Hello to Healey Library patrons near and far!

Welcome back to campus after what we hope was a restful and rejuvenating break. To kick off the spring semester, we wanted to bring your attention to a few hot Healey Library news items about library email reminders, lowering textbook costs for students, and upcoming OER orientations for faculty:

UMBrella Email Notifications

Library patrons will begin receiving email reminders about their Library items.

As of February 1, all Healey Library patrons will receive courtesy notices about what you’ve borrowed, reminders when things are coming due or overdue, and reminders of your current borrowing status. Items that are long overdue could be subject to lost book charges, so check your bookshelves and couch cushions for lurking library materials! Please contact Library.Circulation@umb.edu with any questions, concerns, or corrections.

Lowering Textbook Costs for Students

Here are five pathways you can pursue in partnership with Healey Library and IT to offer no-cost or low-cost textbook alternatives to your students:

• Adopt or adapt instructional materials that are freely licensed for open use (true Open Educational Resources, or OERs)

• Use licensed e-books that are already available through UMBrella

• Submit a Reserves request for Healey Library to purchase e-books for your students to use in your class

• Link to licensed journal and newspaper articles from Healey Library databases in password-protected Blackboard course pages

• Submit a digitization request for scanned chapters of library books and e-books (note that these requests may be subject to copyright and fair use guidelines)

Open Education Info for Faculty

To learn more about the growing Open Education movement, please consider attending a FREE regional training event about the Massachusetts Open Education – Achieving Access for All project.

These events are funded by the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and will provide an introduction to teaching and learning with free and open educational resources and will also offer faculty the opportunity to receive a $200 stipend for reviewing an existing open textbook for the benefit of colleagues. Training workshops take place 10am-2pm at the following locations:

• February 8, 2019: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• March 12, 2019: Bridgewater State University
• March 14, 2019: Worcester State University
• March 20, 2019: Roxbury Community College

For questions about any of these resources, please reach out to Library.Reserves@umb.edu or Open@umb.edu.

As always, we look forward to partnering with you to serve UMass Boston’s students, faculty, researchers, and community partners.

With all best wishes for a wonderful start to the semester,
Joanne Riley, Interim Dean, and the Healey Library Staff

October 22-28, 2018, is Open Access Week! To celebrate, come to a viewing of Paywall: The Business of Scholarship!

• What: Group viewing and discussion of this investigation into the $25 billion for-profit scholarly publishing industry (that is, the big commercial publishers as opposed to non-profit, university presses) from the perspective of the open access movement
• When: Tuesday, October 23, 1:30-3:00pm, and Friday, October 26, 1:00-2:30pm
• Where: Center for Active Learning and Library Instruction (CALLI), H-04-015
• Who: All faculty, staff, and students at UMass Boston are invited to join us

There are a lot of reasons to support  Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OERs). The Open Access movement is driven by the ideal that we all benefit when high-quality information is made freely available. It’s a strongly democratic idea, as it holds that our current publishing system privileges those who are able to pay for access (either individually or through association with a college or university). Many people have come to see these barriers to information as an issue of social inequality, and the move to democratize our publishing models has prompted global declarations and support, including UNESCO’s Paris OER Declaration and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

Closer to home, both the United States and Europe have issued mandates stating that publicly funded research must be made available via open access within a limited time frame after publication. Individual institutions, including UMass Boston, are also adopting open access publishing policies for their own researchers. The Faculty Council at UMass Boston adopted a campus-wide open access policy in 2012. And when it comes to our students, researchers have found that students frequently choose not to purchase textbooks because of cost, knowing that this decision may negatively impact their grades. Further, they don’t register for classes, or register for fewer classes overall, due to textbook cost, impacting persistence and time to degree completion.

Healey Library provides access to ScholarWorks, UMass Boston’s own open access institutional repository. ScholarWorks is the digital collection of UMass Boston’s intellectual, research, and scholarly output that centralizes, makes accessible, and preserves knowledge produced by the institution. Visit the ScholarWorks homepage to watch as materials uploaded to ScholarWorks by the UMass Boston community are accessed by users around the world.

UMass Boston and Healey Library are deeply committed to these ideals. We hope you can join the staff of Healey Library for a viewing and discussion of Paywall: The Business of Scholarship. This one-hour, open access documentary takes a deep dive into the for-profit publishing industry, and we’d love to hear about your own experiences navigating this process as both a reviewer and an author.

Happy Open Access Week! Healey Library celebrates unfettered access to high-quality information at all times, but especially this week!

UMASS BOSTON OPEN ACCESS WEEK EVENTS
sponsored by Healey Library, IT and Student Government in collaboration with MassPIRG