 This is Jessica Hagman at Alden Library, and today I am here on the first floor of Alden in the Center for International Collections, and we're going to talk to Ereba Dawson-Ando and Lorraine Wakna, who are two subject librarians here at Alden, and they're going to tell us about some events that are coming up for Open Access Week and in support of textbook alternatives here at Alden Library. So I'm going to turn you around and let you talk to them. So if you could introduce yourselves and maybe tell us a little bit about what you mean by Open Access for people who haven't heard that term before. Sure. I'm Ereba Dawson-Ando, subject librarian for African Studies and Social Sciences. I manage the African Studies collections and also instruction and consultations, and my Social Sciences portfolio includes geography, international development. So you keep busy. I'm working with lots of different departments. Yes. How about you, Lorraine, for you working with these days? Hi. I'm Lorraine Wakna, and I'm a performing arts librarian as well as African American Studies librarian and English literature. So you're also keeping busy with lots of different departments. Yes. All right. So Open Access Week is coming up in two weeks, and you both are working on groups and how the events are going on, so Open Access, what are we talking about? Okay. So both Lorraine and I are in the COP for scholarly communication. So we work on the library's initiatives on Open Access, or on Open Access and OERs, and we have various initiatives here, but Open Access is the free and immediate online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and reuse these results without limitations or minimum limitations. And every year in October, there's Open Access Week. It's a global event where they use it as an opportunity to explain what Open Access is and also to share its benefits and to educate the academic and research community on the various initiatives available and also to help inspire a wider participation in it. So this year, it's Open Access Week. It's October 23rd through 29th, and in all of them, we're going to have three events. And I'll let Lorraine talk about the first one, the OTN workshop. Yeah. We're going to start actually the week before, and it's going to be two different workshops next Tuesday. One is for faculty, and OTN is the open textbook network. And what we have done is invited faculty to join us, and we have about 40 faculty signed up. And we have two visitors coming, one from Ohio State and one from, I think, University of Michigan that are both scholarly communications librarians. Wait, from Ohio State and Michigan? Yes. That's kind of funny. Yeah. Hopefully there won't be a game. Cool. The presentes. Yes. The other one is from University of Massachusetts. Oh, I'm sorry. Amherst. Amherst, yeah. Okay. Totally different. Okay. Totally different. Starting with that. Sorry about that. Never mind. And in the morning, the faculty will do a workshop with them where they, the open textbook network is, they are working on textbook affordability for students. So we would like faculty to adopt open textbook for their classes. So in this session next Tuesday, faculty have been invited to come and work with these two different librarians, and they also will be writing a review of different textbooks that are on their network. Lots of textbooks are on the open textbook network. And the more they get reviewed by faculty, the more likely they are to be adopted by other faculty. So that's a really good thing. It's also kind of part of our answer to helping students with the cost of textbooks. And then in the afternoon, the librarians have a session where we then talk with the same two people from Amherst and Ohio State about what we can do as librarians to help promote open textbooks, how to discuss it with our faculty, you know, how to raise awareness about the benefits of open textbooks. And this is a continuation of some other activities that have been going on here, right? Like a number of faculty have already worked with their subject librarian to use either an open textbook or identify open materials or to use a library-based resource. Like I have a number of faculty in the Scripps College who've been working on using library resources instead of having students buy textbooks. Right. That was part of the project before. Yes, that's the library's old textbook initiative, where we've had, I think, two programs where we paid faculty money to help them with providing free resources for students as much as possible to lower their textbook costs. Because the state of Ohio has a program where they require universities to lower textbook costs. That's Ohio University's attempts to meet that government initiative. Yes. And so we've had two. The first one was, what, two years ago? And we had several faculty, about 30 faculty, participate. We had workshops in the library, yes, and then show them what resources they can use and then what, how to go about it. And then last year we had, I don't remember, I thought that was last year. No, we had two. We had the workshop series last year, right? Yes. Last year was the workshop series we had before, it was the actual, yeah, so it's an ongoing. It's ongoing. Yes. This is a continuation of this work. It's a continuation, yes. And the workshop series was six different events that we demonstrated to faculty and the different resources we have in the library that we already have purchased, that we already have access to in order to encourage them to use those resources in their classes. So that was, that was, I think it was really helpful for faculty. I don't think they knew about all the different things that they could just use without paying any kind of money or charging their students any kind of money. Okay, so Open Access Week, there's a couple other events. Can you tell us about what's happening? Yes, we have two events and our aim is to provide an opportunity for Ohio University research community to learn about open access publishing, its economic benefits to students and faculty and to help inspire a wider participation in the initiatives that the library has been providing. And the first one will be on October 24th, 4 to 5 p.m. at Alden Room 323. And it's the title is Open Access Monographs, Current Initiatives Sustainable Models and four presenters from the University of Minnesota, Twin Falls, University of Michigan Library and then Assistant Director of Publishing and Operations at the University of California Press and also one person from the University of Ottawa Press. And they will talk about their monograph initiatives and the program will be moderated by Kevin Smith, the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas. And he used to be, before his current position, he used to be the Director of Scholarly Communication at Duke University. So they're going to talk about these different monograph open access initiatives and there will also be