One of my side projects (a 1-credit independent study) in the Spring 2012 semester is the creation of an open access (OA) institutional repository (IR) for Olin College, my alma mater. It's supervised by Engineering Librarian Amy VanEpps on the Purdue side where I'm studying, and Dee Magnoni on the Olin side (she's run Olin's library from the beginning). This wiki page represents the in-progress thoughts on the work.

Introduction

What would we want scholarly communications in an engineering education institution to look like in an ideal world? My alma mater, Olin College, has only had publishing faculty for 10 years or so, there aren't many of them, and they're all very friendly and approachable people; this represents an opportunity to bootstrap an institutional open access repository within the space of a semester project.

Learning objectives

• Identify and articulate a range of scholarly communication issues present in engineering education by using real-life example stories to illustrate broader themes present across institutions.
• Assess the challenges of implementing a scholarly communications policy for an engineering school.
• Coach an engineering educator through applying a scholarly communications policy, including copyright considerations, to their own work.

Schedule

I'll be doing nearly all my work on Wednesday mornings, so the dates listed are for Wednesdays.

• 1: 1/11 - Initial reading and software exploration
• 2: 1/18 - Finish reading, prepare for first faculty participant
• 3: 1/25 - Interview copyright expert, upload first faculty participant's work
• 4: 2/1 - Interview first institutional repository expert, interview first faculty participant
• 5: 2/8 - Interview second institutional repository expert, upload second faculty participant's work
• 6: 2/15 - Interview second faculty participant, upload third faculty participant's work
• 7: 2/22 - Interview third faculty participant
• 8: 2/29 - Off week - away at SIGCSE conference
• 9: 3/7 - Re-consult with copyright expert, address IT issues
• 10: 3/14 - Spring break repository usage recruiting trip to Olin
• 11: 3/21 - Interview third institutional repository expert, implement profile pages (if possible)
• 12: 3/28 - Re-consult with first institutional repository expert, continue to upload faculty participants
• 13: 4/4 - Continue to upload faculty participant work, write usage documentation for Olin faculty
• 14: 4/11 - Interview library administrator, write open access policy draft for Olin
• 15: 4/18 - Review open access policy draft with Olin faculty, staff, and administration
• 16: 4/25 - Wrap up and documentation of the process

Reading list

My readings list will come from http://digitalcommons.bepress.com/repository-research, which is a collection of the papers in the field (they keep a literature review going so we don't have to!) My reading will focus on the following sections:

• Open access and institutional repositories
• Publishing and Scholarly Communication
• IR Implementation and Development
• Repository Collection Development
• Copyright, Permissions, and Authors' Rights
• Case Studies

Deliverables

• A database of Olin publications mapped to publishing agreements and Sherpa/RoMEO publisher codings and chunked into levels of copyright & archiving rights.
• The writing and implementation of an Olin Open-Access policy based on SPARC resources.
• An analysis of Olin faculty publications with their level of openness represented across publishers and content work.
• Populate institutional repository with some of the missing content.
• Copy of final project report submitted to the ENE Graduate Committee (required for Purdue independent study).
• 10-15 minute oral presentation to members of the Purdue community (required for Purdue independent study).

Extensions

If this goes well, we may want to keep going. Braindumping ideas just for the fun of it.

Potential extensions include exploring avenues for publication of things like an experience report on getting the whole thing going, a how-to for helping other engineering libraries (particularly small ones that don't have access to many resources) implement similar projects, and others. Also, if a complete Open Access database of all Olin-produced scholarly work is achieved, then all sorts of interesting analysis can happen, and more papers might pop out. For instance, it becomes much easier to explore the running debate over how the impact (as measured by impact factors and other "conventional" scholarly metrics) of a faculty member's engineering education research compares to their "traditional" engineering research, which may inform discussions on faculty evaluation and promotion process with respect to engineering education work.

If a method of analyzing faculty members in this manner is developed, that data set could be extended to other institutions and we can start asking questions like: Are there pattern similarities between successful engineering education researchers (do they start out as low, medium, or high-impact publishers in other engineering disciplines? does their impact in the other engineering discipline fade as their engineering education impact rises? etc) and how does this compare to engineering faculty who "dip into" engineering education research, possibly in collaboration with a more active engineering education researcher, but don't remain active themselves? But these are bigger questions for a later day.

Todo

• Get 1st faculty participant's CV
• Learn to use software
• Schedule meetings with IR experts
  • Donna - schedule-requested, waiting for reply
  • Mike - schedule-requested, waiting for reply
  • Scott - schedule-requested, waiting for reply

(side note: Purdue/JEE blanket OA letter -- keep pluggin'. Draft questions list for Norman Fortenberry with Amy?)

Done

• Make schedule
• Complete independent study paperwork (todo: 12/7)
• Compile initial bibliography (todo: 12/7)