Category Archives: Research Tips

Related to any of the processes of information seeking, gathering, and managing. How a tool or resource can be used as part of process, how resources are related, the logic or sequence of research process related to library resources.

Research Tips, What's Cool

Celebrate Open Access Week 2024!

Open Access Week 2024 

By Lydia Burrage-Goodwin, Special Projects Librarian & Christine Moynihan, Scholarly Communications, Data, and Affordable Learning Librarian 

Happy Open Access Week!  

Healey Library is excited to provide UMass Boston with Open Access resources and events to celebrate the open dissemination of information and scholarship.  

What is Open Access and Why is it Important? 

As defined by SPARC, a nonprofit open research and education advocacy organization, “Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment”. OA allows research to be discoverable and shareable to a wide-reaching audience, increasing visibility, potential for collaboration, and ensuring the long-term preservation of research.  

Without Open Access scholarship, students, researchers and scholars are forced to either access paywalled material using their own resources or count on Healey Library to provide access through database subscriptions. 

Many publishers require article processing charges from authors who want to make their articles Open Access, which places a burden on the authors and has the potential to limit the reach of scholarship. Healey Library supports authors with transformative (read-and-publish) agreements and support of subscribe-to-open (S2O) initiatives. These agreements allow UMB corresponding authors to publish their articles open access at no cost (or, in select cases, at a reduced cost). A list of the transformative agreements can be found on Healey Library’s Article Processing Charge Guide.  

These practices are prohibitive for many researchers and authors, and hinders advancement of research, information equity and growth. UMass Boston is committed to supporting equitable outcomes for students through our Open Access work. Read more about UMB’s strategic plan here. 

New Open Access Guidelines for Research Funding 

In 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released updated policy guidelines called The Nelson Memo outlining new requirements for providing access to federally funded research. These new guidelines will require free, immediate, and equitable access to federally funded research at UMass Boston and other federal institutions by December 31st, 2025. To remain compliant with these requirements, authors and researchers are encouraged to explore any of UMass Boston’s numerous databases and platforms when publishing or hosting their work. For more information about the requirements, contact the UMB Office of Research and Sponsored Programs.  

Why Publish Open Access? 

Choosing to publish Open Access advances information equity by making research more visible, useful, and transparent to a wider-reaching audience. Below, we highlight two examples of Open Access articles written by UMass Boston scholars: 

In 2019, Jan Mutchler, UMB Professor and Director of the Gerontology Institute, co-authored an article with graduate students Nidya Velasco Roldán and Yang Li entitled “Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and Older Americans, Insecurity in the States 2019”. Hosted on UMB’s institutional repository, ScholarWorks, this article has had almost 19,000 downloads since its publication. This download number is impressive coupled with 101 social media shares and 54 news media mentions, it further solidifies why publishing Open Access is beneficial to both author and reader. 

Image of PlumX Metrics for the article “Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and Older Americans, Insecurity in the States, 2019 by Jan Mutchler, Yang Li, and Nidya Velasco Roldán. Image highlights over 21,000 downloads since 2019.

In 2024, Manning College of Nursing & Health Sciences Nursing Department doctoral candidate Rockson Ansong and Graduate Program Director of Nursing Dr. Priscilla Gazarian co-authored the article “Healthcare self-management support of stroke patients after discharge: A conceptual analysis using Rodger’s evolutionary approach”, published in Wiley’s Journal of Advancing Nursing. They took advantage of Healey Library’s new transformative agreement with Wiley that includes a set number of UMB author APC payment waivers for the year. Since the article’s publication in January 2024, it has received over 1000 full-text views. This number of full-text views is an example of the value of Open Access publishing using one of Healey Library’s transformative read and publish agreements. 

Image of the article “Healthcare self-management support of stroke patients after discharge: A conceptual analysis using Rodger’s evolutionary approach”, by Rockson Ansong and Priscilla Gazarian. Image shows over 1000 downloads since 2024.

Finding Reputable Open Access Publishers 

It is important for authors to read and understand Open Access publishing policies before choosing to submit work to an OA publisher. Authors should learn about the journal’s peer review process, its visibility and reputation, associated fees for publishing, and especially author rights and copyright.  

To find information about publishers and their policies, authors can search Sherpa/Romeo, a database that summarizes Open Access journals and their publishing policies. Authors can also use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a searchable database which indexes over 10.5 million articles and 33,000 journals, many of which do not require authors to pay article processing charges. Their counterpart, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) provides access to almost 90,000 peer-reviewed Open Access books, all of which are completely free.  

