Texas A&M University
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The Libraries’ working Open Access Policy is:

The Texas A&M University Libraries “is an active advocate of open access, believing that open access can help address both the price barriers and the permission barriers that undermine global access to the products of Texas A&M University’s scholarly and creative work, as well as helping alleviate the serious issue of providing Texas A&M scholars access to the world’s scholarly literature due to rising subscription costs. Our Libraries’ programs seek to provide the tools and services that remove barriers to scholars publishing their scholarship as open access.”

The University’s institutional repository is called OAKTrust and was established in 2013.

The Libraries’ support for Open Access seeks to provide the following benefits to the University:
INCREASED VISIBILITY
INCREASED IMPACT
REDUCED COST
INCREASED SUCCESS TO COMPETE FOR and WIN GRANTS

(Source: Texas A&M University Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications, https://library.tamu.edu/services/scholarly_communication/)

The Texas A&M University Libraries (Libraries) is charged with maintaining the University’s Open Access Policy. Within the Libraries, it is the Office of Scholarly Communication’s responsibility to manage the Open Access Policy as well as to report to and communicate with the University’s Faculty Senate.

The Libraries’ working Open Access Policy is:

The Texas A&M University Libraries “is an active advocate of open access, believing that open access can help address both the price barriers and the permission barriers that undermine global access to the products of Texas A&M University’s scholarly and creative work, as well as helping alleviate the serious issue of providing Texas A&M scholars access to the world’s scholarly literature due to rising subscription costs. Our Libraries’ programs seek to provide the tools and services that remove barriers to scholars publishing their scholarship as open access.”

The University’s institutional repository, called OAKTrust (established in 2013), is charged with collecting, preserving and distributing “the scholarly output of the University, including scholarly articles and books, electronic theses and dissertations, conference proceedings, technical reports, digitized library collections, and data sets.”

OAKTrust, in addition to providing an online archive, provides “a set of services that a university offers to members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.”

OAKTrust is in fact made up of two databases – the archival database/repository and another that provides a platform that supports both the collection of ongoing research data and the facilitation of online collaboration between research entities and/or individuals.

The Libraries’ support for Open Access seeks to provide the following benefits to the University:

INCREASED VISIBILITY
Open access literature has the potential to be much more accessible than print-only or subscription-based publications. For researchers, the Open Access model removes the barriers, such as subscription costs, to accessing literature, and the inconveniences associated with the traditional model. As more scholarly information is made freely available, scholars are relying much more on materials that they can find and retrieve online. Authors, with the possibilities of alternative accessibility, must consider how their research can be found and used.

INCREASED IMPACT
The obvious result of higher visibility of open access literature is that open access leads to increased impact and a greater citation rate. Multiple studies conducted over the last several years show that open access materials are cited at a higher rate than articles that are published traditionally.

REDUCED COST
For libraries, open access relieves the burden associated with the ever-increasing cost of serials subscriptions (Since 2000 Serials inflation has risen 113% compared to the national CPI rate of inflation of 39%). Many academic libraries, including those at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Cornell University, are experiencing subscription costs that are growing faster than their purchasing budgets. These cases demonstrate that a continued reliance on a subscription based serials collection my result in reduced or no access to research conducted by fellow researchers.

INCREASED SUCCESS TO COMPETE FOR and WIN GRANTS
Many grant-giving organizations, including the NSF and NIH, require that pre-publications and data sets be housed in open access databases. OAKTrust provides the database and needed support needed to meet these grant prerequisites.

To further mitigate rising resource costs the Libraries’ provide financial support and incentives for Open Access in general and specifically the University’s OakTrust institutional repository, and the OA Textbook project:

•OAKFund:
The Open Access to Knowledge Fund (OAKFund) at Texas A&M University underwrites publication charges for scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books published in fully Open Access publications. For the 2017/2018 fiscal year, the University Libraries provided $105,000 to faculty and full-time researchers. This is a 24% increase from the previous year and a 110% increase from FY2013/2014. This year, as in previous years, 100% of the funds were expended. In addition, in FY2017/2018, began to offer funding to graduate students.

•PeerJ Memberships:
OAKFund also offers a limited number of PeerJ Lifetime Publication Plans. Eligible authors must have an article accepted for publication in PeerJ. Unlike a one-time payment of publication charges, PeerJ membership lasts a lifetime, allowing an author to publish one article per year. Even if eligible authors leave Texas A&M University, future publications accepted in PeerJ will be free of charge.

•BioMed Central APC Discount:
BioMed Central publishes 272 peer-reviewed open access journals. Texas A&M University is a Supporter Member which means that when you publish in any BioMed Central journal you will receive a 15% discount on the article-processing charge. The discount is automatically applied when BMC sends the invoice for the Author Processing Charge (APC).

•Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Gold-for-Gold OA Vouchers:
As a subscriber to Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals, Texas A&M University Libraries receives a type of "rebate" for our investment in the form of open access vouchers. These vouchers may be used by Texas A&M authors to publish their papers in RSC journals free of charge, as a Gold Open Access (OA) article, without paying the normal Article Publication Fee (APF).

