OhioLINK supports open access in a variety of ways, from the first open access (OA) Electronic Theses and Dissertation collaborative started in 2001 to our current support for Open Education Resources (OER) and our OA pilot with Wiley.
Here’s a recap of recent activity:
The ETD Center recently hit a milestone 100,000 submission. It’s one of our most widely used resources with over 9 million downloads globally per year. Read more from OhioLINK ETD coordinator Emily Flynn.
OhioLINK is a member of the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative, a grant-funded project to create 23 OER coursepaks to reduce costs for Ohio students. We provide the OhioLINK Open Course Content Library to host these and other OER content. We’ve had statewide participation from a wide variety of institutions to create and review these materials. We’re thrilled to announce that initial adoption figures indicate that the Collaborative has saved 14,593 Ohio students $3,212,464 in textbook costs with their OER coursepacks in Calculus, Psychology, Sociology, and First Year Writing.
The OhioLINK Affordable Learning Ambassadors are a team of member library and faculty who give workshops on OER and related topics to encourage creation, use and widespread adoption. OhioLINK’s director of affordable learning, Anna Bendo, coordinates the work of this group.
OhioLINK is a proud founding member of the Ohio Digital Network, providing open access images, texts, sounds, and videos from academic and public libraries and cultural heritage organizations in Ohio via the Digital Public Library of America. OhioLINK-member State Library of Ohio manages the coordination and infrastructure on behalf of our members and partners. Check out the collections from our members and partners here.
OhioLINK and Wiley announced a groundbreaking Open Access pilot which is scheduled to start in December 2019. Executive Director Gwen Evans will be at the Charleston Conference on Nov. 7, discussing the details on the panel Start From Where You Are: Key Considerations for Approaching Open Access.
We’ve been hosting a series of webinars on Advanced Topics in Open Access for member education. Several of these presentations have been recorded and are available open access for anyone to view. We’d recommend the webinars on the complexities of supporting OA for society publishers: Angela Cochran, managing director and publisher at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) spoke on the issues from the STM side, and Karin Wulf, director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, discussed it from the humanities side. (NOTE: The first screen of these recordings indicates “There is no content.” Ignore this message and hit the play button.) We’re looking forward to open and recorded sessions with Charles Watkinson, associate university librarian for publishing / director, University of Michigan Press, in December and Ellen Finnie, MIT Libraries co-interim associate director for collections/head, scholarly communications & collections strategy and Nick Lindsay, The MIT Press, director of journals and open access in January.
This fall, OhioLINK staff began cataloging member-selected open access e-books collections, which includes JSTOR, Knowledge Unlatched, Project MUSE, University of California Luminos, and Open Textbooks. These e-books are now available through the OhioLINK shared Central Catalog. Each year, these collections will be reviewed with the opportunity to add or remove collections in order to best serve our users’ needs.
