 Well, hello and welcome everyone to our first session of the day. Why do students embargo their E.T.D.s? We have sharing this information with you is Becky Toms of Utah State University Libraries and Rebecca. Yes, I'm Rebecca Nelson. Okay. And Rebecca Nelson from are you also from Utah State? Yes. Also from Utah State. And Valerie Emerson, I'll be your moderator for this session. Just a quick reminder before we begin. During the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted. Please feel free to use the Q&A tab to post questions which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. You can navigate to other sessions by clicking the desired session in the hop and schedule or click the left hand sidebar links. I want to thank you all for joining us and I'll turn it over to our presenters, Becky and Rebecca. And I think we're ready to go. Great. Thanks so much Valerie. So I'm going to make sure that I'm sharing my screen and get the presentation up. So, Becca, if you want to let me know, are you seeing our slides? Yes, there they are. Okay, super. So we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. As Valerie said, our presentation is why oh why do students embargo their ETDs. And there was a song running through my head when I wrote that title but now I can't remember what it was and I don't sing so we won't go there but again as Valerie said my name is Becky Toms and I am the head of digital initiatives at Utah State University Libraries. And I am Becca Nelson. I'm the institutional repository coordinator at USU Libraries. So to give you a little bit of background on our institution here at Utah State University. Oh, do you want to go back, Becky? Oh, sorry. I was trying to turn off my microphone. There we go. All right. So we have around 3044 students in our graduate enrollment and then about 1536 of those are here at our main campus in Logan and 828 are at our statewide campuses and we're not sure how many exactly but there are a number of online students as well. So every semester that turns into about 120 graduate students that are completing their degree. And so we'll jump into embargoes here at USU. We have our feces and dissertations open in our repository unless they choose the option to embargo. So that is a five year option that you can't choose more. They can't choose less unless they email every five years to extend that or email to take that down early. But when they first choose the option, they only can have it for five years. And then it has to go through an approval process. So the library approves it, their advisor, their department head and also the vice provost of graduate studies all have to sign off before a student can receive an embargo. And we in the library are just managing that process. We're not really the ones in charge of deciding that. And you can see here we have embargoes over the last five years, every semester so you can see in the graph the amount that we've had has gone up and down over the years. But we try not to encourage our students to embargo since there usually isn't a reason that they would need to. We really value open access at our university where land grant institutions so we believe in making things as open as possible and making our research available to the public as well as other researchers. So it just makes it more accessible when we have our thesis and dissertations open in our repository. But we wanted to know more about why our students were choosing this option to embargo. And in the past few years, we've made an effort to communicate more with our students and their advisors about the embargoes. So this graph here shows them over time, the trend over time. So you can see that in the spring which is that blue line that it has mainly stayed consistent. And then it is usually higher than the other semesters we usually have more graduating in the spring. But the summer semester has kind of been more unpredictable. That red line is kind of all over the place. But in the fall, it's again stayed roughly the same and that is a little bit lower than in the spring. So we have just a few reasons that our students can choose to embargo their work. So the first is that they can file a patent or they have research that was supported by a grant or a contract. And that group that sponsored their work has to review it before it's made openly available. So they can also indicate the publisher considers their work to be prior publication. That's not usually necessary since most publishers don't have a problem with considering work that's been previously published and made available through a thesis or a dissertation. We'd had future publication as an option until 2019. We decided to remove it since it's not really a barrier to students publishing again because most publishers don't have a problem with it. So we replaced that future publication with another option where they could write in their own reason if they had some case that they needed to make. Then we would consider it. And usually the reasoning that we found that they're putting into this other option is still future publication that they don't want their data available before they have the chance to publish it. So the last option is the creative writing, which we have worked with our English department for certain students that never want their work to be available. And then here you can see the breakdown of those reasons over time. So the file, a patent and the sponsored research aren't chosen very often. We only have a few creative writing students and then prior publication has tended to be a more popular reason for embarking with future publication being the most popular reason until we took that away in 2019. And then we started to see those numbers going down. And that's also when we started having conversations with students talking a little bit further about their choice. And that started happening in 2020. And you can see it's also continued to decrease a little bit in 2021. We decided to go back and look at the departments that are asking for embargoes the most often since 2017. And the breakdown is that we have English coming in at 23 embargoes since that time and 19 embargoes have come from animal dairy and veterinary sciences. Then it's chemistry and biochemistry at 14 and tied at 11 we have our biological engineering, electrical and computer engineering and lastly the communicative disorders and deaf education. And we see the same departments asking for embargoes and they tend to have the same reasons that they're indicating as they do that. Okay, thanks Becca. