Graduate Center Research Impact: Pin Drops Keep Falling on My Map!

(Déjà vu? This is a very slight reworking of a post from the Graduate Center Library blog.)

Germany. India. England. France. Canada. Poland. Iran. Sweden. China. Turkey. Netherlands. Egypt. Russia. Japan. Those are just a few of the countries where researchers are downloading the works of Graduate Center students and faculty!

Graduate Center Academic Works, the Graduate Center’s new open access institutional repository, tells us more than we ever knew before about global interest in Graduate Center research. The repository is still small — as of today, it holds just 1,125 works, primarily dissertations and master’s theses, faculty articles and other faculty works, and technical reports from the Computer Science program. But its reach is already broad — those 1,125 works have been accessed 31,349 times…and counting! (See the 10 most downloaded items.)

And now we can all watch what’s being downloaded where by visiting the repository’s animated download map (also visible on the bottom of the main GC Academic Works page)!

Map showing some of the downloads from Academic Works on March 11, 2015
Map showing some of the downloads from Academic Works on March 11, 2015

Furthermore, anyone with one or more items in Academic Works receives monthly readership reports with information about how much their works have been accessed. It’s never been easier to track the popularity and impact of your work, or to reach audiences you otherwise wouldn’t have reached — largely through Google and Google Scholar searches.

Lots of East Coast downloads on March 11!
Lots of East Coast downloads on March 11!

GC-affiliated faculty, want to improve the readership and impact of your work? Submit your scholarly and creative works — articles, book contributions, conference presentations, slideshows, posters, data sets, etc. Submitting is as simple as completing a form — see the step-by-step instructions.

Want to raise the profile of your program? Talk to your colleagues about uploading their works as well! Or invite Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication, to a meeting to give an explanation and demonstration of Academic Works.

Want to improve the visibility of your center or institute? Contact Jill Cirasella to inquire about creating an Academic Works section for your center or institute!

A download in Seychelles!
A download in Seychelles!

(Graduate Center students, we’re doing a phased launch and are not accepting student works other than dissertations and theses quite yet. But stay tuned because we will in the near future!)

Have questions? Not sure which publishers allow you to upload copies of your articles? Want to get some one-on-one instruction before you begin? Contact Jill Cirasella — she’s happy to help by email, over the phone, or in person.

Grad Center Faculty Workshop: Why & How to Submit to Academic Works

academic-works-oct-2014

Graduate Center faculty, did you know that the vast majority of journals allow authors to make their articles (either the pre-refereed version, the post-refereed version, or the publisher-branded PDF) freely available online?  However, the responsibility usually lies with you, the author, to do the online posting, and many journals specify that you can only post in a non-commercial institutional repository (as opposed to sites like Academia.edu).

Happily, the Graduate Center now has an institutional repository, Academic Works, ready to accept, store, and preserve your works — journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, data sets, etc.  (Read more about Academic Works.)  And the library is hosting a workshop next week to explain why and how to upload your works:

Faculty Workshop: How to Submit to Academic Works
(Open to GC and CUNY doctoral faculty and research assistants)
Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 1-2pm
Graduate Center Library, Room C196.03 (concourse level inside library)

Eventbrite - Faculty Workshop: How to Submit to Academic Works

We’ll cover the reasons why to submit in the workshop, but here’s a preview:

  • Posting your works online helps you find the widest possible readership.  (Most libraries can only afford to subscribe to a fraction of all scholarly journals.)
  • Articles that are freely available online are cited more by other articles – it’s called the “open access advantage” (read about it here).
  • Posting your works in the institutional repository makes them more findable by Google and Google Scholar.
  • Academic Works will send you monthly download statistics so you can see how often your works are being accessed and what searches led people to your works.
  • Unlike many disciplinary repositories, Academic Works accepts any kind of scholarly work – not just articles.
  • If your publisher requires an embargo period before your work can be made open access, Academic Works can count down the embargo for you and automatically open the work up when the embargo expires.
  • Institutional repositories last longer than personal websites (which are generally tied to your employment at CUNY or domain name registration payments)!

