Month: September 2015

Publish your conference proceedings with Mason Publishing

Screen shot of the Innovations in Teaching & Learning Conference Proceedings.Mason Publishing Group recently partnered with the Center for Teaching and Faculty Excellence (CTFE) to publish the proceedings from this year’s Innovation in Teaching and Learning Conference. The event, which was sponsored in part by the University Libraries and Mason Publishing Group, was very successful, bringing in over 300 attendees and featuring the scholarship of many of our colleagues in the library.

Built using our journal publishing platform, Open Journal Systems, the Conference Proceedings served as an online guide to the conference, providing access to session information and presentation abstracts in a mobile-friendly format. It will continue to serve as a place for presenters to share their papers and presentation materials with colleagues locally and across the broad academic community. The publication has been very successful, with 71 unique visitors to the site during the two days of the conference and pre-conference workshops, many of whom returned to the site multiple times.

We invite you to browse the Conference Proceedings and learn more about the excellent panels and posters presented at http://journals.gmu.edu/ITLCP.

Publishing conference proceedings is a priority for the Mason Publishing Group. There is an abundance of innovative research taking place and being shared on the George Mason campuses, but that research is at risk of being ephemeral without mechanisms to publish, share, and preserve. As you plan for upcoming conferences, consider publishing the proceedings with Mason Publishing.

To learn more about publishing conference proceedings with the Mason Publishing Group, contact John Warren at jwarre13@gmu.edu

Public Access Plans for Federally Funded Research

In the “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” policy memorandum released in February 2013, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren directed Federal agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication. The memorandum also required researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.

The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public—over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.

Click here to see the list of agencies that have made their implementation plans public.

The Scholarly Communication Program at Columbia University has also put together brief summaries of the agencies’ proposed solutions for providing public access to articles and digital data sets.

Get recognized with ORCID

To assist you in your research, from the grant writing phase through publication of your results, the University Libraries encourages you to register with ORCID to generate a unique identifier that can be tied to all your scholarship throughout your professional career.

What is an ORCID identifier and how does it help you? Once registered (only takes about 30 seconds), you are assigned a persistent identifier (16-digit URI; e.g., https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1825-0097) that distinguishes you from every other researcher, including individuals with the same or a similar name. That is, ORCID serves as a registry that disambiguates names, specifically for researchers. Your unique identifier ensures that the research objects you produce (or have already produced), such as articles, reviews, datasets, media, experiments, lab notebooks, and more, are affiliated with your name and your name only.

For more detailed information, please see orcid.org or this short video “What is ORCID?” from ORCID on Vimeo.

Increasingly, an ORCID ID is required when submitting grant and patent applications, and it is useful at the outset of submitting manuscripts and peer reviews to a publisher. It can be affiliated with items and research data you deposit in the Mason Archival Repository Service (MARS) (or, for large data files, Dataverse) for long-term access and preservation. There is no limit to the records you create—ORCID is free.

ORCID uses APIs to support system-to-system communication and authentication, both to upload and export citation data. You may use your ORCID account as your digital research profile, with updated records pushed into ORCID by trusted individuals on your behalf. You have the option to make your profile as open or private as you like.

As a proponent of research stewardship, the University Libraries encourages the Mason community to create and use an ORCID ID.