 Well, thank you everyone and welcome to our annual U.S. E.T.D. A conference. This year's plenary session is entitled publish or perish a panel discussion on the quandaries of open access in the E.T.D.s. Just for some initial housekeeping please remember to keep your video off and your mics muted. Only the panelists and myself should have our video on and we ourselves might want to keep our mics off unless we're speaking just to limit amount of background noise but it does seem pretty quiet right now. Today's plenary session is focused on open access in E.T.D.s specifically the quandaries of open access in E.T.D.s. In some disciplines publishing open is welcomed and encouraged as fresh ideas and discourse add to the field. However, in other disciplines publishing open is frowned upon and intellectual property can be coveted and creativity in the same vein and it might have litigious underpinnings. I want to introduce our highly distinguished panel of academics and Ph.D. graduates from different fields, different backgrounds and they will give us certainly a lot to think about on this topic. This session is meant to be an interactive event where the audience will post their questions in the box marked Q&A. The Q&A box will be moderated by our esteemed board president John Hagen who also has his mic and video turned on. He'll facilitate the Q&A session. The chat box is meant to foster discussion among the attendees and so the questions will only be entertained in the Q&A box. First we have Peter Suber. He's the director of the Harvard office for scholarly communication. He's the director of the Harvard open access project and a senior researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. By training Peter is a philosopher and a lawyer but now he dedicates his time to work on open access full time. Dr. Suber was the principal drafter of the Budapest open access initiative where we get our definition for open access. He also sits on the boards of many groups devoted to OA and scholarly communication. He's been active in fostering open access for many years. Kathleen Driscoll. She is the chair of the school of creative and professional writing at Spalding University in Kentucky. She serves as the chair of association of writers and writers programs. Board of directors 2020 and 2021. Professor Driscoll is the author of several poetry collections including blue etiquette poems which was a finalist for the weatherford award. Stored to the dead Kentucky voices selection by University of Press of Kentucky and winner of the 2018 Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Other awards include grants from the Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women and she has also received prizes from the associated writing programs and Frankfort Arts Foundation. We did have Mahabali scheduled. She's an associate professor of practice at the center of learning and teaching at the American University in Cairo. Unfortunately there was a medical emergency in the family and she was not able to attend. Shadi Marabon is the manager of clinical and medical affairs at Liposin Incorporated. Dr. Marabon received her PhD in pharmaceutical sciences from the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at my own St. John's University in New York. She is a physician scientist with a comprehensive understanding of multiple therapeutic areas including the interpretation of complex scientific data. We also have Michael Brooks, he's an associate teaching professor and undergraduate advisor at Bowling Green State University and Department of History. Dr. Brooks received his PhD from the University of Toledo in 2009 and has researched interests in epidemiological history, European global expansion as well as the history of the American white supremacist movement. We also have Gail McMillan and while perhaps everyone is answering the first question I'm going to call her and try to get her back into the room, there seems to be a little bit of a technical difficulty. So we're going to begin with a brief self introduction by each panelist followed by a question to get the discussion started. After that we will turn the questions over to the audience and again as a reminder put your questions in the Q&A box. John Hagen will facilitate, he will select the questions to be asked and he'll give you a prompt and please unmute and turn your mic and your video on to ask the question. And when Professor McMillan gets into the room I will introduce her. Our first question will be, in your experience with open access, have your hopes and attitudes towards open access changed or evolved? And I'm going to turn off my mic and people would like to go ahead and self introduce. John, can you facilitate that while I try to get Gail? Yes, I'm unmuted now. So, okay, sorry, I was just sending an email to Gail as well. It seems she couldn't get into the room here. So are we doing self introductions? I was only half listening. Yes. Lucy? Yes. Okay. So, I can either pull up my list or you guys can go on to your, I'll jump in. Thank you, Peter. You're first on the list anyway. Good. Thank you. Michael. Michael. Michael, sorry. From the Bowling Green State University, I joined the panel because I've worked with the ETD systems in many capacities. For seven years, a long time ago, in another phase of my life, I was a writing center tutor working with MA and PhD students primarily and ETDs were, of course, a big part of that. As a grad student myself, I submitted my thesis and dissertation to Ohio Link and ETD database. As an aspiring author, I observed firsthand the challenges of publishing a thesis or dissertation while it's simultaneously available in an open access setting. As a faculty member, I've worked with a few dozen students at the MA and PhD level serving on committees for these season dissertations and finally I worked prior to an undergrad advisor. I was a grad advisor for six years in my department and the topic of ETDs was, of course, one of, rather high on the list of things that grad students were seeking advice on. Oh, and evolution, sorry. As an educator, I love open access and open educational resources. I use them in all my classes. I proudly boast that I haven't had a student purchase textbooks since, like, 2014. As an author, it's been challenging. I ended up carving my dissertation up into articles rather than a book specifically because the editors were finding it available freely online and there wasn't really that much that had been changed between the submitted version and the ETD version. Wonderful. Thank you, Michael. So I see we have Gail joined us now. Yay. Just go to the top of the list here. Peter, go ahead, please, with your opening statement. Sure. I'm Peter Suber. I run the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard, which helped develop the policies and practices for ETDs at Harvard. We also implement those policies. I got my PhD in 1977, and so I wrote my dissertation with pen ink, and I don't have a digital copy. And it would be too much trouble for me to make a digital one, that is to read all four things. So all my work is open access except one book and that dissertation. And if I had a digital copy, I would make it open. Again, with those exceptions, all my work is open. I use it as an author. I use it as a reader. And during my dissertation research, I found no books that were right on point for my topic. And I suspect that's a fairly common occurrence because dissertation topics tend to be very narrow. But I did find half a dozen dissertations that were close enough for me to buy, read, study. And I was awakened to the need for open access to dissertations by the fact that I couldn't review or evaluate or skim the dissertations without actually buying them. There was no preview version. And even with a book, you can preview it or skim it from a library. But dissertations are generally not available from libraries except the author's own library. And they're not open even in abstracts. They were not back then. So I benefited from them. I knew they were useful. I think mine was useful. I sometimes consider dissertations to be the most valuable kind of invisible research and the most invisible kind of valuable research. And so I think the access problem is worth solving. And I'd be happy to answer questions about open access to dissertations at Harvard that is what do we do, but also about my general case for open access to dissertations. I wrote a long, full defense of the case for open access to dissertations back in 2006. And I stand by most of it today. But I've changed my mind on a few small points since then. