CUNY Academic Commons

I know I said I’d take some notes at the last meetup, and I didn’t end up doing that during the meeting. But I wanted to write up a few thoughts about what we discussed.

We started off with a discussion of institutional repositories, both generally as a component of an open access strategy for colleges and universities as well as the possibility for an IR here at CUNY. Jill, Madeline, and I (among other CUNY library and non-library faculty) are on a UFS committee to explore getting an IR at CUNY, which arose out of the resolution in support of OA approved at the December 2011 meeting of the UFS. There’s a meeting of that committee on Monday 4/2, and we can update everyone after. As I think we mentioned at last month’s OA meetup, the plan for now is to write a proposal to bring in an external consultant to help us with our IR strategy, someone with more knowledge about the pros and cons of IR systems and staffing than we have on our committee.

As we’ve also discussed in the OA meetups this year, the CUNY Academic Commons could be a great way to add a social layer for an IR, enabling us to add functionality that is missing from many IR systems like following particular researchers or disciplines, commenting, etc.

We spent some time on the idea of both works in progress and open data, and whether either of those components of scholarly research could have a place in an IR at CUNY. It seems clear that both (though especially raw data) have the potential to gobble up lots of server space very quickly, so it might be prudent to start with finished work and expand to data and other uses once the IR is established.

As planned we also talked about open access textbooks and other educational materials. While we know that some faculty are using or creating open textbooks, given the high costs of textbooks for our students we agreed that it would be great if more courses could move to open materials. (And textbooks are problematic for libraries to provide for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they’re consumables that don’t hold up for very long.) There are lots of open educational resources out there and also some intriguing new models, like the program at Temple University in which faculty are receiving stipends to prepare open textbooks for their classes (http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/temple-project-ditches-textbooks-for-homemade-digital-alternatives/35247).

I’ve been chewing on thoughts about open access scholarly publishing, institutional repositories, and open curricular materials, and our discussions last week addressed many of the same themes. All of these taken together — let’s call it the scholarly communication system (though I’m not certain that’s the best term, as it seems somewhat unclear and too library-ish) — touch many different parts of the university. Faculty research and publishing fall under Research and Academic Affairs, textbooks are relevant to Student Affairs, IRs and other technical tools (publishing systems like OJS, e.g.) may be the purview of CIS.

What if we brought all of these components together into one big open system for scholarly communication at CUNY? An institutional repository to gather and preserve the scholarly output of the university, plus journal and book publishing platforms to enable us to publish scholarly work, too. Textbook and other course resources created by CUNY faculty for CUNY students. A CUNY Press, perhaps?

And what if this lived under the Libraries? Traditionally it’s been libraries that have collected and provided access to the products of the scholarly communication system: the books, journals, and other materials needed by faculty and students to do academic work. This is not at all a novel proposition: many university libraries are implementing systems that incorporate at least some of these components, like the University of Michigan (http://www.lib.umich.edu/mpublishing) and Indiana University (http://scholarworks.iu.edu/). While neither university’s system includes textbooks specifically, I think course materials are a natural addition, especially at CUNY with our strong commitment to teaching as well as research.

An open scholarly communication system for CUNY wouldn’t be free, of course, though there are many free open source software applications that could be used to build such a system. And a CUNY Press would be a boon to faculty, students, and staff at the university, consistent with the university’s mission to provide affordable access to higher education for all.

+1 to Alycia’s comment, this has been a great discussion!

Like Alycia, I’d hope that we could build something that would work with the Commons. We could use the IR as the “bucket” — the place to store files, which we need regardless as a place for us to deposit articles, files, etc. published in venues outside of whatever CUNY system we’re building. Then there could be several systems that work with/overlay the IR. I think the profiles and other social networking features of the Commons make that a natural to work with the IR. And I know there’s some publishing happening here too — the excellent JITP, for example — but might there also be a place for an OJS installation that everyone at CUNY could use that wasn’t on the Commons? And PKP’s Open Monograph Press or other solutions for books and textbooks (perhaps something like PressForward or Anthologize)? Each of these systems could perhaps use the IR to store/manage/preserve files, and give folks flexibility for how they wanted to publish their stuff.

Re: possibilities for funding open textbooks, would that be something we could request from the Student Tech Fee?

I also agree with Jill that an OA publishing fund would be of great value for encouraging open access publications by faculty.