A new Grey Literature & Era Emerge with Academic Library Responses to COVID-19: Defining Moment for Open Science
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
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.
00:26
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.
00:47
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.
01:04
So, okay. So, before the pandemic, where were libraries, the traditional model of being face to face, opening with lots of technology and ability
01:25
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
01:48
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
02:09
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
02:24
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
02:46
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
03:12
time and the marginalization of resources, the promotion of e-fers and reliance on large dominant commercial publishers and just overall disparities.
03:28
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.
04:11
There was a big movement to encourage diversity and to realize that we didn't need to do that.
04:30
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.
04:47
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
05:09
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
05:23
was a big piece for us and at my institution, that emergency temporary access service that went into action really helped us
05:40
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.
06:01
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.
06:31
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.
06:50
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
07:03
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,
07:25
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,
07:47
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
08:03
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.
08:23
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
08:44
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.
09:01
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,
09:22
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
09:44
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
10:03
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
10:23
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
10:49
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
11:08
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
11:28
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
11:46
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
12:04
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
12:25
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
12:41
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.
13:06
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.
13:23
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
13:44
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.