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Peter. Kathleen. Hi, everyone. Go ahead. Yeah. Hi. Thank you for having me. My name is Kathleen Driscoll. I am a poet, a writer. I'm a teacher of creative writing. I am the chair of the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spodding University. We have about 800 alums here who have been awarded their MFA's. And one of the culminating project is their MFA thesis, which for us really is a book. And the aim for all of our students is to have that book published by a reputable publisher out in the world. That's our number one goal. So while I see wonderful and useful reasons to have open access and lots of different disciplines, especially the sciences and all, it just doesn't work for us. And in my role as a member and chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which is the largest organization of professional creative writers and academic programs for creative writing in the world, to be humble. We have created policy because all of our members wanted to say that our number one goal is to have creative thesis shelved in the old-fashioned way in libraries. So I'm glad to hear. I'm open to new ideas and all of it. I'm afraid I might be the contrarian here. And that's all right. We need diverse perspectives. Kathleen. Thank you. Thank you so much. Shadi, would you like to give an opening statement, please? Absolutely. Hi, everyone. My name is Shadi Mehrava. Thanks for organizing this panel discussion and having me. So my experience, as Luciella mentioned, was that last year I got my PhD from St. John's University in Pharmaceutical Sciences before submitting my electronic dissertation to ProQuest and going through those steps. I had written an article on my research and that article was accepted for publication in a journal. So when the time came to have my electronic dissertation submitted to ProQuest, I was facing this question of what happens. I need to put an embargo and all those things that I had really thought about before submitting that article to different journals. So that was my first experience and encounter with what is open access, what needs to be done, and all of those. So after going through that experience and familiarizing myself with the concept, I am a strong proponent for open access and I believe it needs all research and especially dissertation, as Peter mentioned, needs to be available to the public because that is all the reason that we do that research for future people, for future studies to reference those and help the research and science develop. Great. Thank you, Shadi. And last but not least, we'll ask Karen McMillan to give an opening statement and then I'll turn it over to Luciella to run the session here. Sure. Should I go ahead and do a formal introduction of Professor McMillan? Oh, if you'd like, I was just handling the informally with the rest. So let's go ahead because we're a little behind. Let's go ahead. Okay. Go right ahead then. Go ahead, Professor McMillan. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I think this is a tremendous panel. It's a great discussion topic to have. My name is Gail McMillan. I'm the director of scholarly communication at Virginia Tech and I've been involved with electronic thesis and dissertation since the mid-90s. So that's over 25 years. So I have a lot of experience with them. I've also not, in addition to helping to lay the groundwork for them at Virginia Tech and other universities, I have, I've been part of three international surveys of institutions and looking into their policies and practices. I've also been part of two surveys of journal editors, university press directors and publishers about their policies and practices towards electronic thesis and dissertations. I work with authors in terms of helping them understand their copyrights and creative comments licenses. We've been trying to turn our paper dissertations into electronic dissertations. We get, you know, several, several hundred added each year. It's going to be a, it's a long process without any additional funding. But I hope that the discussion that we have today can indeed take into account what the publishers are saying and what, even though our survey is somewhat dated and needs to be updated, I think it's important that we, we go with what the data says, what, what actual practices and policies are rather than what we may have heard a publisher's policy is. So let's, let's, and let's, let's talk with those publishers that may have maybe uneasy about electronic thesis and dissertations. But our survey data definitely showed that the vast majority of them, including actually more in the humanities and social sciences, were in favor of electronic thesis and dissertations than in the social, than in the sciences. So I'll be happy to talk more about that, send you links to where this, this information has been published as well. But thank you for inviting me. I look forward to our discussion today. Wonderful. I wanted to add to the conversation that in Shadi's circumstances, you know, there was a hesitancy. I don't think that I can put my work into either ProQuest or the institutional repository. And what I did was reach out to the publisher. The journal was the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology. So being a hard science, I was a little leery. I was like, oh, are they going to give us permission? A lot of the big publishers do not. And the publisher is the American Thoracic Society. And when I reached out to them, they said, yes, of course, you can put it in, you know, the personal, the scholarly institutional repository, you need to cite back, you know, put in a citation to the original journal article. So I was very relieved. And I think Shadi was very surprised. So we were able to do that. And she's actually gotten some downloads from the repository itself. So it is, it is exciting in that sense. From here forward, I think we are going to turn over the Q&A. And I do see a little red button up there. John, if you'd like to. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And I was actually looking through. I just sent out a message to the chat at large to people if they're paying attention to please post your questions and comments in the Q&A tab next to chat here. And we have several in queue. So I am going to ask folks if they would like to ask the question in person, I'll call upon you. And you can do so. If not, I'll be happy to read your question aloud to the audience and the panelists. So let's start with GW, GWSYCord out of Florida. GW, if you want to ask your question live, go ahead and turn on your video and audio. I'll give a second for people to acclimate. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and start this since I don't see GW appearing here. He's maybe shy today. So GW asks, how do creative thesis and dissertation authors and faculty at public universities justify their use of public funds to support creating their private property? I'll open it up to anyone, but I can imagine maybe this would be directed to Kathleen. Yes. Well, I think that a lot of them don't. One of the problems that we have, I think at a conference that we had a few years ago, we had a Google doc petition going through from some students from some of the bigger universities who had sort of a blanket policy like this that said that they would not make any sort of exceptions for our creative theses and all because they just had this one policy and they had public money going in and not also. But you know, this is our intellectual property that we have. And it's not that I know that some people have made the arguments that it's the same to being in an art studio and creating a sculpture. And that sculpture doesn't necessarily belong to the university. You would walk out with it or a painting or whatever. And so I do think that we're in a different sort of discipline and attitude about our work. Great. I have one quick follow up question. So some time ago, we had a discussion with the folks at AWP and by some estimations, it could take budding authors up to maybe 10 years after graduating to get their creative work published. Is that still the case or can you give us a little background on how that scenario plays out for the average person in creative writing? I think that's not uncommon. I think it's not