We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

A new Grey Literature & Era Emerge with Academic Library Responses to COVID-19: Defining Moment for Open Science

00:00

Formal Metadata

Title
A new Grey Literature & Era Emerge with Academic Library Responses to COVID-19: Defining Moment for Open Science
Title of Series
Number of Parts
11
Author
Contributors
License
CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
As libraries worldwide confront how to make their resources available to users when their physical spaces were locked down as the Coronavirus challenged safety and wellbeing for the public to visit, conversations around "openness" escalated. Open Science manages to be ahead of the curve as the majority of library users find the journal literature in STEM fields increasingly available but not always open. Other forms of information, particularly books and data, grey literature and video content remain behind paywalls and subscription models. As fast changes occur forcing libraries to augment their collections to meet more intense online needs for at least one quarter of this calendar year, it is a time of reckoning to identify priorities for immediate acquisition and licensing. Publishers, societies and information providers stepped up to open their inventories to libraries worldwide and to reduce the demands on non-functioning traditional interlibrary loan services. This generosity aided students with online textbooks, conducted laboratory learning with different resources, relying on more streaming media, activating online access for materials only held in print, and filled gaps for researchers seeking specialized information to respond to added calls for new supplies and products to fight the spread of the virus. The "shower of benevolence" has constrained human resources in addressing how best to curate and promote this open frontier of largesse that may not be part of any permanent collection. Standards and specifications are resources that are high in demand, as innovation, entrepreneurship and fabrication kick into a fast track to produce facial masks, medical gowns, respirators, ventilators, and other breathing devices needed by health care workers and patients. Information about the relationships of COVID-19 to other science conditions such as pollution, air quality, transportation logistics, and supply chains challenge all protocols for social distancing and human interactions. Library collections have multiplied as the roster of new free content proliferates however short term. The demand for alternative digital resources spawned new and temporary grey solutions delivering large collections of content still under copyright while libraries' physical collections are inaccessible. Two contrasting resources emerged: 1) the HathiTrust.org Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS). The HathiTrust opened up copyrighted material in the HathiTrust digital library to readers at member institutions with copies of those items in their physical collections. Millions of digitized books available through HathiTrust, which are also in libraries' collections are now available online to those affiliates via authentication. 2) in another more challenging activity is the emotional response the Authors' Guild made to the Internet Archive, which launched the National Emergency Library to offer free access to millions of in-copyright works. Perceptions of content outside of the sciences have welcomed these transformative albeit controversial challenges to copyright by making humanities and social science literature more digitally available as preferences for print are more pronounced in those disciplines. Additional transitions promoting open science and more generally open access includes how the sharing of information as conferences are postponed or cancelled require other creative ways to engage in professional discourse, information transfer and exchanges. Hosting virtual meetings has associated costs, requires new technologies and cloud storage, and requires different planning strategies to execute and scale accordingly with access to the varied content. This new normal, whether temporary or more permanent is an added challenge to grey literature as access expands to the general public in a more open reach. This paper, US centric, will explore a new openness in how libraries have accepted these unprecedented challenges and responded to meeting users' needs on a constantly changing continuum trying to be as disruption free as possible. A survey will be administered to determine how academic libraries have fared through this time and to determine what impact these changes will have on future library priorities, collections and services. The foundations of Open Science secured a baseline for publishers to partner with the library community and provide access to content not as universally available but became open for this juncture. COVID-19 is an unwanted catalyst that expanded the boundaries about how far open science can stretch in this unexpected environment libraries currently navigate.
Computer animation
Computer animation
Computer animation
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Hi everyone, I'm Julia Gelfand and it is now six o'clock in the morning in California and I'm at the University of California at Irvine. So there's been a little bit of some of my topic today. It's about the academic library response to COVID and what this did for open science and for great literature.
And so we were planning to do a survey that found that there were many other surveys that were conducted by much larger and more robust organizations. So my co-author and I decided to use those examples and to build them in and they're all heavily cited in the paper.
So you can go to that. So, and they came from the European Communities, Ithaca SR, Educause, the National Academies, and a lot of scholars who were presenting at conferences in the last six months.
So, okay. So, before the pandemic, where were libraries, the traditional model of being face to face, opening with lots of technology and ability
for students to collaborate and to take classes, to use all kinds of resources, and to be creative and to think and to study and there was a strong use of print. When we went into lockdown in March, major changes
took place and probably have changed the way we're thinking of libraries in fundamental ways going forward. So the beginning phrase was pretty basic, but we saw diminishing value of print collections and enhanced
digital access and how were we going to make that available and scale it for the needs. We also saw a huge demand for textbooks, which we hadn't really addressed in the past as students
had many more options with reserve systems and things like that, which we couldn't offer and embedded librarianship spiked. The equity and access in higher education amid the COVID-19 pandemic was an initiative that
librarian colleagues who support area studies and specialized and globalized and multilingual collections signed in the summer. And it really highlighted some of the things Dan just talked about in the observation of how much institutions suffered during this
