This presentation was given during Open Access Week in October 2009. Open Access Week is a world-wide event where academic institutions explore Open Access – the ideal of free, full-text, immediate, online access to peer-reviewed scholarship and research results so new ideas and information can be obtained rapidly and freely by everyone.

This presentation was given at the 2012 Open Access Week program, “The Open Data Revolution: Challenges and Innovations” on October 23, 2012. Open Access Week is a world-wide event where academic institutions explore Open Access – the ideal of free, full-text, immediate, online access to peer-reviewed scholarship and research results so new ideas and information can be obtained rapidly and freely by everyone. Many funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, and journal publishers, such as Nature, require researchers to share data produced during the course of their research. When researchers share their data, other researchers can reuse it to answer new questions, opening up new interpretations and discoveries. Sharing data may also lead to sharing research processes, workflows and tools and may make research articles and papers more useful and citable by others.

This presentation was given at the 2012 Open Access Week program, “The Open Data Revolution: Challenges and Innovations” on October 23, 2012. Open Access Week is a world-wide event where academic institutions explore Open Access – the ideal of free, full-text, immediate, online access to peer-reviewed scholarship and research results so new ideas and information can be obtained rapidly and freely by everyone. Many funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, and journal publishers, such as Nature, require researchers to share data produced during the course of their research. When researchers share their data, other researchers can reuse it to answer new questions, opening up new interpretations and discoveries. Sharing data may also lead to sharing research processes, workflows and tools and may make research articles and papers more useful and citable by others.

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Project Report (M.Pub.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Master of Publishing Program) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Open access is being talked about, and implemented, around the globe, by everyone from the U.N. to individual authors, editors, and publishers, and collaborative groups. As of October 2004, requests for a government mandate for OA had gone forward not only in the U.S. and the U.K., but also Croatia. The Scielo (Scientific Electronic Online) collections of Latin America are very substantial, fully open access journal collections. In the developing world, OA is seen not only as the best means to access the research results of others, but as an opportunity to contribute their own scholarly research findings. Outside the U.S. and the U.K., profits from scientific publishing are not common, and subsidies are not unusual. The author predicts that the present slow but steady growth in institutional repositories will be replaced in the near future by dramatic growth.

In response to the increasing cost of college, colleges and universities are leveraging financial aid and academic support services to implement access and success programs intended to help financially disadvantaged students afford and persist through a baccalaureate degree program. This research is a study of the efficacy of one such program at a large research university in the southwestern region of the United States. The study sample included low-income program participants in four cohorts of freshmen enrolling for the first time in college from fall 2007 (Cohort 1) to fall 2010 (Cohort 4) and a comparison group of almost 400 low-income freshmen who enrolled for the first time in college in fall 2006 (the year prior to program implementation) for a sample total of over 2150 students. Approximately 64% were female, 36 % were males, over 60% were African American and Hispanic, and over 75% were first generation college students. Logistic regression was used to measure probability and odds of their academic success and retention in the first year of college utilizing gender, ethnicity, parental degree attainment, and program participation as the independent variables. The logistic regression models illustrated that participation in the program netted a consistently positive and significant impact on academic success across all cohorts, increasing the odds ratio for academic success no less than three times in favor of program participants vis-à-vis the comparison group. The statistical models illustrated that the program netted a slight positive impact on the odds of retention, particularly for African American students. Therefore, the principle implication that might be drawn from this study is that by strategically leveraging financial aid and academic support services, access and success programs can facilitate higher rates of academic success and retention for financially disadvantaged college students.

The University of Arizona Library is a vital participant in the AgNIC Rangelands project and has contributed to the initiative in many ways. For example, in the mid-to-late 1990â s the Library digitized the backfiles of the Journal of Range Management for open access on the web. Funding and completing digitization projects such as this is a complicated process and requires many decisions along the way. This paper outlines the process taken by the Library to manage a more recent project to scan back issues of the journal Rangelands. It starts with the decision to develop a project plan and request funding from the National Agricultural Library (NAL). It continues on to describe negotiating agreements with project partners, the process for outsourcing of scanning, the design of the technical infrastructure needed to support digitized content, and issues of sustainability that any digital library encounters.

Presented at the 2012 Open Access Week program, "The Open Data Revolution: Challenges and Innovations" in the Fall 2012.

published_or_final_version / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy