then adopt or adapt OER to create more affordable courses. We also encourage awareness of OER with pre-service teachers by helping students find and assess K-12 Textbooks.
- PlumX Metrics
- An important component of open access resources are the metrics by which their impact is measured. As of this year, all items in UTC Scholar feature PlumX Metrics, which measure not only citations and downloads of a particular resource, but also other types of engagement, such as bookmarks and social media shares. This data is valuable information for authors seeking to demonstrate the impact of their research.
- Data Management Services
- Data management and open data are an important part of open science. Many funding agencies now require that both the published research and the data used in that research be available to the public. The UTC library’s Data Management Services can help faculty create strong data management plans and can host research data in UTC Scholar’s Research and Data collection.
- Journal and Conference Publishing Services
- Modern Psychological Studies is one of two peer reviewed journals published by the university and hosted in UTC Scholar. The full run of Modern Psychological Studies dating back to 1992 has been digitized and made available online.
- UTC Scholar is also home to posters and presentations delivered at the Department of Psychology’s River Cities Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference (RCIO). The programming for this annual conference is managed through UTC Scholar and the content is submitted by presenters prior to the event.