The actual act of submitting your work is simple and straightforward, but we’ll cover all the steps in the workshop too.

What about graduate students?  We welcome research assistants to attend this workshop with you or on your behalf.  However, the repository is not yet ready to accept articles, etc. by graduate students themselves.  (We’ll get there soon!)

Can’t make it but want to know more?  Contact Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication, jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu.

Dissertation Dilemma: To Embargo or Not to Embargo?

(Déjà vu? This post is a very slight reworking of a post by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz that appeared yesterday on the Graduate Center Library blog.)

fork in road
Photo is © Daniel Oines, used under a
Creative Commons Attribution license.

Now that the first batch of dissertations is available in Graduate Center Academic Works, the Graduate Center’s new open access institutional repository, students and faculty are once again wondering whether it’s better to make dissertations open access immediately or embargo them (keep them private, unavailable to readers and researchers) for a year or two or more.

The GC Library takes this issue seriously — in fact, so seriously that last spring we co-hosted “Share It Now or Save It For Later: Making Choices about Dissertations and Publishing,” an event that tackled the question of whether making a dissertation open access affects the author’s ability to publish the work as a book. For background information and relevant readings, see the handout distributed at the event.

Below are highlights from the speakers’ remarks:

Jill Cirasella (Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communications at the Graduate Center) introduced the moderator and co-sponsors.

 

Polly Thistlethwaite (Chief Librarian of the Graduate Center and moderator of the event) provided some context for the conversation, discussing student anxieties about releasing dissertations and announcing the arrival of the GC’s institutional repository.

 

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association) discussed the difficulty of deciding what to do with a dissertation at “a moment of peak anxiety” but argued that “the thing that’s deposited might get somebody started being interested in the question that you’re working on, but it doesn’t detract from the desirability of that final, really polished well-thought-through project [i.e., a book based on the dissertation].”

 

Philip Leventhal (Editor for Literary Studies, Journalism, and U.S. History, Columbia University Press) discussed the economics of publishing authors’ first books and analyzed the differences between a dissertation and a first book. He described what he looks for in proposals for first books and concurred with Kathleen that a dissertation-based book is a “different entity” from the dissertation itself. Students and advisers will likely be comforted by his statement that “[i]n my time at Columbia, it’s never come up that we’ve decided not to publish a book because it was available online.”

 

Jerome Singerman (Senior Humanities Editor, University of Pennsylvania Press) sided with the embargo. He reminded the audience that university presses are subject to market forces, summarized historical changes in library purchasing patterns, and argued that the market for a dissertation-based book is smaller if the dissertation is available open access. He also discussed the role of approval plans in library book acquisitions. (For a contrasting picture of how dissertations factor into approval plans, see the reprinted message from Michael Zeoli from YBP, aka Yankee Book Peddler.)

 

Gregory Donovan (Assistant Professor, Sociology and Urban Studies, Saint Peter’s University [now Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University] and Graduate Center alumnus) discussed why and how he made his dissertation open access. He began with a reminder that a graduate’s first goal is getting a job, which requires getting your name and your work known — which is facilitated by making your work open access. (Please note that the Graduate Center has deactivated the ProQuest paid open access option that Gregory referred to. Students now make their dissertation open access simply by choosing not to embargo it in Academic Works.)

 

Colleen Eren (Assistant Professor, Criminal Justice, LaGuardia Community College and Graduate Center alumna) reported that the fact that she embargoed her dissertation did not, in the end, affect the interest of publishers in her work. Her closing line summarized the view of most of the panel: “[t]he lesson of my experience is that perhaps embargoing is not as big a deal as it’s being blown up to be because the final product that you’re going to negotiate with the editor is going to be so vastly different that it perhaps won’t make that much of a difference.”