Author: Sylvia Orner

This week (October 21-27), we celebrate International Open Access Week!

International Open Access Week is a global initiative sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) that aims to engage communities in discussion about the importance and benefits of open access.

The ability to share and access research and scholarly information is important to us here at the Weinberg Memorial Library, and we know that it is equally important to our faculty here at the University of Scranton.  Did you know that in 2023, nearly 50% of works that were published by University of Scranton authors and indexed in OpenAlex were published under some form of open access?

We think that’s amazing and would love to hear more!  If you’ve recently published open access and would like to share your experience and what open scholarship means to you, please message us at affordablelearning@scranton.edu.  We’d love to highlight some of your stories as we continue to celebrate Open Access Week.

If you’ve always wondered about publishing open access but were worried about cost prohibitive article processing charges (APCs), fear not!  The Library is excited to announce partnerships with some of our publishers to provide Read and Publish opportunities which will cover APCs in select journals for authors affiliated with the University of Scranton.

Our current agreements cover publishing opportunities with the Association for Computing Machinery, Cambridge University Press, the American Chemical Society, and Springer Nature. You can learn more about these opportunities by visiting our Open Access Publishing Research Guide or reaching out to the OER Committee at affordablelearning@scranton.edu.

We hope you’ll take advantage of these exciting offers, and we look forward to providing more opportunities in the future.

The Weinberg Memorial Library is excited to announce a new search experience that all starts with a single search box.

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) is a new tool that will provide a single-entry point for all of the Library’s collections.  Using this single, unified search, you can now find books, eBooks, journal articles, and streaming media from across the Library’s databases, electronic resources, and print and media collections.  With easy filtering options, you can limit your results by date of publication, publisher, subject, and more.

While you can still look for individual databases in our newly redesigned A-to-Z database list, EDS will fully integrate results from many of our most popular databases meaning you won’t have to conduct the same search across multiple sites.

Want to learn more?  Check out our quick start guide or go to the Library’s homepage to start searching today!

The Weinberg Memorial Library is pleased to offer $1,000 Affordable Learning Implementation Grants to successful faculty applicants.

What is Affordable Learning?

Affordable Learning aims to reduce the financial burden on students by replacing expensive for-cost textbooks and course materials with no-cost or low-cost educational resources. For the Affordable Learning Implementation Grants, faculty may opt to use existing open educational resources (OER), open-source software, open access e-books or journals, or appropriately licensed Library materials to replace all, or some, for-cost course materials.

Accepted applications can also use an additional fund (up to $200) to purchase library materials not currently owned. If you are interested in purchasing new material, please contact Sylvia Orner (sylvia.orner@scranton.edu) prior to submitting your application to ensure that appropriate licensing options are available.

If you are interested in learning more about OER, please visit the Library’s OER Research Guide.  For more information about the Affordable Learning Implementation grants, including reports from previous recipients, please visit the Library’s webpage.

To apply…

Fill out the Application Form.

Awards

The library will award up to four $1,000 Affordable Learning Implementation Grants for Fall/Intersession courses. The Implementation Grants do not need to fund purchasing course materials. The grants are faculty incentive stipends that are subject to taxes. For joint applicants, the stipend will be divided.

A group of Library faculty and teaching faculty representatives will review all applications. The multidisciplinary judging panel will use a rubric that can be found on the OER Research Guide.

Upon completion of the course, recipients must submit a report documenting the impact that the Affordable Learning Implementation Grant had on their section(s) and whether they will continue to use Affordable Learning or OER materials for future classes. Final reports must be submitted to the Dean of the Library and will be published on the Library’s website.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please consult with the librarian liaison to your department to help you prepare your proposal. For more information, contact the Committee at affordablelearning@scranton.edu.

Application Deadline: Friday, April 28, 2023

 

Please join us during Open Education Week for Coffee and Conversations on Affordable Learning.  The OER Committee will be hosting drop-in sessions on Thursday, March 9 (1pm-3pm)  and Friday, March 10 (11:30 am-12:30pm) on the 2^nd floor of the Weinberg Memorial Library (WML 202).  Coffee and cookies will be served.

Feel free to stop in any time during those hours to ask questions or to learn more about the Library’s Affordable Learning initiatives including Affordable Learning Implementation grants and our new open access publishing agreements with Cambridge University Press and the American Chemical Society.

We are also pleased to announce that applications for Affordable Learning Implementation grants are now being accepted for courses to be taught in the Fall 2023 or Intersession 2024 semesters.  All faculty members are welcome to apply, and applications will be accepted until Friday, April 28^th.    Please see the Library’s website for more information or click here to apply.

The Weinberg Memorial Library now offers access to The Chronicle of  Higher Education‘s online presence – Chronicle.com. In addition to the journal content published monthly, Chronicle.com contains daily news, data, and special issues like The Almanac of Higher Education and The Trends Report. University of Scranton students, faculty, and staff have unlimited on and off campus use as well as domain access which allows anyone with a scranton.edu email address to create a free account. Your Chronicle.com account will automatically sync with our site license subscription providing access to all content and additional options to sign up to receive newsletters like Academe Today, Chronicle Review, and more.

For more information on creating your Chronicle.com account, click here.

The Weinberg Memorial Library is pleased to offer a new Recreational Reads collection for the spring semester!  This collection is currently located in front of the Circulation Desk next to the new books and offers a variety of new and popular fiction and nonfiction for your reading enjoyment.

Titles in the recreational reading collection will be available for check out to all students, faculty, and staff for 30 days. Our starter collection features approximately 90 titles with new titles being added periodically so be sure to stop by and browse!  You can also look for titles online by searching “Recreational Reading Collection” in the Library catalog.

Our vendor Wiley is currently experiencing some issues with EZproxy and third party linking. For this reason, you may encounter a message reading “This web property is not accessible via this address” when trying to connect to material from the Wiley Online Library from off campus.
Wiley is aware of the issue and is working on restoring service for all.
Thank you for your patience as we await a resolution.

Just in time for Open Access Week, the Library has started a trial for CloudSource OA.  We invite all students and faculty to take a look at this exciting new resource which makes searching for open access books, journals, and open educational resources a breeze.  This new search platform curates and aggregates open access content from leading publishers and scholars around the world in one convenient and easy to use location.

The trial period will last until October 31st, 2021 so please take some time to explore.  You can link to the resource here or visit our A to Z Database list and click on “Trial Databases”.  If you have any questions or feedback about this database, please contact Sylvia Orner (sylvia.orner@scranton.edu).