University Times

What is the role of the University in publicly disseminating the research and scholarship of individual faculty members?

That was the key question addressed by Adam Shear of the University Senate library committee at last week’s Faculty Assembly.

“In the past, that’s largely been an individual effort of faculty, and the question is whether the University ought to take a more proactive role,” Shear said. “And, then: What are the implications of change in the technology that are taking place very rapidly?”

Shear presented a follow-up report on the Senate’s March 2009 plenary session titled “Scholarly Publishing Today and Tomorrow.”

(See two stories in the March 19 issue of the University Times.)

Noting that the spring 2009 plenary session report is posted on the Senate’s web site, Shear focused his presentation on what emerged from the plenary session.

He said the library committee had made four broad recommendations for Faculty Assembly and Senate Council to consider, adding that after gathering feedback on the committee’s full report, committee members would present specific motions at a future Assembly meeting.

The first recommendation, Shear said, is that the University convene a task force that would bring together constituents from all of the major groups that are concerned with issues of open access, technology and publishing, and tenure and promotion criteria involving technology.

The model in mind, he said, is the 2000 information technology committee, chaired by the provost.

“We’re not necessarily proposing an ongoing committee. It may be a limited task force that would do its work and dissolve in a year,” Shear said.

In addition to guidance from the Provost’s office, the task force could include constituencies such as the University Library System; the University of Pittsburgh Press; the general counsel’s office; the Senate executive committee; the Deans’ Council, and faculty with expertise in these areas.

The second recommendation involves Pitt’s D-Scholarship institutional repository for research output, which is based on open-access principles, making all materials in the repository freely accessible to the global research community.

The library committee recommends that the University open a discussion about moving toward a model of expected participation for faculty with an opt-out clause. In the meantime, the University should promote the repository to faculty.

“Right now, automatically dissertations and electronic theses go into it, but otherwise participation in the D-Scholarship repository is voluntary,” Shear noted. The committee was informed that only a handful of faculty members had used the repository, which was launched earlier this fall.

“So we recommend moving toward something that is not voluntary, but that is expected,” he said. “We can play with the term ‘mandated,’ but the expectation would be that faculty would deposit their research here. There would always have to be an opt-out clause, either for an individual faculty member who doesn’t want to participate — although we can’t really think of good reasons why not — or in the case of material that was published under publishing agreements that don’t permit it.”

The push toward getting more participation should include better guidance and support for faculty in negotiating publishing agreements, he added.

The third recommendation, Shear said, is that the University educate its members, particularly faculty, post-docs and doctoral students, about author’s rights, copyright issues and how to negotiate with publishers.

“By and large, this University and all universities have had a hands-off policy in the past, saying, ‘You publish, go figure it out and come tenure time tell us where you’ve published and how much,’” Shear said.

He noted that PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, is up and running.

“All NIH-funded research now [is required to go] into PubMed Central, and Pitt’s librarians are working on ways to automatically have the PubMed Central material come into [the D-Scholarship repository],” Shear said. “This would be an expansion of that to include all areas of research on the campus.”

The fourth recommendation, he said, is that individual schools and departments examine tenure and promotion processes and criteria to make sure they take account of ongoing changes in the publishing industry and new models of scholarly communication.

Shear added that last February a coalition of the American Association of Universities, the Association of Research Libraries and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, which all count Pitt as a member, asked universities to be more proactive at the institutional level in the publication and dissemination of scholarship and in making it accessible to wider audiences under open-access principles.

“Our recommendations largely fall in line with those institutional strategies,” he said.

Shear directed Assembly members to the library committee’s full report and asked that feedback be forwarded to him or to Rosemary Hoffman, co-chair of the committee, who helped prepare the report.

Shear’s presentation prompted some discussion at the Nov. 4 Assembly.

Senate President Michael Pinsky commented, “I believe open access is becoming normal.

“For example, Stanford has a wonderful open-access web page for their faculty, as a way of bragging about [their scholarship]. That’s been an effective recruitment tool for fellows and graduate students, and I assume for faculty as well,” Pinsky said.

“What I don’t understand at all is the last recommendation,” Pinsky said. “Promotion and tenure is a function of the quality of the research, the impact effect of the journal and the evaluation of the quality of the research by people external to the University. Whether it’s open access or not shouldn’t alter in any way tenure.”

“That’s exactly right: It shouldn’t,” Shear responded. “However, there are two issues that came up repeatedly during the plenary [session]. First, there is an enormous amount of faculty anxiety and confusion about the difference between open access and online publication, and the difference between open access and peer review. There’s a mistaken assumption that online or open access means not peer reviewed, when in fact peer review is a function of something else, and even some print journals are not peer reviewed. [To counter] that anxiety and confusion, we felt it was important for the University to allay those concerns. That may not require any change in tenure and promotion criteria, it may simply mean a change in the way tenure and promotion criteria are communicated.”

A related issue, Shear said, is that outside of the fields in which one can make a list of the journals and their impact factors, such as in the humanities and some social sciences, there remains confusion among faculty about the relative value of print versus online publication.

“What might happen is that certain schools might come back and say, ‘We don’t need to make a change. We just need to make sure that our new faculty can take their peer-reviewed article to open access and that it’s still a peer-reviewed article,” Shear said.

In another matter, Pinsky related a classroom incident that he said raises a number of potential ethical, legal and University policy concerns.

He reported that in October a student secretly taped a Pitt class and posted it on YouTube. The posting included the student’s caustic commentary about the class, the instructor and the University, Pinsky said. When confronted by the instructor, the student removed the video from the YouTube site and resigned from the course. The teacher was satisfied and elected not to pursue any action against the student.

“Other students in the classroom were upset, saying that they feared speaking out in class if their comments might end up on YouTube,” Pinsky said.

“We need to defend the sanctity of the classroom that allows for free and open debate,” he said, adding that the Student Handbook does not address the issue definitively.

“This issue needs to be addressed directly by the University administration, faculty and students. In that regard I have been in contact with Kathy Humphrey, vice provost for Student Affairs, and Jim Maher, provost,” Pinsky said. “I do not know where this will end but I do believe that it needs to be addressed in a generic fashion openly.”

Following the Faculty Assembly meeting, Pinsky told the University Times he would broach the issue at Senate Council, which met yesterday after the University Times went to press.

—Peter Hart