uncommon to take about 10 years. It took me about 10 years of sort of fiddling around with my thesis. And certainly what became my book was generally in my thesis, but it had gone through some sort of evolution since then. But, you know, it's not out of the realm that someone would have their thesis published or have a contract the moment that they walked away with their degree in their hand. And so one just doesn't know what's going to happen at that point. That's not what publishers told us in our survey. I said that writing for your thesis committee is very different from writing for a general audience and that the committee of three or five people that reviews that thesis is very different from the peer review process that articles and monographs go through. So it's not, it's rarely exactly the same thing that it was when it was a thesis. It's what I've heard from publishers and I think seems logical. And publishers who are willing to make a book out of an open access dissertation are willing in part because the thesis has to be revised significantly before it makes the kind of book that the publisher cares to publish. On the other hand, to be fair to Kathleen, they're only talking about works of scholarship, not works of creative writing. And it's very possible that an approved piece of creative writing would be ready to public without revision. Or the revision would be not substantially changing what the heart of the project is. What we are doing is writing a book. We're not writing part of a book or a sketch for a book or a different plan for a book. Our hope is that most of the programs that I'm with, one of the goals is to have or the requirements is to have a publishable or near publishable book to stand in for the thesis. Great, thank you. I think in general we have to seek to understand the circumstances revolving around various publishing venues depending on the discipline, the historical trends and so forth. So we can all kind of find a common ground. We can't always have a one-size-fits-all answer for all things. I certainly think I want to acknowledge Gail's work and her colleagues in doing the survey information, but I think also we need to look at the nuances of situations as well. Do we have any other comments or questions or follow-up on this particular question? I don't want to dominate the conversation. I just want to add one more tidbit of information. It's called toward an open-access monograph ecosystem. Is anybody familiar with that? It's about 20, 25 universities, members of the Association of Research Libraries and the AAUP, about 60 publishers. And they are funding the publication of monographs to be open access. And so we have some data now as well, in 2018, about accessing, downloading, and actually selling alongside the same when the pre-electronic copy is available. And I looked at, we've had about nine faculty from Virginia Tech take part in this program, and they were all assistant professors publishing from their dissertation. And I think there are examples out there of open-access monographs that are doing better as a result, doing better in their sales of hard copies as a result of being openly available electronically at the same time. And I can share data about that if you'd like later on. Thank you, Gail. And I think there are a few cases, at least Ann, where, for example, somebody who's a prolific creative writer, they might put their thesis out there as one creative work, and they might want to push something else in terms of the first book, another creative work that they had in mind which is not their thesis. And it's possible that by putting the initial creative work out there for open access against them, some notoriety, some attention, which then could land subsequent publishing deals. I've seen that in history, in creative writing. It's probably a rarity, but I think that it is possible to have some benefits if someone is predisposed. I think particularly practice in the creative writing would be to sell first serial rights to excerpts in a more public market than to go to open access. But I can't say that I can't really speak to I don't really know if many or any people have put things out with open access alongside their other books. That's very common with book length scholarship, but not with book length creative writing. By the way, it's not. There are some science fiction novels that are both open and closed, not because science fiction is special, but because somebody who liked science fiction started an open access science fiction publishing firm that also produced predications for sale. By the way, it was successful. It's not uncommon to have people who have difficulty publishing their work to have it published through self-publishing or creating their own publishing, and they still have the rights to things, keep the rights to things and have some monetary gain as well. It's sort of a parallel kind of universe. Fascinating. Yes, I'm sure we'll return to this topic as it was a lively thing. Let's jump for the moment to a different next question here. I'm going to call upon Lily Compton. Lily, if you'd like to ask your question, you have actually two questions, a follow-up one as well. Go ahead and unmute your audio and video. I'll give you a second to do that. If not, I'm going to go ahead and read at least the first question so don't be shy, guys. Okay, so we'll go ahead and I'll read the question. Lily Compton asks, it's common for our students to include published articles in their ETD just like Shadi mentioned. What is the trend in terms of the journal publishers' views toward the inclusion of these articles? So in my case, it was that as Luciella mentioned, we reached out to the journal asking, requesting what is their policy. So the most important thing for them was that if I was to publish my work in a pre-print server, which was basically the university repository, they would need that work not to be peer reviewed, which wasn't in the case of my dissertation. So they also just requested me to attach some supplemental files with a link to my article. So everybody, like, I could point the readers to if there was any subsequent versions and stuff. So in my case, it basically wasn't that complicated although I thought it was and it was kind of stressful, but when we figured it out, it was pretty simple. As I said also, I was actually taken aback because my experience has been with a lot of the hard sciences. They're really not willing to do that. I was pleasantly surprised and it's always good to make the attempt, you know, and to let publishers know that this is an issue, especially when the digital copy serves as the university official copy. I think in your situation, Shadi, you also had co-authors and the article itself had morphed quite a bit. I don't know if anyone else could speak to the sciences as far as the attitude or the environment, which the scientific publishers kind of put out. So Lily has a follow-up question, maybe Shadi or one of the others can help with this. And a follow-up question, is this what, oh, she says, what should our students do when they wish to include a previously published article in their Open Access E-T-D? I can say what we do here at Harvard. We just transferred copyright to that publisher. Then they can omit that chapter from the Open Access copy in our repository if we don't have permission to share it. On the other hand, we distinguish the access copy, which is open in our repository, from the archival copy, which is in the university archives. And the university archival copy is never redacted. On the other hand, it's not open access either. It will be in the archival copy, even if it's not in the access copy. But we will try to get permission to share even that chapter for the access copy. Yeah, I think this is the key education point with students, and that is to really educate them about their copyrights. I think they, like many people, just assume when the publisher asks them to give all of their rights to get the journal article published, they assume that they have to give it up. They have to give the publisher non-exclusive rights, which tends to work. Yes. So I think copyright education is perhaps lacking. We need to do more for our students. And we should do it, especially when students are allowed to include published articles as chapters of dissertations. They don't want to sabotage their dissertation by making a mistake at that point. Right. And then some universities, Harvard