Bret Davidson
Digital Technologies Development Librarian
North Carolina State University
Eka Grguric
Libraries Fellow
North Carolina State University
Andrée Rathemacher
Professor, Head of Acquisitions
University of Rhode Island
The Scholar’s Backpack: Using Virtual Environments to Support Modern Research Practice (Davidson, Grguric)
An increased emphasis on the reproducibility of research has ignited a shift toward more open practices, creating new requirements for researchers to improve research infrastructure and develop a modern research skill set. As a result, reproducible and portable computing environments are critical for future research success. This talk will define a modern research skill set, discuss its relationship to the principles of open science, and introduce the Scholar’s Backpack, a project to help researchers create the scientific computing environments they need to be productive. We will show how we are simplifying the learning experience for novice data scientists, how we are improving the reproducibility of scientific computing environments, how these environments have been used in our own Summer of Open Science workshop series, and how they could be applied to library services in a variety of disciplines.
Presentation (Davidson)
A Comparison of Research Sharing Tools: The Institutional Repository vs. Academic Social Networking Among University of Rhode Island Faculty (Rathemacher)
In recent years, academic social networking sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu have been gaining popularity as a way for scholars to share their work and make connections. For universities with open access (OA) policies where faculty are expected to deposit their scholarly articles in the institutional repository (IR), this trend presents an interesting problem. On the one hand, growing levels of participation on academic social networks indicate that scholars want to share their work, and that is good news for OA. On the other hand, academic social networks may be competing with IRs and are at odds with the mission of OA policies to provide researchers with a legal, non-commercial, and long-term method of sharing their work. At the University of Rhode Island (URI) we are asking what motivates faculty authors to share their work through ResearchGate—in many cases violating their publishing contracts—versus participating in our permissions-based OA Policy by depositing in the IR. We will present the preliminary results of our study, which includes data comparing the level of participation of over 550 faculty in ResearchGate and the OA Policy. Our data also include responses from a faculty survey that seeks to capture researchers’ understanding of the difference between distributing their articles through ResearchGate versus the OA Policy and what motivates their decisions. This study will not only help inform URI’s implementation of our OA Policy but will provide broader insight into faculty authors’ attitudes towards these two different types of research sharing tools.
