Publishing, Repositories, and Open Access

Presentation to SILS 690:279 about the scholarly publishing process, repository systems and their relationship to open access

Content liberation! How increasing the institutional repository content turned into faculty outreach services

In January 2016, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty adopted the Open Access Policy, which encouraged faculty to deposit their articles into the Carolina Digital Repository. The UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries Open Access Implementation team was then charged with increasing the amount of content in the Carolina Digital Repository and raising faculty awareness of the Open Access Policy and author rights issues. In this paper, we will discuss the challenges of locating and harvesting content, the outreach strategies we used with faculty from diverse departments, and the assessment of the overall project’s success. We also share findings from our analysis of the content we collected and recommendations for replicating or scaling up similar projects

Content Liberation Project Summary

The UNC Libraries Open Access Implementation team has been charged with increasing the amount of content in the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) and raising faculty awareness of the UNC Open Access Policy and author rights issues. The team has determined that providing access to legal versions of paywalled content will best address the charge and will demonstrate the value of the CDR to the faculty. Therefore, the team has developed an overarching project, Content Liberation, to extract content from behind paywalls. The general goals for the Content Liberation project are: 1) Fill the repository with high-quality content. 2) Raise faculty awareness of the Open Access policy. 3) Identify areas of repository and service growt

Content Liberation Update, August 2018

In 2018, the Open Access Implementation Team (the Team) conducted three Content Liberation pilot projects to ingest UNC-authored content into the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR). A summary of each project is available in Content Liberation Overview. This report summarizes our current progress on these projects and suggests recommendations for progress in the next academic year. A follow-up report will be available in August 2019

Conducting a Baseline Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Assessment of Institutional Repository Content

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are central to repository and overall library work. Although DEI principles have been incorporated into many repository programs for digital collections, institutional repository initiatives have lagged. However, DEI principles can and should be applied to institutional repository collections to ensure equity and representation. The Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) is the institutional repository for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and aims to collect scholarly material that is representative of the research conducted at the university. In support of UNC-CH’s open access policy, the university’s libraries have launched three major content recruitment initiatives in the past four years: a large vendor-supplied open access article batch upload, ongoing CV review for faculty, and annual highly cited researchers batch uploads. After loading content from these projects, it was apparent that the initiatives identified articles concentrated in the sciences. UNC-CH has a strong humanities and social sciences focus, which it was feared would be obscured by the large import of science content. Additionally, it was suspected that the CDR might now reflect demographics that were not aligned with those of the university, and this would affect the CDR’s mission of scholarly representation. In 2021, the libraries conducted a baseline assessment of the CDR’s content projects to see if they aligned with the demographics of the university. The outcomes of the assessment will inform resource allocation for future projects that promote DEI principles. This assessment looked at subject area coverage, author gender, and author self-identified race in all three CDR content initiatives. Results were compared with official UNC-CH demographics to determine if articles loaded as part of the projects reflected the demographics of the university and thus are broadly representative of the university’s scholarly output. A white paper describing the findings in detail is available in the CDR. This chapter explores the process used to conduct the assessment and reflect on lessons learned. It also presents key takeaways for readers interested in conducting their own assessments

Gender and Race in Carolina Digital Repository Content Methodology Review

In 2021, I conducted a review of subject area, gender and race representation in three Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) projects. The goal of the review was to determine if the content produced by the three projects were representative of the demographics of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). I used a publicly available, widely distributed list of faculty members who self-identified as Black, indigenous or a person of color and compared the list to CDR deposits. Also, I used a frequently cited API tool to determine author gender, based on recommendations from several bibliometrics studies. At the end of the review, I recommended further research and reflection on ways to identify gender and race of CDR authors in an accurate and ethical manner. This report represents the first step in that reflection, and it will be an ongoing and iterative process. For this assessment, I first looked at studies which estimated race and/or gender composition of their subjects. I then categorized the methodologies to determine the most used. In this follow-up review, I will report on the results of my investigation into alternate methods to identify gender and race of authors, provide an evaluation of the previous study based on my findings and provide a recommendation for future work

Carolina Digital Repository Update 2020

This report summarizes activity in the Carolina Digital Repository from January 1, 2020 through November 30, 2020. It describes key initiatives, growth and usage of the repository as well as a description of future initiatives

Carolina Digital Repository Update 2021

This report summarizes activity in the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) from January 1, 2021 through November 30, 2021. It describes key initiatives, growth and usage of the repository as well as a description of future initiatives

The Carolina Digital Repository During COVID-19: Responding to a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified conversations about widespread open access to scholarly literature. Institutional repositories such as the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) can play a key part in the dissemination of scholarly research. Access to coronavirus research was particularly important for the CDR, as UNC-CH is one of the leading institutions in the world for coronavirus research. The pandemic also had local impacts to our work. In March 2020, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) moved to online learning in response to rising coronavirus cases. Due to this change, many UNC-CH Libraries staff members and student workers needed work that could be done remotely. In this presentation, I will describe several projects which we undertook this year to increase access and dissemination of research, and to provide UNC Libraries staff with work which could be completed remotely and asynchronously. For each project, I will share the team’s successes, failures, lessons learned and plans for the future. I will also describe enhancements the team made to our Hyrax-based repository to facilitate the success of these projects

Subject Coverage, Gender and Race in Carolina Digital Repository Content

The Carolina Digital Repository is the institutional repository for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The CDR is built on Samvera Hyrax and accepts all types of scholarly material from the UNC-CH community, including articles, book chapters, posters, presentations, video and research data. In support of UNC-CH's Open Access Policy, the UNC Libraries Open Access Implementation Team was tasked in 2017 with increasing the amount of faculty scholarship in the CDR. The Team identified three strategies, which we collectively named “Content Liberation”: 1. Author citations/1foldr: Originally, CDR staff planned to conduct affiliation searches in the UNC Libraries subscription databases. After the UNC Libraries purchased a 1foldr report from 1Science, this project was adapted to load content from that report. 2. CV review: CDR staff planned to review faculty CVs for deposit-eligible scholarship on an as-needed basis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this project was adapted into a work from home project for library workers and students. 3. Highly Cited Researchers: Using Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers lists, CDR staff identified high impact, deposit-eligible scholarship. To discover the gaps in coverage, I conducted an analysis of the subject areas, gender and racial makeup of authors included in the three approaches to content identification. The research questions in this analysis are: 1. Does CDR content fully represent the scholarly output of the university? 2. Do CDR’s initiatives and content sources ameliorate or replicate existing inequities in the academy? 3. How can CDR bring attention to the work of marginalized groups