An introduction to open access, open data, and institutional repositories, featuring panelists from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Refreshments will be provided.

Location: Canevin 108

Presenters:

Lauren B. Collister, Ph.D.

Scholarly Communications Librarian, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh

During the process of obtaining her Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics, Lauren realized that there was a lot more to academic work than doing research and publishing it. She became an advocate for Open Scholarship as an early career researcher, and turned the focus of her career to helping her fellow scholars navigate the life cycle of scholarship. In her position as Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Pittsburgh, Lauren engages directly with faculty, staff, and students to help them manage and track their scholarly output. She also serves as a voice for scholarly communication with the Linguistic Society of America, the Association of Internet Researchers, the OpenCon Community for Early Career Researchers, and the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Lauren will be discussing the Open movement in higher education and why it is important, beneficial, and easy for scholars of all types to make their work accessible to the world. From source material to data to publications to peer review, learn about the current state of Open in the scholarly world and what you can do to participate.

David A. Scherer

Scholarly Communications and Research Curation Consultant, University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University

David Scherer is the Scholarly Communications and Research Curation Consultant with the University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon University. In his role he oversees the scholarly communications program at CMU, which includes ORCID registration, Three Minute Thesis Competition, Copyright, Fair Use, and the institutional repository, Research Showcase. In his previous role at Purdue University, David oversaw the institutional repository, Purdue e-Pubs. David is also a co-editor and author of the recent publication, Making Institutional Repositories Work, which intended to take the pulse of institutional repositories—to see how they have matured and what can be expected from them, as well as introduce what may be the future role of the institutional repository. David earned his MSLIS and MA in History from Simmons College.

David will be discussing the movement towards institutional repositories, and their benefits as the mechanism for faculty, staff, and students to make their research outputs more discoverable and globally accessible. From posting versions of peer-reviewed published scholarship, theses and dissertations, to grey literature and conference proceeding presentations and posters, come learn how institutional repositories can benefit the global community and how you can participate.

Gina M. Peirce

Assistant Director, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh

At Pitt’s Center for Russian and East European Studies, Gina Peirce administers a wide range of foreign language and international studies programs funded by federal grants from the US Department of Education, Defense Language and National Security Education Office, and National Endowment for the Humanities. Gina holds a master’s degree in Political Science / Russian and East European Studies from the University of Michigan and a master’s in Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh, where her studies focused on second language acquisition. She is particularly interested in identifying factors that facilitate or impede the attainment of high-level Russian language proficiency by US university students. Gina’s thesis project, completed in 2015, examined acquisition of the Russian grammatical case and gender systems by heritage speakers and traditional second language learners.

Gina will discuss the experience of publishing an open dataset to accompany her master’s thesis in the D-Scholarship institutional repository at the University of Pittsburgh. Her thesis project analyzed a dataset of 232 short essays by 24 advanced Russian language learners, which were annotated with details on all errors made by the essay writers in selecting grammatical endings for nouns and adjectives. Working with the University Library System to publish her dataset in Pitt's D-Scholarship has helped to ensure both that the results of Gina's study are replicable by other second language acquisition researchers, and that it is possible for such researchers to utilize her annotated data to explore other factors influencing learners of foreign language grammar in addition to those highlighted in her thesis.