and Virginia Tech included, now have open access policies at their universities. And for Virginia Tech, our policy applies to faculty, staff, and students. So it shouldn't be a problem from here on out. At least not for schools with that kind of policy. Our rights retention policy only applies to faculty, but we have a version of it that applies to students. However, it requires the student to know about it and opt in. And many students, including published articles, says chapters should opt in before they get going. That way they retain all the rights they need to authorize open access, even to that chapter, without seeking that permission from the publisher. Yeah. I think in addition to educating our students about copyright, they need to be in contact with the journal editor or publisher that they wish to have to publish with and find out what the policy is before they publish, before they submit the article. You know, that seems to me would alleviate some of the problems. And the same with monograph, you know, if you want to publish a book, who are you looking to publish it with and what is their policy? Find out before you get kind of tied to it because you've already submitted it and then you find out what their policy is towards open access. Yes, that's a very sensible approach and be informed before you proceed. So, well, this is a lively topic here. We have a question, a follow-up question on this topic from Jonah McAllister Erickson at the University of Pittsburgh. Jonah, if you'd like to ask your question live, go ahead and unmute your video and audio. Okay. Okay, the second here. All right, you guys are being shy today. Okay, so Jonah asks, following up on the last question, have there been any publishers that have not eventually granted permission? At Pitt, we have had a few issues, but eventually all publishers have granted permission. Okay. Well, I don't think any of our panelists are aware of that. I think the key message from that last point was, you know, be aware what you're getting into before you jump in and pave a smoother way toward any hiccups with publishers. We have another question from Lily. She says, there's also the reversed question, what are journal publishers doing when they receive a manuscript that's already in an open ETD? Anybody want to take that? I know the answer for books, but not for journal articles. And I would have turned to Gail, but she has turned off her camera. Oh, Gail, we can hear you if you want to address that. I don't know where you're... I don't know. I don't know what happened to it either, because I'm seeing myself. Oh, now we're back. I can see Gail. Yes. Okay, so I'm sorry. What was the question? Oh, okay. So there is also a reversed question. What are the journal publishers doing when they receive a manuscript that's already in an open ETD? I haven't heard one way or another about that. Same here. I haven't heard of a case where that's been a problem, let alone a controversy. On the other hand, more and more journals are willing to accept OpenX's preprints than in the past, and preprints are often very unchanged from the version approved by peer review. Any journal willing to accept an open preprint should be willing to accept an open chapter in a dissertation. The only thing I've heard anecdotally is not with ETDs, but with commercial academia.edu where a student had posted something that was on that site and then submitted it to a journal and forgotten about it, and the journal editor requested that they take it down. Was that a problem to do that, or they were able to comply? Yeah. The student might have greater interest in being published than throwing it out on academia that they were happy to pull it. Gail, were you going to add something? No. Okay. Actually, Larry Teg had a comment directed to Gail. Gail, you're absolutely correct. What we must be careful with is not to accept a few papers combined and called a dissertation. Is that what you said? Well, my experience at Virginia Tech is we have two styles of thesis and dissertation, and one is called a manuscript style. And for a thesis, I think you can have two articles pre-published or prepared for publication. They don't even have to be published, but they're prepared for publication, and three to five for a dissertation, and they're sandwiched between that introductory information and the literature review. But they can be published articles or articles prepared for publication. So that saves the student having to write one chapter just for those three reviewers and for that thesis or dissertation and having to take the time to rewrite it for publication. They can write it for the publication to begin with. I think that's kind of what Kathleen, you were saying is that these thesis that your students are producing are intended to be submitted as a finished product to the publisher. I think there's a little difference in what we do because maybe not, maybe not. Maybe I'm being too... I have too much hubris about this, but it's not simply... I see a question about could there be a reflective piece that could take the place of the thesis or whatever, but for us it's the process, the whole point is to demonstrate expertise and putting together the piece of writing, not just the content of it, but how the content is handled in terms of structure, pacing, point of view, narrative voice, all of those things. So it's that the whole project is what we're in part giving the degree upon. So the basis for the degree. Great, great. I see Larry wants to jump in. Larry, go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to jump in and say that our policy is such that a student can definitely include a couple of publications or their prepublications in their ETD. Pre-publications we are not too concerned about, except for the fact that we insist that a student can't just put those things together and call it a dissertation. They must be philosophical about what they do. They are earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree and they must show that they can integrate that information and discuss that information relative to their discipline that there happened to be in at that time. So just putting a few papers together and stapling them to us doesn't cut it. And they must show that they can do something with that. They have to be creative with what they've published. And because they're writing a book, they're not just submitting a series of journal articles, they're actually writing a book. And so they have to treat it in that manner. So I just wanted to jump in and say, I think people that just accept stapled publications as dissertations of there's something really missing in that whole process. Yeah, so I think we're all for better quality content. So next question. I'm Courtney Mumma. Mumma, if you would like to ask your question live, go ahead and unmute. Hey Courtney, go ahead, the floor is yours. I wasn't sure I knew how to do it, but I do. Okay. Thank you all so much for this conversation. I am just throwing another wrench here. I'm curious whether any of you are starting to see imperatives locally to publish the associated data in research data repositories in tandem with publication and IRs and journal platforms. And if you can talk about that a little. We see it and we encourage it. I can't speak about whether there's a trend in that direction, but we have an open access repository for text and one for data. Unfortunately, they're not the same one. When someone submits the text with accompanying data, we encourage them to deposit the data in the separate data repository and then we connect them each to the other. So if you're reading the text, you're pointing to the data. If you're reading the data, you're pointing that for the text. The same is true of Virginia Tech. I think more often I may have seen students including the data as supplemental files with their thesis and dissertation and submitting it all together. But it's also possible for them to submit the thesis or dissertation, the graduate school for approval and separately submit the data to our data repository. We can do it either way. The graduate school doesn't prescribe one way or the other. Great. Courtney, does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you. It's kind of what I expected. Yes. Sure. Let me just add one thing. Go ahead, please. It just occurred to me one of the things that we have been noticing is that the accompanying data isn't always in an open format. We get a PDF