News – Page 5 – Mason Publishing Group

International Open Access Week (October 19-25, 2015)

October 6, 2015January 15, 2018 by Mason Publishing Group

It’s that time of year again – International Open Access Week, October 19-25, 2015, is almost upon us! This will be Mason’s 7th year of celebrating Open Access Week, which began as a student-led national day of action in 2007. See below for our exciting line-up of workshops, presentations, and activities and join us at any or all of these events!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2015

MARS “Deposit-a-thon”

Jeri Wieringa and Claudia Holland (Mason Publishing Group)

Do you have scholarly items that you would like to upload to MARS but just haven’t had the time to start the process? To kick off International Open Access Week (October 19-25), Mason Publishing Group is hosting a MARS “deposit-a-thon” to help you get your scholarship into our institutional repository.

On Monday, October 19, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, we will be in the Fenwick 2nd Floor Conference Room, ready to guide you through the process of setting up an account (if you don’t have one) and uploading content to MARS. Drop by with your CV and, if possible, a laptop, to get advice on your publishers, identify which versions of your published articles you can upload, and start entering those items into MARS. Start International OA Week by releasing your scholarship beyond the paywall!

We will have cookies but BYOD.

Monday, October 19, 1 to 3 p.m., Fenwick Library, 2nd Floor Conference Room, Fairfax Campus

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2015

Tips and Tricks for Sharing Your Research

Wendy Mann (Data Services) and Jeri Wieringa (Mason Publishing Group)

Is your grant funder or publisher requiring that you openly share your data and/or research findings? Are you interested in making versions of your scholarship and data available online with no pay barrier, but are not sure how? Join us on Tuesday, October 20, for “Tips and Tricks for Sharing Your Research.” Presenters will provide an overview of the services offered by the George Mason University Libraries to support researchers in preparing and openly distributing their scholarship.

Topics discussed will include: an overview of the repository services, how you can get your research (manuscripts, data, etc.) into our repository, and guidance on best practices for sharing research. There will be time for Q&A and discussion.

Tuesday, October 20, 3 to 4 p.m., Johnson Center, Gateway Library Instruction Room, Fairfax Campus

Info Table

Come pick up some free swag and ask one of our librarians about Open Access to research and open educational resources! The info tables will also feature materials about ORCID (orcid.org), a free service that provides researchers with a unique identifier to distinguish their research activities from those of others with similar names.

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, 4 to 7:30 p.m., Founders Hall Lobby, Arlington Campus

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, Gateway Library and Fenwick Library, Fairfax Campus

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, Mercer Library, Prince William Campus

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2015

Workshop: How to Make Your Published Articles Open Access

Stephen Robertson (RRCHNM/History & Art History), Jeri Wieringa (Digital Publishing Production Lead, Mason Publishing Group, University Libraries), and Claudia Holland (Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office, Mason Publishing Group, University Libraries)

Regardless of what journals you publish in, you can make your articles freely available online in Mason’s institutional repository, MARS. Making publications open access in this way can raise the visibility of your research, and allow it to be shared with audiences without access to university libraries able to afford to subscribe to the journals in which you publish. In this workshop Claudia Holland (Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office, Mason Publishing Group, University Libraries) and Jeri Wieringa (Digital Publishing Production Lead, Mason Publishing Group, University Libraries) and Stephen Robertson (RRCHNM/History & Art History) will take you through the process of making your publications open access, addressing:

What versions of your articles you can make open access
When you can make your articles open access
How you deposit your open access articles in MARS, GMU’s institutional repository
What you can do with open access articles in MARS

Wednesday, October 21, 12 to 1 p.m., Johnson Center Conference Room A, Fairfax Campus

Info Table

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, 4 to 7:30 p.m., Founders Hall Lobby, Arlington Campus

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, Gateway Library and Fenwick Library, Fairfax Campus

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, Mercer Library, Prince William Campus

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2015

The Open Media (R)Evolution

George Mason University Forensics Team

Online access to media has revolutionized how consumers experience music, television, film, and games. Free or low cost distribution and production models allow us to expand our appreciation for new genres and create exciting new material to share.

Join us on October 22 when student members of the nationally ranked GMU Forensics Team discuss how open media models have changed our role as consumers and as creators of new content. How have they sparked collaboration among established and new partnerships? What does the entertainment industry gain from making their material ‘free’? What are the barriers to this explosion in digital content?

Share your opinions and questions during this free discussion! Light refreshments will be served.

Featured speakers are Samuel Abney, communication major; Natalia Castro, integrative studies; AK Komanduri, government and international politics major; and Nathan Leys, government and international politics major.

Thursday, October 22, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., Alan and Sally Merten Hall, Room 1202, Fairfax Campus

Info Table

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, 4 to 7:30 p.m., Founders Hall Lobby, Arlington Campus

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, Gateway Library and Fenwick Library, Fairfax Campus

Tuesday, October 20 – Thursday, October 22, Mercer Library, Prince William Campus

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2015

Create a Dynamic Classroom Experience Using Open Educational Resources: a workshop for curious educators

Jane Rosecrans, Karyn Pallay, and Josh Watson (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College) and Claudia Holland (George Mason University Libraries)

Online access to free learning materials has allowed educators, like you, more freedom and creativity than ever to tailor their courses. You have the freedom to reuse all types of media, to modify content to suit your pedagogy and your students’ learning styles, and to create completely new material. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to reduce textbook costs for your students!