If an author is concerned about the integrity of a journal or publisher, they should take advantage of Healey Library’s subscription to Cabell’s Journalytics and Predatory Reports (users will need a UMB credential to login to this resource). This resource evaluates the legitimacy of journals’ business practices, flagging violations like conflict of interest, falsification of information, unrelated content, or harmful copyright practices. Users can apply a filter to search for Open Access journals that fall into the Gold, Diamond, Bronze, or Hybrid categories.  

To learn more about publishing Open Access with reputable publishers and for further resources, visit our Open Access Library Guide.  

Open Access Week Events:  

Keep an eye out for your Healey Librarians across campus, spreading the word about Open Access! 

Event Day and TimeAbout
Zoom Workshop: Intro to ScholarWorks  Tuesday, October 22nd at 10am Register here to attend the workshop
Tabling at the Campus Center Terrace (second floor) Wednesday, October 23rd, 2pm – 3:30pm We’ll be offering information for students about Open Access resources available to them, we’ll provide snacks and a raffle for prizes. 
Tabling at the Campus Center Terrace (second floor) Thursday, October 24th, 2pm – 3:30pm Come to the Campus Center Terrace to enter a raffle for prizes, grab some free snacks and learn about Open Access at Healey Library!

Further Open Access Resources: 

  • See what events and activities our sister school UMass Dartmouth has planned for Open Access Week!
  • Visit our Open Access LibGuide for a comprehensive list of open access resources and databases  

For further information, contact Christine Moynihan, Scholarly Communications, Data, and Affordable Learning Librarian at Christine.Moynihan@umb.edu.  

Research Tips, Resources, What's Cool

Want to Make Finding Full Text Articles Easier? Download the Lean Library Browser Extension

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jstor.org page with the Get Access Lean Library Pop-up appearing on the top right. The pop-up has a Get Access button.
Lean Library is a browser extension that provides quick and simple access to Library-subscribed full-text content – whenever, wherever you need it. When you’re on a website that contains library-subscribed content, the browser extension will notify you with a pop-up alert in the bookmarks bar that library access exists. The pop-up will provide you with the Get Access button to prompt you to authenticate with your UMass Boston login. If we do not have full-text access, then the extension will provide a link to InterLibrary Loan.

You don’t have to interrupt your workflow to find Healey Library; Healey Library will find you! Download the extension, select University of Massachusetts Boston, and start browsing for articles!

Here are some other ways Lean Library can help:

Find alternative access to articles and ebooks. If there is no access to the article or book through the current site, Lean Library helps find alternative access in another Healey Library-licensed resource or through open access channels. For books, Lean Library will take the ISBN on a page and match it up to our library holdings. This also works with Amazon, Google, and Outlook (web)!

Improved Google Scholar experience
You will notice our Find It@UMBrella links appearing beside some full text. Run a search – engineering education for women- in Google Scholar to test it out. Without Lean Library, you will have to go through Google’s multi-step Library Links set-up.

Highlight & Search in UMBrella
With Lean Library, you can highlight any text on a webpage and search it in UMBrella. Do this by using the context menu of your browser, i.e. by right-clicking on a webpage. Select the Search UMBrella @ Healey Library option from the menu.

For even more information about Lean Library, including FAQs, please visit our Lean Library Guide.

Announcements, In the News, Library Services, Research Tips

New library guide: Meeting the Challenges of Community-Based and Human Subjects Research in the Remote Mode

In early October 2020, UMass Boston faculty and graduate students were invited to join the Remote Research Sub-Committee of the campus Research Committee for a deep dive into the practical and professional, personal and existential aspects of trying to do community-based and other human subjects research in the remote mode.  This “Remote Research Symposium” generated helpful conversations, networking, suggestions and resource recommendations, all of which inspired the creation of this guide.

With the guidance of the sub-committee and based on resources curated by Associate Professor Rosalyn Negrón,  Healey librarians Teresa Maceira, Lauren Movlai and Lucas Hall organized an extensive reference guide around the topics of the three breakout sessions at the October symposium, which were:

  1. Research Guidance and Scholarship
  2. Remote Research Resources
  3. Work-Life Balance

The new guide’s menu offers a link to each section; we hope you find the included resources to be useful as you navigate the challenges of managing community-based and human subjects research in the remote mode.

Research Tips

Tips and tricks for searching the library catalog

 Want to learn some new ways to search the library catalog and get better results? This blog post provides some tips and tricks to help you.