file that everybody pretty much can read, but then the data comes in and it might be an Excel spreadsheet. You know, it's not even a CSV file sometimes or it's in some other proprietary software. And in the short term, that's not a problem. You know, many of us have access to Microsoft Office and Excel, but I think in the long term that is going to be a problem that that data may not be accessible. Yes. Yes. Thank you. I think to you, and I don't know if Peter knows anymore about this, the federal mandates on publicly funded research. I know they're collecting not only, you know, requiring open access of the published articles, but also the data now in data repositories are going up. And so I suspect it's becoming much more common in terms of, you know, formats that are submitted and, you know, the longevity of these things. And I think people are becoming much more familiar with it. Peter or anybody, I don't know if you had anything else to add to that. But most funders that mandate open access to research articles encourage or nudge open access to data, but they don't strongly require it in the same way for all kinds of complicated reasons. They tend to require a research data management plan, which says I will provide access to my data to people who needed under the following circumstances or with the following providers. And that's usually enough to satisfy the funder. And why do they step back from a strong mandate to that? Well, one reason is privacy that is research on human subjects can't be made open in the same way that other research, other data can't. Sometimes the data sets are literally too big to share on the internet, like astronomy data sets. And if there's several, you know, terabytes in size, there's no point putting them online for downloading since nobody could download them. There are other problems. You don't have to go into them. But because these problems exist, funders are reluctant just to say make it open no matter what. Great. Great. So just in terms of the timekeeping, we're at one hour in. We've allotted 60 to 90 minutes. Actually, we can go to 235 absolute time. I've got another commitment to 40 for a first sponsor message. But I have a number of other questions in the hopper here. So let's just keep going, Lucy, unless you think otherwise. This is great. So Justin White, if you would like to ask your question live, go ahead and unmute. I'll give you a second here. So all right. In the interest of time, I'm going to jump in and ask Justin's question. What sort of OA policies have your universities adopted for ETDs? Are they opt-in, opt-out? Are they self-deposit into the university's IR only? Peter and Gail, I can see you guys addressing that one. They're opt-out here. It's unavoidable that your dissertation will be deposited in our repository. And that will be deposited in ProQuest. Now, in the case of our repository, you can get an embargo. And if it's a short embargo, you can get the embargo extended. You can get an extension any number of times. You cannot remove the dissertation from our repository without permission from your department. You can also get extensions on ProQuest copies of the dissertation. You can also remove it from ProQuest. It's actually easier to remove from ProQuest than from our repository because you don't need approval from anybody in your department. Gail, how do you do things with VT? Yeah. Similarly, thesis notifications are mandatory electronically deposited. They're deposited with the graduate school. And when the graduate school approves them, they come to the Virginia Tech repository called VT TechWorks. They can have short-term embargoes or university-only access, but they're all meant to become publicly available eventually in the short term rather than the long term. We have not been requiring our students to deposit their thesis and dissertations with ProQuest for quite some time. So that's up to the students whether they do that. Great. Thank you. Go ahead. Well, I'm just seeing Justin's question also about articles and chapters that may be redacted. I think that any dissertation that is approved by Virginia Tech is going to be accepted by ProQuest because we would not be approving it if the student didn't have permission to publish an article. Then that wouldn't be part of an approved dissertation. That doesn't happen, but in theory, that's how we would handle it. There was a very interesting case like that many years ago. A woman wrote a multimedia dissertation with some audio clips and some video clips in addition to the text, and she claimed that she had fair use to use those clips. The university was kind of uncertain about that, but ProQuest was very certain that she did not have fair use, and they would not accept it. There was some back and forth about that. The university funding decided to approve her dissertation on the merits. I thought it was worthy of the degree, and this was a case where there was an exception made and her dissertation was approved without going to ProQuest, and ProQuest never did accept it. By the way, she had a good answer for herself. She said, I'm not going to ask for permission when I have fair use because that proves that you think you need it. I could see how she would have fair use rights in her thesis or dissertation because that's an educational thing. ProQuest is a commercial entity, so when you're looking at those four fair use factors, education is not on your side. It's a commercial entity. Great. There was another follow-up question from Justin. Are there any examples of UTDs going from the graduate college directly to the university's institutional repository bypassing the need to have students upload? Here at Harvard, the submission to the repository is the same as the act of submitting it for approval. Once it's been approved by your committee, you have to submit a properly formatted version, a digital version, and the act of doing that is the same as the act of putting it in the repository. Right. It's not a separate step. It's submitted to the graduate school for their approval, and once they approve it, then it comes into the repository and becomes available. It used to be in the very early days, we didn't have the same kind of repository we had now, we just had the ETD database, and so students actually submitted it to the ETD database, then the graduate school came in and approved it there, but it wasn't released to the public until the graduate school had approved it in any case. Great. We have our next question from Deborah Charles. Where is Deborah? If you'd like to unmute and join us, feel free. I'll give you a second. Hi. Yeah, so Peter was mentioning when talking about the campus version of a dissertation, not being redacted, but then maybe the open access having some chapters redacted for other reasons. And we recently had an interesting case, and I would love to hear what the panel has to say about this, where we have a version of a dissertation that needs to be redacted for both campus and open access, but it just can't be released because it has sensitive information in there about burial sites for an archeology type study. And so I was just wondering what sorts of things that you've encountered maybe in this area. This was newer for us. And our solution was that there is an entity that holds the unredacted volume actually outside of the university. It's a national park service. And if the unredacted version is necessary, they contact that entity to get it. And so that's included in the version we have on campus, but you just mentioned no redactions. And I was just wondering if there are some kind of exclusions for that or exceptions for certain areas. Yes, that's a good question. And technically our archival version is not redacted, but in the case of sensitive dissertations, we don't put them in our digital archive or in the repository for just the reasons that you're talking about. Okay. One of the examples that came up here is an anthropology student who interviewed confidential informants in a war torn country. And it was very important to keep them anonymous or their lives would be in danger. And she did her best to anonymize them in the dissertation, but for all we knew somebody could crack the anonymous anonymization and learn who they were. So we decided to keep it out of all of our repositories. I'm not exactly sure what happened to it, but we have a print copy somewhere in case anybody needs it. And we don't like to make exceptions like that