•OA Textbooks:
In collaboration with the Open Textbook Library Initiative at the University of Minnesota (http://open.umn.edu), this emerging project seeks to recruit faculty to attend local workshops that guide the review of available OA textbooks and convince the instructors to adopt an OA textbook for their class. In FY2017/2018 7 classes used either Open Access Textbooks or Open Access Custom Course Packs. This represented a total of 3,378 students with cost savings to the students of $595K.

•OA Textbook Recognition Awards:
In an effort to recognize effective applications of OA textbooks the Libraries in conjunction with the University, open access textbook awards and incentives. Each totaled $1,500 and five were awarded in FY2017/2018.

(Source: Texas A&M University Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications, https://library.tamu.edu/services/scholarly_communication/)

OAKTRUST
The University Libraries Digital Repository (OAKTrust) “is an open access digital repository for collecting, preserving, and distributing the scholarly output of the Texas A&M University and its partners. It provides increased access to the products of the University's research and scholarship endeavors, fosters the preservation of these digital works for future generations, promotes increasingly rapid advances in scholarly communication, and helps deepen community understanding of the value of higher education.”

TEXAS DIGITAL LIBRARIES
Texas A&M University is a founding partner of the Texas Digital Libraries (TDL). The TDL is a Texas- based collaboration of institutional repositories from 22 “small and large colleges, public and private universities, and academic medical centers from every region of Texas.”

OAKSEARCH
This is a program to enable access to large collections of open access materials (e.g. books, journals and other scholarly documents) without having to pass through authentication protocols – thus enabling anyone to view and use the open access information resources.

OAKFUND
“The Open Access to Knowledge Fund (OAKFund) at Texas A&M University underwrites publication charges for scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books published in fully Open Access publications.”

OATEXTBOOKS
“In collaboration with the Open Textbook Library Initiative at the University of Minnesota (http://open.umn.edu), The Texas A&M University Libraries seeks to recruit instructional faculty to utilize, with the courses they teach, open access text books and resources as well as develop customized course packs that are built on open access materials. Stipends are offered to instructional faculty to incentivize their interest and participation in the University’s Open Access Textbook Initiative.

SCHOLARY REPUTATION & IMPACT
The University Libraries provides numerous tools and services to provide visibility of the Texas A&M University’s faculty and scholarly impact. These includes:
• The use of Scholars@TAMU which is “a profile system that hosts searchable expertise for faculty and TAMU organizations by gathering data from institution-leave/enterprise systems, publicly available research data (e.g. grants and publications), and other authoritative sources. The data is compiled into a profile that you can be edited to best represent a faculty member’s scholarship and expertise. This is achieved through the use of ORCID and VIVO.
• The use of ORCID (Open Researchers and Contributor ID), a standard and service, “to help researchers establish and maintain scholarly identity”
• The use of VIVO, which “is a part of the growing suite of web-based tools and services are being developed that can enhance the visibility of faculty research, enrich their scholarly identity, and support the discovery of potential collaborators. These projects rely on creating unique identifiers for scholars, harvesting the metadata associated with their scholarly work, developing semantic web applications and databases, and providing campus outreach and training.”
• Impact Metrics which “is an emerging project that seeks to identify new and useful measures of scholarly reputation” that will review “effect of open access on citation rates” as well as “support faculty going up for Promotion & Tenure (P&T).”
• Increase grant competitiveness especially those award through the NSF

RESEARCH DATA MANAGEMENT
Training, support and hosting of data sets to meet funding agency requirements.

SCHOLARY COMMUNICATIONS FACULTY AWARDS
“The Student Government Association (SGA) at Texas A&M University has partnered with the University Libraries to establish two annual awards for faculty members who go above and beyond in adopting and demonstrating exemplary usage of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in their classrooms or taking active roles in the creation or dissemination of these open access materials. These awards seek to recognize faculty who promote or contribute to a culture of utilizing free academic resources and knowledge sharing in order to lessen the financial burden on students, and mitigate the overall cost of receiving an education.

•SGA Open Educator Award
Awarded to faculty members who demonstrate exemplary usage of open access materials in their own classrooms. Examples of such use include but are not limited to: utilizing free textbooks, providing free electronic notes or textbook alternatives, using/incorporating free educational resources/materials in courses, etc.
•SGA Open Education Champion Award
Awarded to a faculty member who demonstrates the most compelling and significant positive impact in areas related to open educational resources, with additional weight given to action that contribute to or use Texas A&M’s OAKTrust institutional repository. Examples include but are not limited to: (1) Public sharing of research, works, projects, course notes, or other educational resources in OAKTrust or elsewhere; (2) championing the goal of making use of free educational resources beyond the faculty member’s own classroom. For more information about depositing your work in OAKTrust.”

(Source: Texas A&M University Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications, https://library.tamu.edu/services/scholarly_communication/)

Estimated percentage of scholarly articles published annually by the institution's faculty and staff that are deposited in a designated repository. This data field is new for this year's STAR's report and a system needs to be put in place to calculate this percentage. The percentage will not be available in this reporting cycle but steps are now in place to gather and report in subsequent STAR's reports.