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about how we have responded to all of this information that we have gathered and kind of the efforts that we have made to provide some education and start some conversations about the embargo choices that our students are making. So, what the first thing we did is just asked our students and their advisors to tell us a little bit more about what they were choosing and why they were choosing that so in 2020. We essentially put together a boilerplate email that when students would submit their, their embargo request form which kind of initiates the whole process, and they would make that prior publication selection. We, we developed this boilerplate email and we sent it back to those students and to their advisors kind of asking them some questions you know prior publication would indicate that they were pursuing a publication option for their thesis or dissertation and that a publisher was saying that they considered that the, the thesis or dissertation being available in a repository as prior publication and therefore wouldn't consider it. So, we, we wanted to know a little bit more about that and we framed the email that way so we didn't want the students and the advisors to think that we were, you know, judging their choice or second guessing things. So we framed it as the library wants to know more about this because that's an important information, a bit of information for us if publishers are making these statements or these requirements. And we want to know about that so we can better advise our students and, and the faculty. And so, in sending those emails and getting the responses, what it revealed is that many of the students or their advisors, so they were actually thinking about future publication, they weren't in a situation that they had already identified a publisher and been told this, but they weren't imagining that they might want to publish on this which is completely reasonable and that they, there is this as I think we all know kind of myth out there that there are publishers that consider an ETD and availability and an open repository as prior publication. And so, there was just generally some confusion, you know, about the embargo about these policies, the reasons, etc. So, really these emails open the door for us to have a conversation with the students and the faculty and we could share information about publisher policies so when they told us oh I'm looking at this journal or this publisher potentially. We could point them to the place on, hopefully point them to the place on that publisher website that specifically said that the availability of content or material in an ETD via an open repository wouldn't preclude you know them considering a manuscript for publication. So that has been a really useful tool and having those conversations. And so just a little bit more about that. So we emailed 12 students in 2020, and there were three who decided to change their reasons so they didn't decide not to embargo, but they at least were more informed about the decision they were making and why they were making it so we still consider that a good thing. And then there are three who decided not to embargo after all. And in 2021, we contacted 15 students, seven chose to change their reason. So again, hopefully that's because they had a little more information, and three decided not to embargo after all. And then the other thing we did was last spring, right in the thick of the pandemic, we offered an embargo workshop that we promoted to graduate students, advisors and program coordinators across the university. And we had about 30 attendees from a wide variety of departments and we just shared some of that same information about publisher policies. You know the reasons for embargoes what an embargo meant what it didn't mean. And we got some good feedback via the survey we had some good questions. And I think that this is something that we would try doing again, and hopefully in an eventual post pandemic world. We would have a little bit more engagement with our folks on campus. So where we are now and what we're planning to do next so as you saw in the numbers back as shared we do think we're seeing you know the spring and summer 2021 numbers are trending down. We've got our fingers crossed about the full picture for 2021. We are seeing some of the same departments and advisors. So that's something we're continuing to think about. And then the fall 2021 those numbers will really you know round out our calendar year 2021 and determine if in fact our numbers have gone down overall. And so what next what we're planning next is to offer another workshop, as I said we'd like to do that again. But we're also in conversations with our liaisons as I mentioned we have these you know frequent flyer departments or advisors and so we're talking to those liaisons about how we might do some particular outreach to those individuals or those departments again just to make sure that they have all the information. Before they're making these decisions. And then also beginning some discussions at the higher university level with our graduate council that oversees all graduate education to talk about embargoes. You know across the university and make sure that the university still you know is behind these policies that were established you know long before Becca or I worked here. So I wrapped us up very quickly there because we were running out of time but thank you. I'm going to stop screen sharing and have a couple of minutes for questions. If there are questions in the chat we can answer those or folks want to jump on and ask a question we'd be happy to answer in our last couple minutes. And I saw there were a couple questions in the Q&A. So there are stakeholders again for who is approving the embargo request is the library, their advisor, their department head and the vice provost of graduate studies. So all four of those have to sign off and it goes to the library first which is where I get the chance to kind of talk with them before it goes anywhere else. And then the embargo period is five years they don't have another choice unless they email and discuss with us but as far as getting the actual approval it is five years and that's the only choice. So really their choice there is that they could contact us before the five years were up and asked to have the embargo canceled and we have had a couple of departments where they really only wanted embargoed for a year because it's very fast paced research and so, and this is mostly just for ease of processing, you know we weren't going to give them one year three year five year options so. Yeah, yeah. So someone else had asked if we have a list of those publisher policies I do keep track of the ones that we have checked and talked with students about. So yes, I could share that if you would like to contact us. Are there any other questions we have about two minutes left. Hi Natalia, did you have a question. Hi, yeah real quick. Was there something that prompted this research or doing interventions maybe like intervention is a strong word but doing that the talks with the faculty or. Because we have an embargo and we we we've looked it over the years how many students embargo and what percentage it is and but there really isn't a, you know an impetus to kind of ask why it was it kind of just a. You know an emphasis on behalf of the grad school or the library or just curious about the, the why behind it. Yeah, so I think it was. It was mostly on our part that we had seen kind of an increase some semesters and we didn't understand why and like I had said we really value open access and not wanting our students to embargo so in order for that to. Go down at all we figured that it would have to come from us communicating more. But Becky, did you want to add something. I think I yeah I completely agree with that I'll just add that I think we also suspected that there was some confusion out there as I said I think we all know there are these myths that Oh, a publisher won't consider your manuscript and. I just wanted to find ways to help people know that that's not true so that was that was part of it. Yeah, can you guys say how long you've had your particular embargo policy the five year policy do you know like when that was implemented. As far as I know it's been that as long as I've been here which has been since 2000 2012 I started so. I'm sorry but we've reached time. I want to thank you all for coming. The next session will start in five minutes so and they'll be a sponsor. I have a message on the stage right now and then our next session. Thank you both. I appreciate you coming in presenting today. Thank you. Thanks Valerie. Thanks everyone.