because it's actually a university policy going back since before the internet to make all dissertations public in the original sense, being accessible to the public, even to walk-in patrons. And this is an exception to that. So we made the exception reluctantly. But on your particular kind of example, there's an interesting case from our herbarium, which is a botanical museum. And they have a lot of rare specimens and endangered specimens, plants that would, might go extinct if collectors knew where they were. And when they collect something, they always annotate it as to the location. And they were considering an open access policy that would include the metadata and that might endanger those plants. And the biggest sticking point for them was whether to share sensitive metadata like that. And I won't summarize all their reasoning, but just FYI, they concluded that they ought to make it all open, including the metadata. That was their call, not our call. Interesting, thank you. Great. Peter, while we have on the floor here is a quick question from a BWSY court. Peter, could you share the name of the SFOA Slayers Bound Copy and Publishing House? I did. I put it in the Ask Question thread, but I'll repeat it. It's Bain Books, B-A-E-N. And it's still around. I put the URL in the same thread. And I can't swear that it still follows the open, closed hybrid model that I described a minute ago, but it's worth checking out. It did use that model once upon a time. Great, great. Thank you. Larry Tague had a question. I'm just going to, in interest of time, going to read his question here. We require permission for all published materials that are used. Authors and parentheses, students, must be first or second authors to use their publications. What are other policies? Are you anybody aware of other policies? Probably not an easy answer for that one. We have a question from Natalia Bauer. Natalia, if you'd like to ask that in live, go ahead and unmute. Oh, there it goes. Hi, Natalia. Hi, everybody. I had asked earlier, and I think it was sort of addressed, but we at one point considered for creative writing to have like a scholarly report, I guess you would call it or something similar. We did something similar to this for a film program here at UCF because the film was the thesis, but there had to be something written to accompany the film, whether they wanted to submit the film or not. That's still up to them. They can choose to do that. But the compromise was a scholarly write-up of the film process. So everything that went into the process, everything that, screenshots of the film, everything behind it, production schedules, things like that, and that's basically the written thesis. And we were considering something similar for creative writing theses. We finally came to an agreement with our creative writing program basically that our dissemination policy would be okay, but it was sort of back and forth for a little bit. And they felt as though it would be almost a punishment, I guess you could say to the creative writing authors that they would have to write something separate or in their mind something separate to discuss the process instead of submitting the work, what they considered the work or the thesis itself or the work they hoped to have published. So right now it's still the work, whether it's collection of poetry or short stories or whatever it might be. That's right now what they published. They have to also have an introduction, but they don't have references or things like that typically. But I just wanted to know if other universities had considered something similar or had amended dissemination policies, because ours is pretty relatively open access. We have limited time restrictions on ours, but ultimately all of our ETDs are released publicly after any restrictions have been fulfilled. So that was just basically my question and it's long-winded. I've heard of programs doing that, asking for the critical piece, and certainly there are many components of critical pieces that we have our students do as their requirements, but not as part of the thesis or the creative dissertation. So that would be something that's different. I think that, so number one, what we want is a bound copy in a library that one has to walk into and can't walk out unless you're with it, unless you're hiding in some place with you. But number two would be an embargo, indefinite embargo on the information. And then of course the abstract itself that the student has written would be shared and would have open access to that. That our graduate students across the discipline are getting more and more concerned about human errors and leaks, because there are some ETD programs where you have to go in and re-up the embargo again, and that person could be away. The student could be, graduate could be away and have no idea that this is sort of happening in the background. So I don't really know that that is going to be something that people are going to take on, as you say, because it's like write the dissertation or the thesis and then write another dissertation in the thesis. So it's sort of asking us to reconfigure our discipline and our culminating projects to get around this problem. I think it kind of comes down to whether, and you said the word culminating project, what is a thesis? So in creative writing, the thesis is that that is the work. In other disciplines, it might be you write articles and you can make it and synthesize it into a dissertation. So it kind of comes down to a fundamental question, I think in a way, and it's an interesting one, and how each university treats it a little bit differently. But I think there's also, I think somebody mentioned in the Q&A, I'm sorry that I can't remember who it was, but something about is there responsibility, because we are public institutions, where a lot of us, I speak for us as a public institution, and funding and things like that, a responsibility to have our, I guess in most cases, it's research, but research and creative scholarship or whatever you want to call it out there in some way. And if it can't be out there, do we call it a thesis? Do we call it a culminating project or something instead? But I think there's a cachet with calling it a thesis, and that helps, I think. It's a tough question, I think, of what to do with that when the rest of everybody else has to share it, everything else is open, but these aren't. That's also a consideration as well. Right. Well, I think too, and maybe this is a poor answer to your question, but we're not simply sharing our publications, we're giving public readings, we're giving workshops where it's not as if it's a one-way street and there's no other way that the student or soon-to-be-graduate has a way of sharing information with the community at large there, and we have no problem putting them in the library so you can go in an old-fashioned way and go in and look at them. Right. Well, we don't even have them in our library. We do, but they're electronic repositories, so it creates different challenges, and I think that's when a lot of this came up, was as universities moved to ETDs instead of, if it's a book somewhere, somebody has to go and like you said, use it right then and there, leave it and not take it with them, but this creates a different set of challenges, so thank you. Yeah, sure. Thanks. Great question. Kathleen, are you or anybody on the panel, is anyone aware of a case where you have an MFA thesis? The student graduated, they went on to publish their book, and then later granted open access to the initially restricted creative work in that repository, or is that a possibility and a rumble of possibilities? Would people ever want to do that? Well, I think that, you know, for our dream, most, for most students and graduates, is to go with a really reputable national New York house, you know, as a publication, so it would depend on what those contracts say, and if those contracts are released, as well, so sometimes things go out of print, and if they go out of print, yeah, I've seen people share things, I don't know and, you know, I don't have any idea that it wouldn't be in an open access setting, but I have seen people such as, you know, Peter was talking about the science fiction, putting things up, you know, in a sort of repository that can be accessed online, that's certainly not out of the realm. I mean, certainly we had the Gutenberg project, you know, those authors are usually long dead, but