INTRODUCTIONThe popularity of academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu indicates that scholars want to share their work, yet for universities with open access (OA) policies, these sites may be competing with institutional repositories (IRs) for content. This article seeks to reveal researcher practices, attitudes, and motivations around uploading their work to ResearchGate and complying with an institutional OA Policy through a study of faculty at the University of Rhode Island (URI). METHODS We conducted a population study to examine the participation by 558 full-time URI faculty members in the OA Policy and ResearchGate followed by a survey of 728 full-time URI faculty members about their participation in the two services. DISCUSSION The majority of URI faculty do not participate in the OA Policy or use ResearchGate. Authors' primary motivations for participation are sharing their work more broadly and increasing its visibility and impact. Faculty who participate in ResearchGate are more likely to participate in the OA Policy, and vice versa. The fact that the OA Policy targets the author manuscript and not the final published article constitutes a significant barrier to participation. CONCLUSION Librarians should not view academic social networks as a threat to open access. Authors' strong preference for sharing the final, published version of their articles provides support for calls to hasten the transition to a Gold OA publishing system. Misunderstandings about the OA Policy and copyright indicate a need for librarians to conduct greater education and outreach to authors about options for legally sharing articles. Received: 01/26/2017 Accepted: 06/20/2017 Correspondence: Andrée Rathemacher, 269 Library, University Libraries, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881, USA, andree@uri.edu 2. Throughout the survey, faculty reported a strong aversion to sharing the author manuscript version of their articles. This was the most significant barrier to participating in the OA Policy. This finding, if generalizable, should inform current discussions among OA advocates about the respective roles going forward of Green OA achieved through depositing author manuscripts in institutional repositories and Gold OA achieved at the point of publication.
RESEARCH3. Our survey revealed a range of misunderstandings about the IR, OA policies, and copyright. For example, many respondents believe that the legality of posting one's articles in both the IR and ResearchGate depends on publisher policy and the version of the article posted. In fact, permissions-based OA policies make it legal to post author manuscripts in the IR regardless of publisher policies, and many subscriptionaccess journals prohibit depositing any version of an article to commercial sites like ResearchGate. These misunderstandings indicate a need for librarians to conduct greater education and outreach to faculty around their options for legally sharing published articles.
INTRODUCTIONFrom electronic journals and repositories to soci...
The authors discuss the plan for building an incremental, multi-year information literacy program at the University of Rhode Island. Review of the current library instruction program leads to why and how they plan to change the program by focusing on the concepts of understanding what information is in addition to learning how to gather, evaluate, and use information. The Draft Plan for Information Literacy at the University of Rhode Island Libraries addresses the information and research needs of undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty needs. The development of creditbearing courses in information literacy, the creation of information literacy modules for specific disciplines and the Draft Plan for Information Literacy are discussed.
Distributed networking is a distributed computer operating system said to be "distributed" when the computer programming and the data to be worked on are spread out over more than one computer, usually over a network.
, who provided an overview of developments in online education. Kumar stated that his job is to help the community at MIT respond to the significance of all things open and all things digital and their impact on the university. The shift to "open" and "digital" has profound pedagogical implications, and what is exciting is that we do not yet know what these are. We need to figure out how to collect data so that we can ask the relevant questions and create preferred futures for education, futures defined by dramatic improvements in access and new ways of defining and realizing quality. Kumar explained that on the demand side, there is a growing need for access to higher education, both in countries like Brazil and India that are trying to develop in a hurry and do not have an adequate educational infrastructure and in the United States, where cost has become a barrier to educational access. On the supply side, we have powerful new technologies, including tools like mobile computing, cloud computing, data visualization and analytics, augmented reality, and game-based learning. These technologies are contributing to the production and distribution of education through massive open online courses (MOOCs). Another significant factor in the transformation of education is openness, as expressed through open access scholarship, open educational resources, open source software, and open licenses like those from Creative Commons. Open education has been expressed in different ways over the years through many educational initiatives, Kumar explained. Just over ten years ago, open courseware was launched when MIT made the content of all its courses available online for free for educational purposes. With this initiative, the MIT community began having discussions about MIT's unique value proposition. Faculty articulated that what defined the value of an MIT education was intensity: a high level of interaction between high quality students and high quality faculty as evidenced in part through project-based learning and hands-on experiences. The question became how to maintain and extend this value proposition when offering online distance education to a broader set of learners who are more diverse in their levels of preparation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.