Wildcards

You can use wildcards characters to replace one or more characters when searching the library catalog. Please note that these characters are not valid as wildcards when they are the first character in your search term.

For a single character wildcard search, use the ? (question mark) symbol. For example, type authori?e to find both the American (authorize) and British (authorize) spellings.

For a multiple character wildcard search, use the * (asterisk) symbol. For example, type cell* for cellular, cells, etc.

Using the * (asterisk) symbol as the first character in your search term indicates that the search term is important. For example, baseball *Boston.

To locate a search term that is essential, type a + (plus sign) in front of the word. For example, +lung +cancer.

Tip: It is best to use a wildcard search term with other search terms so you do not get too many search results.

Diacritics

A dialatin-accentscritic is a symbol that is attached to a letter and is used to indicate an alternative pronunciation for the letter. Some examples of diacritics are accents (continuación), cedillas (François), and umlauts (Brontë).

If your search term has a diacritic, you can either include or not include the diacritic in your search term.

Tip: If you do not get the proper search results using a diacritic, type the search term without the diacritics.

Character sets

Our library catalog like many computer systems looks for characters in ASCII format. If you copy and paste a search term from a document or Web page, the search term may contain non-ASCII characters and then the term may not appear in your search results.

Example: ASCII and Non-ASCII apostrophe characters

Non-ASCII : George Washington’s

ASCII: George Washington’s

For characters such as diacritics, commas, apostrophes, and quotes, try deleting these types of characters and retype them directly in the search box.

Library Services, Research Tips, Resources

Using Archival Collections in Your Research

UASC Stacks
UMass Boston’s archival storage space. The University holds more than 200 archival collections across a variety of research areas.

Developing a successful research strategy involves identifying and locating relevant resources including both secondary and primary source materials.  It may turn out that UMass Boston’s Archives hold archival collections that are of direct use to you in your research.  UMass Boston’s collections encompass a variety of subject disciplines.  We preserve archival materials related to the University’s history as well as records and documents that reflect the university’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social action, alternative movements, community organizations and local history related to our neighboring communities including the Boston Harbor Islands.   A couple of examples:

ForestersRecords
A single MCOF Record. Source: University Archives and Special Collections, UMass Boston.

UMass Boston holds than 28,000 mortuary records from the Mass. Catholic Association of Foresters,  a fraternal organization begun in Boston in 1879 by Irish immigrants. These records include extensive data about the health, social networks, occupations and immigration patterns of thousands of people over many decades.  We also hold the records of the international organization “Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research”, the papers of Judge David Mazzone, who presided over the cleanup of Boston Harbor, the chambers papers of W. Arthur Garrity, who presided over the desegregation of Boston Public Schools, records of the League of American Wheelmen and many, many more organizations and individuals.

1968 photo of Columbia Point
Columbia Point before the construction of the UMass Boston campus; photo taken in 1968. The building in the center is the Calf Pasture Pumping Station. Source: University Archives and Special Collections, UMass Boston.

Bicycling postcard, “You Can Count On US, Solider ! We’ll Keep ‘Em Rolling!”, circa 1920-1950. Source: Archives and Special Collections, UMass Boston.

Of course, no single archival institution can hold everything. Around the world, different institutions have committed to taking responsibility for storing and preserving different chunks of the historic record, usually based on that institution’s own mission and goals. There are many other archival institutions in the area and around the world, and Healey Library’s Archives staff can help you to find out what they hold and how to access them. There are also several fine, online directories of archival holdings – “ArchiveGrid” from OCLC is a good one.  Another is WorldCat, where you may limit search results to “Archival Material” using the faceting options in the left-hand column.

BPD Duty Card, 1919
Duty roster card for a patrolman involved in the 1919 Police Strike in Boston. Source: Boston Police Department Archives; digital copies of the full set held at University Archives and Special Collections, UMass Boston.

So if your research can make use of archival materials in any format, please do contact us. The staff here in the University Archives and Special Collections is enthusiastically committed to assisting you in reaching your academic and research goals.  The best way to take advantage of the Archives department’s services is simply to email library.archives@umb.edu and tell us what you need or are hoping to accomplish. And you are welcome to stop by any weekday between 10 am and 4 pm to say hello and see our Reading Room and speak to an archivist.  The University Archives and Special Collections are located on the 5th Floor of the Healey Library.

Related Resources:

Descriptions of UMass Boston’s Archival Collections

UMass Boston’s Repository for Digital Collections

Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research (SAA handout)