those are wonderful archives for everyone, but first is the commercial, and it's not only, there's a dovetail for us, it's not only the monetary value that's being lost for the writer, but it's also, you know, the academic community, if you want to teach, it's pretty brutal, the market right now, and for most creative writing programs, the assumption is you must have a book from a reputable place before your application will even be considered. So it's just sort of, there are reverberations that go beyond just those first rights, the problems of losing your first rights. Great, great, thank you. Okay, let's push through a few more questions here. So I'm going to expedite and just read these. Justin White wants to know, does anyone happen to know what pro-quest theses and dissertations, plus he is on articles as chapters? Are those redacted similar to the OA access copies Peter mentioned? Now, if this is a question that's long-winded or whatever, we can certainly have the pro-quest folks address it in the ETD administrator users group session, but if anybody has a quick response to Austin or anybody else on with us, you're welcome to unmute and join the conversation. Or if anybody has a panelist, no, go ahead. I don't know the direct answer and I can imagine a hard case, but I know that pro-quest tries to make cases easy by requiring authors to sign a form saying, I have the rights to give this to you and I authorize you to do whatever you do with it. And in a case where a chapter is already copyrighted by a publisher, the author could not sign that form. But when they do sign the form, there's no problem for pro-quest. Great. Okay, I don't see anybody from pro-quest here, so I'll just leave that up in the air there and you guys can address that at some point. Lysiella, I see you have a question. Did you want to ask that live? Sure thing. Thank you. I'm wondering for the recent students who graduated, what are the concerns with granting open access? Maybe you remember, you know, from your peers or what your own views might be and how they have changed or if they're the same. You'd like to speak on that? No, I see we have Troy coming up here. I think there are technical difficulties with Michael. I'm not hearing him well. Michael, yeah, I think your audio is cutting out. Did you want to start over, please? It's cutting out. I don't have audio for Michael. Michael, you could type your response in the Q&A or chat tab. Okay. Anybody else wanted to take a stab at that? Yeah, sure. So for me, I guess one of my concerns was, what does it mean for my future work? Because like for my dissertation, I was wondering if I should include all these data points that I have done research on. I definitely had plenty, but the fact that it was going to be granted open access, I was concerned as to would I be able to publish any of these in my future studies endeavors? So now I am like, okay, so that probably wasn't an issue as much as I was concerned about, but still it definitely depends on where I might want to submit those articles and future works too. So there are definitely still concerns as to if I will be able to publish those works. Great. Thank you, Shadi. Michael, I don't know if you want to try again. I'll leave that open while I'm waiting for Michael to rejoin us. I see Troy Espey has his window open here. Troy, I don't know if you had a question or you just had not turned off your video. Oh, I'm sorry. Now I'm just coming in late to catch the discussion, but thank you. Welcome to the party. All right, thanks. Okay, sure. So, okay, Michael looks like he's still on mute mode. So question from Alison Crawford. Hello. What repositories do panelists use for data? What is the acceptable format for data submission? I think maybe slightly addressed it earlier. Anybody want to add to that? We're still making standards, I guess. Okay, Terry Green has a question. We've got a few minutes. Terry, do you want to do this live? I'll give you a second to unmute if you want to. Okay, I'll go ahead and ask Terry's question. Oh, yes. Terry, welcome. Thank you. Go ahead, Terry. Yeah, so my question is for Mike and Shadi. When you were completing your dissertations, what type of information did you feel that you needed that you didn't get? And where were you expecting this type of education and information from graduate college, from, you know, technical resources, from the library? And this is kind of a follow-up to the discussion about scholarly publishing and copyright and things like that. For some reason, Michael's audio is cutting out again. Michael, I'm putting out a call for Jennifer. I don't know if there's anything he can help with us with on the technical side. I guess that question was also addressed to Shadi, but I don't see Shadi in with us anymore. Luciella, what are we going to do? I think there, I think Shadi might have her photo might have gone. I just don't see her on the panel. I don't know if she dropped off. Okay. I'm wondering if Michael would want to type his response in the... Yeah, I would suggest that. So while we're figuring things out here, there's an anonymous question. Not only do we require permission from the publisher, but a copy of those permissions are uploaded to ProQuest. Interesting. Does anybody else do that? Does that sound like a standard practice? Michael's shaking your head. Okay. That makes sense. That's part of our policy at Virginia Tech is that you, when you submit your dissertation, there is the use of those permissions along with it so that the graduate school can know that you really have. And we can ask for a fair use evaluation. And we recommend that people use the American Library Association Fair Use Evaluator because it will give you a determination that you can then print out and submit with your thesis or dissertation. But we'd like to see that evidence as well. Okay, great. Peter, did you have anything you wanted to add to that? No, except we don't require that formal or official, semi-official fair use evaluation. When we have doctoral students who have questions about including third-party content and they want to know whether or not it's fair, we tend to talk to them in person. We have lawyers and legally-translated brands to help with that. Okay, great. Ashley Mezersmith has a question. I think it was a follow-up to Gail's comment. Do you, my gosh, it jumped. Do you publish those permissions as well or how do you record them? Usually the students submit them as supplemental materials with their thesis or dissertation. So you can download the dissertation without downloading those, but they are submitted with it. So they're just supplemental files. We'd like to have that evidence of permission for the long run so that it isn't questioned later on. Okay, great. I see we have Shadi Beck with us. Shadi, we did have that question. Terry asked, when you're completing your dissertation, what type of information did you feel you needed that you didn't get and from whom would you have wanted to have gotten the info? Would it be from the library or I think Terry suggested we don't have a centralized graduate office, but maybe your department, your advisor. Yeah, absolutely. I would, with regards to what information I would have needed, I would revert back to the answer to Luciella's question like to what extent can I include my data points? I think we're all freezing. Can you hear me? No. Yes. Okay. But with regards to who I was, I wanted to get that information from, I believe my department because like my advisor, my, the dean, they weren't really, they didn't have the knowledge and information that I needed with regards to writing my dissertation for open access. Now that I have a tentative date for my article to be published. And then they definitely referred me to the library, which they had the library, of course had that information and was extremely helpful. But I would have wanted my department and my advisor specifically to be more informative and knowledgeable in that, in that regards. I could build on that. One of the chief obstacles to open access for ETDs is bad advice from faculty members. And Gail has good data on how few book publishers actually refuse to accept open dissertations as submissions, but most faculty don't know the data. And they think most publishers will refuse when in fact most do not. Most are willing. Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with the extent to which revisions are required. And most people don't write the absolute be all, you know, book at the dissertation level. And so often extensive revisions are acquired and they're really not quite the same thing with the exclusion of creative work sometimes. But, you know, in general, we're saying. Okay, we've got five more minutes. Okay. Let's see. I don't know if you're still with us. I don't see your video panel, but I'll continue on here. Larry Teghead, I guess a comment or question. That's a question. How many institutions a declaration of authorship? I'm not sure what Larry meant by that. Larry, if you want to join us and follow up. And then he says, oh, require a declaration of authorship. How many institutions require a declaration of authorship? Does anybody know that? That'd be an interesting question. Gail, do you have a handle on how many institutions require a declaration of authorship? Gail, are you hearing me? Oh dear. Okay. For some reason, I must be having some technical issues here. We're about at the end of the session, gang. So we'll hang tight for a second. I want to see if Lucy Ella will appear back. Yay, Lucy Ella, you're back. Can you hear me? Anyone hear me? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yeah. Lucy Ella, can you hear me? We can hear you. Okay. Hopefully we'll take a little break here. And we'll work out the technical difficulties. I'll get with Jennifer, our tech person, and see what's going on. So the other thing that might be helpful, I guess if everyone has their screens muted, the audience participants, and it is the case, I think Natalia, if you can mute your video panel, I don't know if that will help at all, but that might keep things a little bit quiet. Janice Robinson says she can hear Lucy Ella, and I can hear her too. Okay. Anyone on the panel, can you still hear me? Good. Okay. Okay. I'm just not talking to the wall here. So, yeah, I'm looking at the schedule here. I have our first sponsor message at 240. And so we've got another four minutes. If you guys want to do a closing thing, Lucy Ella, I don't know what happened, but if you want to make a quick, brief closing remark, feel free. Kathleen, did you want to start off? Well, I hope I still have friends out there. But it just seems obvious to me that there are nuances and different concerns between different disciplines and I don't see our stance at AWP changing. But we certainly appreciate this conversation and are always open to hearing the newest trends and the newest policies and all that. So thank you all so much for having me. It's been a great conversation. I've learned a lot. Yes. Thank you, Kathleen. It's been very productive. Thank you, Kathleen. I appreciate it. Yes. Peter, closing comments. I might just add the policy effort. I can't hear Peter. Go ahead, Gil. Creative writing features are embargoed for five years. That means there's nothing available. And then they become university only accessible. So they never become publicly available, but they're available to the current university community. Thank you. Great. Thanks, Gil. It used to be, you know, we used to have a lot of public computers, so that basically meant anybody who walked into the library used a public computer would have access to all of our faces and visitations. But now that we have fewer public computers and mostly people bring their own, they don't have that same level of access. Okay. Very good. Peter, closing comments. Yes. First, I still support open access to EGDs with the possible exception of creative writing doctoral dissertations. When I first started defending open access to dissertations, I defended it without exception. And I admit I was not thinking about the creative writing programs that gave PhDs as opposed to creative writing programs that simply cultivated writing. And most of the arguments for open access to dissertations apply to scholarship or knowledge, and therefore not directly to creative writing. I'm glad to make that exception. And in my own work on open access, especially as I see the open access movement succeeding, as I see the curve going up, I want us all to be careful not to harm novelists, journalists and other writers who live by selling their work. That is, open access applies best to scholarship, especially journal and book scholarship, when the authors are not paid. And so I don't want this to become an information ought to be free movement in which novelists never get paid. I don't want novelists to disappear. I don't want journalists to disappear. And that's hard. I don't really see the world moving toward information wants to be free. But I'm very conscious of the risk. And I'm very conscious of why scholarship is special, why scholarship is different. And one more thing on embargoes, since Gail just parted out. I mentioned that we permit embargoes and we permit embargoes to be extended even indefinite number of times. But I don't want to leave the impression that we're easy on embargoes. On the contrary, we're very hard on embargoes. And Arthur can get- I guess our question is ending. Is that correct? It is getting ready to. I just got a message as well. I can stop. I'm going to, yeah. Lucille, I'm going to jump over to the main stages. We're headed next year, but we've got two 40 that starts up. So Lucille, if you would like to have Shadi and Gail give some closing comments, I'm just going to wig out there. Thank you all for your participation. Thank you so much, John. Shadi and Gail, would you like to go ahead and give a couple closing comments? Go ahead, Gail. Go ahead, Shadi, sorry. Go ahead, Shadi. No worries. This was, yeah, very informative session on open access. And as a proponent of open access, I hope that discussions like this would help graduate students in the future to have be more informed of what it exactly means for them and for their future work. So thank you for organizing this. And I hope these sort of discussions continues. Gail? Yes. So I need to wrap up. Just a closing statement. Okay. I would just say that I think it's good to check with your publishers, the journal editors or the book publishers before you decide that you have to embargo and restrict access to your thesis or dissertation. I think publishers' policy is very widely. And in most of our experience, when asked, the publisher will provide, will allow access to the published work. And I would again call people's attention to tome the open access monograph ecosystem because there you can see the data. You can see what's really been happening with open access monograph and how they are being downloaded. I just, the average download is at least 100 and the average sales is eight. So if the point of creating a thesis or dissertation is to get your work out there, not just to get the degree but to get the work out there, then open access is the way to go. And I think we owe it to the public to give them access to these terrific works that have been created at our universities. So I'm very much a proponent of open access and I think we can work around the issues involved in the cost of open access and the benefits to the public, not just to the author but to the public for making these works open access. Thank you so much for having me. This was a great discussion. I enjoyed it very much. Yeah, I'd like to thank you all. I actually took a lot of notes and I really appreciate, you know, the comments that were made and also what Peter Suber said, you know that I don't want this to be a information should be free movement because I think a lot of, sometimes there are a lot of people in OA that kind of, you know, that message comes across and I think a lot of people just kind of become very hesitant because of that. So I've taken a lot of notes and in the workshops that I offer to our graduate students, I'm going to include some of the suggestions that you all have made. You know, thank you all for your time today. It was very fruitful. I think the attendees are a wonderful audience with their questions and of course John Hagen for moderating. I also want to remind the audience that the International Open Access Week is going to be at the end of October, that last week in October and there are so many resources that are available from Spark on the Open Access Week on the openaccessweek.org site. Again, that's the openaccessweek.org site. So make sure to participate in that Open Access Week and we hope to see you all in the remaining sessions. Thank you all. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Including those who have questions.