President's Report 2010-2011

University of Denver Faculty Senate

President’s Report

Academic Year July 1, 2010 – June 30, 2011

Introduction

The following report summarizes the activities of the Faculty Senate for the academic year ending on June 30, 2011. Overall, it was a good year. In addition to dealing with routine and one-time issues, the Senate adopted four stretch goals. There were no simmering issues left at the end of the year, although as detailed below, there is still work ahead of us. With respect to our four stretch goals, it can be said that we reached “the end of the beginning.” Further work will be accomplished under the Provost’s Academic Strategic Positioning Initiative as it unfolds. Thanks to all who participated in Senate activities in the past year: Senators, committee members and chairs, faculty at large, students, administrators, staff, and members of the Board of Trustees. We look forward to collaborating with all of you in a shared governance environment as DU engages with the interesting times that lie ahead for colleges and universities in the US and around the world.

Culturing Interdisciplinarity

By Dean Saitta, Department of Anthropology

About five years ago, American scientific and educational organizations—including the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association of Universities—produced a bumper crop of reports suggesting that interdisciplinary teaching and research was the wave of the future in higher education.  Since that time many universities (some more than others) have been experimenting with strategies to promote interdisciplinary and collaborative work.  DU is now looking to better invest in such work as one part of its Strategic Positioning Initiative.

I’m a member of the Strategic Positioning Committee charged with developing three priorities for interdisciplinary work on campus. Other committee members include Phoenix Cai (Law, Co-Chair), Barbara Wilcots (AP Graduate Studies, Co-chair), Doug Allen (DCB), Andy Goetz (Geography), Frank Laird (JKSIS), Julia McGahey (AP Planning and Budget), Nicole Nicotera (GSSW) and Tim Weaver (SAAH). Chris Riordan (Dean, DCB) and James Herbert Williams (Dean, GSSW) are ex officio members.  We’d like to use this blog to solicit ideas and stimulate conversation about priority development and the strategies we might use at DU to better promote interdisciplinary teaching and research.

CFP - Access: Open Resources, Open Stacks

Call to Conversation for Spring 2011 Faculty Forum

Access: Open Resources, Open Stacks

Because we were not able to publish a winter edition of the Forum, I am extending the previous call for submissions in conjunction with a new topic for a spring issue with the theme of Access: Open Resources and Open Stacks. 

Open Resources

The 2010 Provost’s Conference affirmed DU’s commitment to open educational resources (OER), and promoting OER is one of the Faculty Senate’s agenda priorities for 2010-2011. We invite articles from faculty across campus about open access scholarship and open educational resources.  Do you publish your research in open access forums?  Why or why not? What are the benefits and challenges of open access and/or digital scholarship in your field?  What types of open resources do you use in your classes and how do you deliver course content to students? How can DU and the Faculty Senate work toward greater acceptance of and innovation in open access scholarship and pedagogy?

Open Stacks

As we look forward to the library renovation scheduled to begin this summer, there has been some debate about plans for the space, particularly about the decision to remove 80% of the library’s collections to offsite storage. Based on faculty and student response to the plan, the administration will be holding discussions to determine how to configure the remaining collections and will revise the percentage of books available on site if needed. We invite faculty articles in response to this plan and other aspects of the library renovation.  There will, no doubt, be lively discussion of the decision process,  which should be informed by last year's discussion of shared governance (see Faculty Forum XXIV.2-3).  But we would also like to hear about how you and your students use the library and what features are most important to you. How will planned renovations and reduction of open stacks affect your scholarship and teaching? How should an academic library balance demands for access to traditional text formats and digital formats? What are you most looking forward to about the new Academic Commons?

Please send queries, abstracts, or article drafts to Jennifer Campbell (Jennifer. Campbell@du.edu). The new blog format for the faculty forum allows us to publish articles as they come in, rather than only sharing submissions on a quarterly basis.

Faculty Forum Blog Introduction

Welcome to the new, improved, and interactive Faculty Forum. You can still access older issues of the Forum at http://www.du.edu/facsen/forum.html, but all new articles will be published here, along with Faculty Senate updates and announcements.

We believe the Faculty Forum Blog will better meet the needs of faculty and fulfill more of the publication guidelines set out in the Faculty Senate By-laws. Because the blog allows us to publish items more frequently, rather than waiting for a quarterly publication, we can cover Senate business in a timely fashion and faculty can share ideas and concerns about issues and events on campus as they arise. We also hope that the comment feature in the blog format will encourage greater participation and ongoing conversation.  You can subscribe to the Faculty Forum blog through an RSS feed so you will be alerted when new content is added.

As we develop this blog, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.  Please contact Jennifer Campbell, Faculty Forum Editor, at jennifer.campbell@du.edu.

Faculty Forum XXV.1- December 2010

Provost’s Conference Overview

On Friday, October 29, faculty from across campus gathered at the Driscoll Ballroom for the 2010 Provost’s Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age. This was a timely topic on a national level, following International Open Access Week (October 18-24) and the publication and endorsement of an Open Letter in support of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) by a number of university presidents, provosts, and research vice presidents in the spring. The day’s presentations and conversations were also particularly relevant for DU at a time when the Faculty Senate is undertaking efforts to expand the university’s use of open educational resources and review its promotion and tenure practices.  