opportunity to ask questions. And this program is for both librarians and faculty and we encourage faculty to attend and learn about these different initiatives and how they can, it can benefit them in their teaching. Okay. And so this is really about, you said monographs, right? Yes. Books, monographs. Yeah, monographs. Which is different from like open access journal, not different, but a different kind of publishing model of course than open access articles, right? Yes. Like it's a different kind of approach to get a book open access. Yeah, these are books. Yeah. And it's being sponsored by Lever Press, which is a consortium of many liberal arts colleges who want to, I think, publish a monograph. So it's only on monographs, not articles. Okay. Yes. We had, was it last year or two years ago? I can't keep track either. But we had a high university faculty member who came right and talked about getting her book published. She had a monograph that was published, open access through Knowledge Unlatched, was it? Yes. Jennifer Fredette. Fredette from Political Science. Yes. Yeah. The programs we organized on open access and it was, I think we have four faculty members talk about how they've used open publishing. Yes. Okay. Yes. So one of the presenters, one of them will talk about both Lever Press and Knowledge Unlatched. And Knowledge Unlatched works with like university presses, right, to try to get funding from libraries, to tell me libraries, to make the books open access. Like they say, tell them the libraries fund the book publication and then it's open access available to everyone. It's kind of a different funding model than like libraries just purchasing the book. Yes. It's a different funding model. Okay. All right. So then what is the other event that's happening? The other event is another webinar and that will be on October 25th from one to two in Alden Room 323. And that is called what we talk about when we talk about open access, which is actually a good thing because it's a, it's a wakely term. It's complete. There are so many different models and different people adopting in different ways. It's good to kind of just get an idea of what we mean in a basic way because they want us to be able as subject librarians and faculty are welcome to this as well to be able to say what is open access to each other, to other faculty, for us to help discuss it with our faculty and also why go with open access, how does it work? Why would someone go down that road? How is it paid for things like that? And then they're also going to talk about, they're going to show examples of open access, yeah, they're going to give us some ideas about things we can use in our classes to talk about open access or even ways we can when we're teaching say, well, this, for example, is something you can use that's totally free and open to all people and it's there for you, right? So just to clarify, both of those are webinars, but we're hosting a showing of the webinars in the library, so you can come here and watch those webinars together and I imagine probably if you do that you'll meet other people who are interested in this idea of open access of monographs or other kind of publishing models. And also an opportunity to talk to each other and both faculty and librarians to discuss these initiatives and also if you don't understand something, you can get clarification instead of you just sitting in your office and watching it by yourself. Sure. Do people need to register or can they just show up? They can show up, no registration, yeah, and there's going to be a blog post I think next week about it and there will be links to the detailed information so people can get it or they can call us or send us an email if they want more details about the workshops or the webinars. Whatever way you prefer to get in touch with us, we'll answer whatever you want. And they might be recorded, but I'm not sure. The OTN will be recorded. Right, but I mean the other two webinars would likely be. Yes, it will be recorded so that we could also send you links to the webinars if you'd like to view them on your own. Yes. Anything else you want to add about OpenAx this week or anything? One thing that's really interesting that I do want to say is that we have quite a few people, librarians, and I believe faculty participating in the open textbook workshop next week from the regional campuses. That's awesome. It's really nice I think about every regional campus is being represented, which is really great because they have even more economical problems than we do over here with their budgets and things. So it's nice that the regionals will be on board with all of this. A truly university-wide event. Right. Awesome. Yes, yes. And we're encouraging everybody to attend and also try and look into open access publishing and how it will benefit students economically because I think it's an important issue since textbooks are very expensive and they keep going up. And I would say if you need more, you want to understand more, if you go to our webpage and just search in the search box for open access, you'll see about five different articles about it, describing it, talking about different initiatives, different places you can look for open textbooks. It doesn't cost anything to go on the websites and look at the open textbooks. That's why they're open. You can on your own do whatever you want in those databases. And that includes, I just want to mention, that includes things like primary source materials as well. Like we've supported the, of course I can't think about the project. Is that the one where they do the primary source collections? Then they, like the library support the digitization of the collection and then everyone gets access to that material as well. Yes, yeah. There's a lot of those in, a lot of universities and a lot of, even museums and all that have primary sources digitized. And instead of traveling to, let's say Washington D.C. or Louisiana to use a primary source material, you can just use a digitized copy online for free. Okay. I'm going to turn the camera back around and say thanks to Araba and Lorraine and the rest of the community of practice for continuing the conversation around open access on the Ohio University campus. I think in the next decade we're going to see a lot of exciting changes when it comes to how things are published and shared around the world, really. And I'm excited that we get to be a part of this. So thanks to everyone. Once again, as a reminder, we'll have information on our website about the open textbook, open textbook network event next week. And then the week after is open access week. You can find, I'm sure, lots of celebration online. We'll be tweeting about it at Alden Library. And then we have two webinars that you can attend in person to learn more and to kind of talk to other people on campus who are interested in that as well. So thanks for watching and we will talk to you later.