But how do you know when content on the web can be modified and reused? Can you rely on the purported quality of, for example, open textbooks? What can you do to share materials you create with a broader audience and still get credit for the time and effort you put into them? Why consider using anything but the traditional textbook you have selected for a course? You might already be using open resources in your courses. Are you making this cost-savings known to potential enrollees?

The Virginia Community College System is a nationally recognized leader in using and building open educational resources. Join this experienced team of faculty in an interactive two-hour workshop to explore answers to these questions and learn more about the following topics:

Why OER?
Defining OER Terms and Concepts
Finding and Evaluating OER and free course materials
Building an OER Course
Understanding Creative Commons Licenses and Applying them to your own course materials
Evaluating the Quality and Effectiveness of OER materials in your course
OER and Student Success and Retention

The University Libraries wants to hear how your use of open resources can be supported. Please register for this workshop today and save your place! There are only 35 seats available.

Friday, October 23, 1 to 3 p.m., Johnson Center, Gateway Library Instruction Room, Fairfax Campus

Participate in the International “101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication” Survey

October 6, 2015October 6, 2015 by Mason Publishing Group

What tools do you use in your research workflow? Web of Science or Google Scholar? Zotero or Papers? ORCID or ResearchGate? JCR or Altmetric?

George Mason University faculty and graduate students are invited to take this graphical survey—101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication—about research tool use. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and you can opt to receive a visual characterization of your workflow compared to that of your peer group via email.

https://innoscholcomm.typeform.com/to/Csvr7b?source=4g2M2u

Why participate? You will learn how your use of digital research tools compares to that of your peers, and you may discover some new tools. You’ll inform Mason’s University Libraries about what you use so that we can optimize library services and resources to suit your needs. By taking this survey, developed by librarians at Utrecht University, you are also contributing to a global effort to chart the evolving landscape of scholarly communication. The survey will investigate how tool usage varies by discipline, country, and research role. The survey will run until February 2016.

Preliminary results of this international survey, as well as the final dataset, will be posted on the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication site. The University Libraries will also share our community’s dataset and produce a publicly available report.

The survey link above is unique to the George Mason Community. If you wish to promote the survey to scholars outside of George Mason, please direct them to https://101innovations.wordpress.com/.

Publish your conference proceedings with Mason Publishing

September 29, 2015September 29, 2015 by Mason Publishing Group

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

September 22, 2015November 9, 2015 by Mason Publishing Group

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

September 14, 2015February 2, 2022 by Mason Publishing Group

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.

Coming Soon: The Five George Masons

August 27, 2015September 1, 2015 by Mason Publishing Group

Together with Gunston Hall, George Mason University Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new edition of The Five George Masons: Patriots and Planters of Virginia and Maryland, by Pamela C. Copeland and Richard K. MacMaster, to be released Fall 2015.

First published in 1975, this work tells the history of the George Mason family, from George Mason (I) who arrived in the Colony of Virginia around 1652 through George Mason (V), son of the revolutionary patriot. In tracing the family history of the Masons, Copeland provides important context for understanding the life and work of George Mason (IV), drafter of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and vocal proponent of state and individual rights.

New Theme for OJS Journals

July 30, 2015September 1, 2015 by Mason Publishing Group

Mason Publishing is pleased to announce the release of a responsive theme for journals published on our OJS platform. Featuring larger font sizes, responsive images, and mobile-ready styles, this theme gives a modern look to journals hosted by Mason Publishing.

The source code is available on Github at https://github.com/masonpublishing/OJS-Theme.

Contact Jeri Wieringa at jwiering@gmu.edu to launch your own journal with Mason Publishing or for help configuring the new theme.

OER Part 3: Grants, Advocacy, and Guidelines

October 23, 2014September 1, 2017 by Mason Publishing Group

Learn more about how you can support the adoption and development of high-quality open courses and educational resources by checking out the following resources on grants, OER advocacy, and other OER guidelines. The rest of our series on Open Educational Resources (OER) features collections of open courses, textbooks, and course content that you may use, re-purpose, and distribute for your teaching and learning needs.

Part 1: Course Content and Textbooks | Part 2: Open Courses and MOOCs | Part 4: K-12 Resources | Part 5: Articles and Research

Return to OER overview

Predatory Open Access Publishers

October 9, 2014September 8, 2015 by Mason Publishing Group

Check out Beall’s List of Predatory Open Access Publishers and journals list if you receive manuscript solicitations from purported academic publishers with which you are unfamiliar. University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall expresses caution in dealing with the publishers he lists because invariably they are in it for the money that can be made from charging authors article processing fees. Often these businesses have questionable review practices, bogus editorial boards, and/or their websites mimic the look of well-established publishers. See The Scientist article for Beall’s explanation of how a publisher or journal winds up on one of his lists or read his criteria here.