Tag: cuny

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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.

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Introducing Megan Wacha, Your New Scholarly Communications Librarian!

megan cropped 2Open access advocates around CUNY are thrilled to announce the arrival (and extremely productive first few weeks) of Megan Wacha, CUNY’s new Scholarly Communications Librarian, based at the Office of Library Services. While many CUNY librarians have long engaged, both formally and informally, with open access, repositories, and other scholarly communications topics, Megan is CUNY’s first librarian dedicated entirely to scholarly communications, and I know I speak for many when I say we’re eager — nay, ravenous — for her expertise, collaboration, and leadership.

Megan will be engaged with a wide variety of scholarly communications conversations, but her initial focus will be developing and managing CUNY’s new institutional repository, Academic Works. She will also co-chair OLS’s brand new Scholarly Communications Committee. And, of course, she’ll be a frequent blogger right here at Open Access @ CUNY.

Before coming to CUNY, Megan was Research and Instruction Librarian for the Performing Arts at Barnard College, where she led outreach on scholarly communications topics, served on the advisory committee to Columbia’s institutional repository (Academic Commons), provided guidance on fair use and copyright issues, trained editors of an open access undergraduate journal, and helped support various digital projects. She is also an active Wikipedian — her Wikipedia efforts include working to increase contributions by and about women and people from other marginalized groups. (And we can’t leave out the fact that she won Knowledge Unlatched’s open access meme competition!)

Many of you have already met Megan, but if you haven’t, you are welcome to reach out to her at megan.wacha@cuny.edu.

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Attention, CUNY Faculty: Get Paid to Learn about Open Educational Resources (OER)!

"Global Open Educational Resources Logo" by Jonathasmello - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
“Global Open Educational Resources Logo” by Jonathasmello – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

CUNY’s Office of Library Services just announced an exciting (and paid!) opportunity for full-time and part-time faculty to learn about open educational resources (OER), which include open access textbooks and other freely available, online instructional materials:

CUNY’s Office of Library Services is sponsoring an online workshop designed to provide an overview of Open Education Resources (OER) for CUNY faculty looking to integrate OER into their classes.

Open content and open access textbooks are instructional resources that can be used, reused, often remixed and customized under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others while ensuring authors retain copyright to their work. (Read more here.)

OER present an alternative to the high cost of textbooks for students. OER are freely available and distributable course materials. For this workshop the focus will be on OER materials that are:

  • Available at no cost to faculty and to students
  • Can be modified by faculty
  • Can be redistributed by faculty with changes to the original OER work.

Faculty can choose pre-existing materials, just as they do with traditional textbooks, but they can reconfigure content as they see fit, pulling elements of one text into elements of a different one, even rewriting sections, if the faculty member wishes.

OER are not just textbook material. They can include anything from entire course shells, to syllabi, to assignments, to presentations.

For students, OER means less money spent on course materials and course materials that are specifically tailored to the work of their professor. Instead of forcing a textbook into a pedagogical structure, the textbook and course materials are driven by individual pedagogy.

This class is made up of four modules, plus a final project. Each module is made up of readings, videos and discussions. Each workshop section will be comprised of no more than 20 participants in order to foster in intimate forum to share OER work and get feedback from colleagues and the facilitator. The goal is to finish the workshop with a better understanding of OER and also to come away with some work that can be immediately integrated into classes.

The workshops will be entirely on line and last for a two week period requiring approximately 10 hours of work. The activities and assignments can be completed on a flexible schedule during the time period. To be eligible for this workshop, applicants must be teaching faculty scheduled to teach in the spring 2015 semester. Department chair and Chief Academic Officer sign-off will be required. Faculty successfully completing the workshop will receive compensation of 10 hours at the non-teaching adjunct rate for participation.

Click here for registration.

Questions? Please contact: Ann Fiddler at Ann.Fiddler@cuny.edu or 646-664-8060.