time and the marginalization of resources, the promotion of e-fers and reliance on large dominant commercial publishers and just overall disparities.
Additional concerns that made it a little bit difficult were the signatories also called for additional concerns to be addressed and these were pretty US centric because it provided temporary memberships and fee waivers to struggling institutions.
There was a big movement to encourage diversity and to realize that we didn't need to do that.
So today, as we all know, the numbers are spiking and soaring and we're in a very dynamic state right now of what's happening.
The impact on collections and resources, I really want to concentrate on here because it is the services that get kind of more of the emphasis and we were better positioned and more confident about our services than we were to
have to pour a lot of money into filling gaps and collections and to realize what all our potential was. And there was some great potential. The Hathi Trust
was a big piece for us and at my institution, that emergency temporary access service that went into action really helped us
because as members, we could make available material that is in copyright during this time. The situation is that you can't lend the print collections during this time and they become unavailable, but it really helped us.
And the split situation is that a parallel initiative from the Internet Archive attempted to do the same thing on a different scale, non-member organizations, and the Authors Guild took it to court and it's winding its way through the legal process right now, waiting for a decision, but the authors just were unwilling to make their works available even during this pandemic.
But there were many acts of goodwill, as Dan and others have alluded to, and this was a huge gift of largesse, but there were certain problems that we had to cope with, and we had to really define workflows to accommodate it.
And so these are very, very important situations, but we were extremely grateful for this benevolence because it allowed us to fill some gaps without
paying for it, but we had to promote it and we had to make sure that people could find it. So those kinds of situations were quite important. So what happened in STEM? To allow students to have access to materials,
we had to really worry about safety. We had to license on a big campus-wide initiative, electronic lab notebooks, and teach them how to conduct experiments independently, without the lab or without fellow students around. And we also had to,
we found that the dependence on videos, and here are some examples of them, really made a difference. And video in general really helped us out, but we had some issues with how to stream it
and the costs associated with some of this. Also fieldwork studies and how to promote doing more ethnographic and observation research and create those instances for students who may be not familiar with that until now. And we created opportunities from the current landscape.
So there was a lot of this, I've documented in the paper as well, of things the libraries collaborated with faculty to happen. The obstacles in the research piece were basically the labs, but a lot of faculty and research
researched across the campus immediately, like the day we went into lockdown, decided they were going to redirect their research enterprises and create PPE, which is badly needed.
As things soared. So we had lots of things going on, and you see this calculator here of the burn rate calculator of what supplies were, and we were using that a lot to help inform people. One thing we were caught off guard with was the need for standards. And if you've ever worked with standards,
you know that they're difficult to use, and they're difficult to identify and to share and provide access for. So this is quite well documented in the paper as well. And then we promoted it through LibGuides and other functions about where people could find it, and other fast pivots that we had were
basically about business terms and how to do this licensing that has also been mentioned. But, you know, things that we did at my campus and some other examples, and what implications for scholarly communication was quite important. And you can see that the coalition
one second, and the coalition of librarians for equity and access are doing some interesting things about this and doing some programs and those noted as well. There's also some interesting situations about preprint use, which I think will be quite important
as we understand the sheer volume, not just in the sciences, but we saw early this morning, the social science research network, which is an Elsevier owned term, identified that they have 6000 COVID-related papers worldwide, and they're
basically non-medical. So this is, plus our MedRN has been just going ballistics. New era for gray literature, pretty obvious. And I'm just winding this through that you'll see some other
materials here for the reliance on e-resources, I think is really going to be what defines this period. And the impact for open science, this infographic sort of shows this and suggests the relationships
and the benefits of open science on collections. So just to summarize, the academic libraries despite COVID are really building gray literature, and we can look forward to a lot more, I think, of understanding of the relationship between
preprint content and published content. And we're seeing, you know, publishers and societies and all kinds of nonprofits and think tanks that are following this immensely. A new initiative that was just announced this week
at the University of California, sister campus at San Francisco, really looks at how to launch an equity in publishing and open science initiative to foster the next generation of journal editors to share, mentor, and promote the intersections of scholarly publishing and
open science between early career and those underrepresented researchers, particularly in medicine and allied health. So I think that's going to be very, very exciting. And I want to conclude by saying open science practices in contrast to traditional
models of knowledge production emphasize that open, transparent, and collaborative research dissemination practices are focused more properly balanced collective institutional individual benefits. It represents a positive evolution of the research endeavor along three dimensions, collaboration, efficiency, and replicability.
And finally, science is still science, facts are still facts, no one is going to fall off the edge of the earth that they sail far enough west, and rejecting face masks is not going to protect anyone from COVID-19.
And soon but not soon enough, the White House is going to embrace science and facts again. So I thank you and the paper, as I said, has lots of details about these resources and the directions that I think academic libraries, at least in the United States, are taking from
small campuses and my co-author is at a community college and what they've done to the research enterprises. So thank you for your attention.