ABSTRACT. The two primary means for accomplishing Open Access (OA) goals are the "author pays" or Gold model and the "self-archiving" or Green model, both of which can have variations or hybrids. There is a growing schism between proponents of the Gold and Green models. Scholar uptake on self-archiving has been very limited. At the same time, a great deal of concern has been expressed regarding the Gold model, particularly with regard to cost and the role of peer-review lite journals. With the evolving OA environment as a backdrop, the authors conducted a survey of university engineering faculty in order to better understand their OA practices and attitudes. The scholarly communication needs and activities of engineering faculty are more diverse than other scholars in that they have a broader and more varied literature, which includes journal articles, conference papers, technical reports, standards, handbook information, patents, and grey literature. The survey was comprised of 12 Likert scale questions and 3 open comment questions. The results of the survey of engineering faculty were consistent with other studies that have revealed concerns over the author pays model and a reluctance to self-archive in the university institutional repository (IR). Survey results showed that engineering faculty do not extensively publish in author pays Gold journals and had limited plans to do so in the future. In line with other studies, the survey revealed that there was a lack of familiarity with campus IRs and a very small uptake rate for depositing research output in institutional repositories.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-

Academic libraries are transitioning from access systems based on federated, broadcast search technologies to Web-scale discovery systems with central, aggregated indexes. It is important to understand user information seeking behaviors, but knowledge of user searching patterns in online catalogs is incomplete and contradictory. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has been collecting custom transaction log data from a main gateway built around the Easy Search (ES) federated search system. ES provides contextual search assistance suggestions that facilitate search reformulation and performs added title and phrase searches. An analysis of the transaction logs has revealed information on user search characteristics and search assistance usage. These findings show the importance of known-item searching, including journal, book, and article title searches. The Illinois team has been working with Web-scale discovery system vendors on a hybrid approach that incorporates search assistance and recommender elements with Web-scale aggregation and blended result displays.

No abstract

We thank the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for its sponsorship of the Research Support Services project on Civil and Environmental Engineering. Ithaka S+R provides research and strategic guidance to help the academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, demographic, and technological change. Ithaka S+R is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that works to advance and preserve knowledge and to improve teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies. Artstor, JSTOR, and Portico are also part of ITHAKA.

No abstract

Much has been written about researcher's data management and data sharing practices and needs. The published studies show that researchers have an awareness of the data sharing mandates and policies of federal grant agencies and journal publishers and there is a growing acceptance of the intrinsic value of data sharing albeit with some concerns and caveats. However, establishing an effective and consistent data management service presents challenges for libraries, given the known disciplinary differences in data management needs and the fact that faculty have not yet significantly changed their data management practices to conform to federal agency and publisher mandates. After conducting in-depth interviews with twenty-one engineering and atmospheric science faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, it became clear that scientists and engineers view the research lifecycle as a holistic endeavor and treat data as one of many necessary elements in the scholarly communication workflow. The generation, usage, storage, and sharing of data are part of the integrated scholarly workflow, and are not necessarily wholly separate processes. Building on these interviews, the authors have developed an instructional and training program that better focuses on integrating data management activities focusing on research and scholarly communication processes. The goal of our project was to examine data management practices in the context of researcher scholarly workflow needs and behaviors and develop and implement an instructional program that addresses researcher data needs. The development and assessment of this program is underway.

Universities routinely employ research impact assessment mechanisms and tools for grant proposals, resource allocation decisions, and funding budget requests. These impact metrics are often displayed in interactive visualizations and dashboard displays. There is a growing trend for libraries to be cooperatively involved in the gathering and provision of research intelligence and impact data. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has developed a system for generating research impact visualizations for research groups within the newly established Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Using the Elsevier Scopus database Applications Programming Interface, we have created a series of scripts to extract article, conference paper, and book chapter metadata and build supporting database tables. From the database, a dashboard visualization of scaled and clickable display bubbles and publication number labels is generated for each individual researcher. The interactive visualization can retrieve articles and papers published over the last five years, citation information (as cited by number) for each researcher, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grant matches, and a visualization of the coauthored papers for each author within the cohort. These activities enhance the role of the library in supporting knowledge management and scholarly communication and in fostering campus partnerships and collaborations.