2 seek new UA post to run research depot

FAYETTEVILLE — Two candidates to oversee an effort to expand the public availability of scholarly research will give presentations beginning today at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Faculty in May approved a policy encouraging the voluntary submission of academic articles to a UA repository. The open access policy gives the university nonexclusive distribution rights, with the research published online at scholarworks.uark.edu.

Following a national search, two candidates will interview to lead what will be known as UA’s Office of Scholarly Communications, said Carolyn Henderson Allen, UA’s dean of libraries.

Melody Herr will speak at 9 a. m. today at UA’s Donald W. Reynolds Center Auditorium. Herr is senior acquiring editor for politics and government at the University of Michigan Press.

Mark Konecny will speak at 9 a. m. Thursday, also at the Reynolds Center. Konecny is the associate director and librarian at the Los Angelesbased Institute of Modern Russian Culture.

The scholarworks.uark.edu site began publishing articles about six months ago, Allen said. So far, mostly student research has been published, including undergraduate theses.

However, several articles from the Wal- Mart Sustainability Case Project, a research effort involving UA business faculty, have been published at the site. Articles highlight interviews done with Wal- Mart executives about company strategies to reduce environmental waste and utilize renewable energy sources, for example.

Allen is on the steering committee for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a group that promotes the open access model. She emphasized that several universities have undertaken similar open access efforts, including Harvard and the University of Kansas.

At the University of California, the university system’s Academic Senate approved an open access policy in 2013 that covered 10 campuses.

“Our challenge is always to recruit content, and that’s a challenge for, I think, every repository we’ve ever talked to,” said Mitchell Brown, a research librarian and scholarly communications coordinator at the University of California, Irvine.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that nonacademic users have accessed the work of University of California researchers, Brown said, noting an apparent interest in scholarship related to that state’s drought.

Allen said that while funding is assured for the new hire, a budget has not yet been drawn up for the new Office of Scholarly Communications. The leader of the office will report to Allen and also Jim Rankin, UA’s vice provost for research and economic development.

Allen also said that UA has begun an open educational resources initiative that might be overseen by the same office. Open educational resources are generally free of copyright restrictions. If such resources take the place of traditional textbooks, their adoption in the classroom can lower costs to students.

“We have a committee in place that includes library faculty as well as some of the teaching faculty and the bookstore, and they’re trying to come up with some plans and opportunities for faculty to become more familiar with open educational resources and to be able to produce them as well,” Allen said.