After breakfast and opening remarks from Provost Greg Kvistad and Penrose Dean Nancy Allen, Heather Joseph delivered the opening keynote, “Open Access: The Current Landscape and Future Direction of Scholarly Communication.” Joseph is Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and spent 15 years in the publishing industry before dedicating herself to open access initiatives. For this presentation, Joseph focused on open access journals, noting that quality research often isn’t readily accessible due to price barriers, technical barriers, and cultural barriers. Some science journal subscriptions costs thousands of dollars per year, and journal expenditures have outstripped inflation and library budgets. Open access journals, such as those catalogued in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and institutional digital repositories can increase access while decreasing costs. 

Having research available is a first step; but scholars must be able to work with it. Joseph noted that there has been an explosion of publishing to keep up with the exponential pace of research, but while the amount of information has increased dramatically, our human ability to manage and interpret it has not.  We therefore must harness the power of networks for accessibility and usability, and to do so, we must remove legal barriers as well as technical barriers for interoperability. For open access journals and databases to succeed, there will also need to be cultural change within academia. New types of scholarship may not be trusted, especially if there are questions about their sustainability, and there is a deep reliance on current impact measures. Open access advocates will need to work on increasing researcher awareness about their options and rights and aligning incentives and rewards structures with open access goals. You can read more about Heather Joseph’s work and view selected presentations at http://www.arl.org/sparc/about/staff/joseph.shtml.

Following the keynote, the panel “Open Access in Practice: Local Experts Share their Experiences” discussed the benefits and challenges of several specific open-access efforts. In “E-Journals & Interactive Design: Re-mediating the Fields for Scholars & Writers,” Scott Howard, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department, discussed the two digital journals he publishes annually on Blogger. APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature & Culture and RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry/Literature & Culture are both peer-reviewed, international open-access journals with Creative Commons licenses. Because the two journals address the needs of such different authors and audiences, they have offered unique challenges, but the open-access blog format has its advantages, including the flexibility of the publishing space, the ease with which readers can comment on works, and the ability to track usage through Google Analytics.

Jamaica Jones, who is the special projects librarian for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, discussed NCAR’s OpenSky digital repository in “Open Access at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).” NCAR and UCAR (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research) have adopted an open access policy (based on the NIH Public Access Policy established in 2008), which requires employees to submit their publications to OpenSky. OpenSky provides a permanent digital location for research findings and makes them widely accessible to an international audience while protecting authors’ rights and providing services such as usage metrics analysis, institutional reporting, and automatic updates of online CVs. Jones attributes the success of OpenSky to its support of a collaborative research culture, partnerships with traditional publishing entities, integrated infrastructure, and author services that make participation more attractive to researchers. She also notes that scholars from DU can benefit from open access initiatives like this one through heightened visibility and impact, increased citations, greater engagement with the public, and an opportunity to shape the future of scholarly communication.

Donald McCubbrey, from the Department of Information Technology and Electronic Commerce in Daniels College of Business, presented “Open Educational Resources: Status and Trends.” McCubbrey is the project co-leader for the Global Text Project, which supports the development and distribution of free college-level textbooks. This highly collaborative effort, based on the principle that “No one is as smart as everyone,” invites student involvement in text creation—allowing student work to add real value and have a life beyond the classroom—and encourages users to modify books to suit local circumstances, particularly since the project focuses on developing economies. An increasing selection of books is available online, in print, or on DVD, and is searchable by keyword or subject directory. McCubbrey identified several challenges for such open-access initiatives, including the need to increase awareness, change faculty attitudes toward textbook adoption, encourage student involvement, and increase project funding and sustainability. McCubbrey argues that the benefits of open access textbooks for students and teachers, however, call for a proactive and sustained approach to open-access and alternative publication models here and abroad.

Following lunch and conversation, Diane Harley, a Senior Researcher for the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley presented a keynote on “The Future of Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing.” Harley co-authored the report  “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines” (2010), which is based on extensive case studies of tenure and promotion practices and research values in fields from astrophysics to political science. Based on this research, Harley argued that current tenure and promotion systems rely too heavily on a limited number of high-profile journals and citation metrics and expressed concerns that the elite standards of research universities often influence tenure and promotion requirements for less competitive colleges in negative ways. Instead, academic communities should establish more flexible peer review and academic reward systems that recognize the changing landscape of research and publishing. 

The conference concluded with three concurrent discussion sessions to extend conversations from the plenary sessions. Jamaica Jones and Greg Colati facilitated “Data Centers are the New Library Stacks: What Libraries Can Do to Help Make Your Academic Work Discoverable and Sustainable.” Colati is Coordinator of Digital Initiatives (DI) for Penrose, which is dedicated to creating sustainable, accessible, digital content at the University of Denver.  You can learn more DI tools and services online at http://library.du.edu/site/about/DI/index.php.

Don McCubbrey and Diane Harley led the discussion “Open Educational Resources: New Models for Classroom Materials,” which allowed participants to learn about resources like the Internet Archive and OER Commons and  share strategies for using library resources and Blackboard to deliver open course content. Heather Joseph and Anne McCall, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences moderated “Changing Models in Scholarly Communication: Implications for Promotion and Tenure.”  While these talks (and a chocolate reception) ended the Provost’s Conference, they were intended to start ongoing conversations about open access and the future of scholarship and teaching at DU.

You can view video of the plenary sessions and access related documents and resources on the Provost Conference Portfolio page: https://portfolio.du.edu/pc/port?portfolio=provostconference.