Ongoing Projects
The Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) serves the research and scholarly support needs of Texas A&M faculty, graduate students, and other campus scholars through the provision of modern, web-based publishing and repository services.
Promoting Online Scholarly Identity
New, web-based tools and services are being developed that can enhance the visibility of faculty research, enrich their scholarly identity, and support the discovery of potential collaborators. These projects rely on creating unique identifiers for scholars, harvesting the metadata associated with their scholarly work, developing semantic web applications and databases, and providing campus outreach and training.
VIVO
VIVO is a robust, open-source, semantic-web application that enables the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines by providing standard research profiles for all university faculty and graduate students.
ORCID
ORCIDs are persistent digital identifiers that identify scholars. ORCIDs support the integration of key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between a scholar and their professional activities ensuring that their work is recognized. The Texas A&M ORCID project is minting ORCIDs for graduate students, we expect to expand this program to post-docs and faculty in the future.
Scholarly Impact Metrics
This is an emerging project that seeks to identify new and useful measures of scholarly reputation. The library has installed Altmetrics. We have developed a short review of the effect of open access on citation rates. We are developing a program to support faculty going up for P&T.
Promoting Open Access
Texas A&M University Libraries is an active advocate of open access, believing that open access can help address both the price barriers and the permission barriers that undermine global access to the products of Texas A&M’s scholarly and creative work, as well as helping alleviate the serious issue of providing Texas A&M scholars access to the world’s scholarly literature due to rising subscription costs. The programs below seek to provide the tools and services that remove barriers to scholars publishing their scholarship as open access.
Open Access Week
OSC coordinates the campus’s celebration of Open Access Week each October with highly visible public programming including tabling events around campus; workshops and seminars; campus-wide announcements and mailings; and student-oriented contests
OAKTrust
OAKTrust is Texas A&M University’s institutional repository. The institutional repository is built upon the DSpace and Vireo platforms. It serves as the primary tool for the curation of Texas A&M University’s electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and is an emerging platform for other types of Texas A&M scholarly publications. The curation of all ETDs in OAKTrust is mandated.
OAKFund
OAKFund is a fund for Texas A&M faculty authors to support publication fees for OA journals.
Texas FARMER and HathiTrust
The Texas FARMER and HathiTrust project is focused on ingesting newly digitized Texas A&M University agricultural publications (i.e., Experiment Station bulletins, Extension Service bulletins, Extension Service leaflets, and Extension Service circulars) into OAKTrust and HathiTrust.
Open Access Textbook Project
In collaboration with the Open Textbook Library Initiative at the University of Minnesota, this emerging project seeks to recruit faculty to attend local workshops that guide the review of available OA textbooks and convince the instructors to adopt an OA textbook for their class. The workshops have been designed and partners are now being solicited on campus.
Supporting New Forms of Digital Scholarship & Research Collaboration
Digital and networking technologies are prompting significant change and opportunity in the practices of scholars, particularly as they collaborate, the publication of their scholarship, and the scholarly communication process. The projects below seek to develop new tools, services and policies that take advantage of these opportunities to advance Texas A&M scholarship and its societal impact as well as develop the systems that allow Texas A&M researchers to meet emerging federal mandates for public access to research.
Digital Scholarship & Humanities
Community building effort focused on developing an innovative DH+Lib partnership with the (emerging) campus DH community.
Digital Collections & Projects
Members of the OSC team provide support for digital collection-building, through metadata creation and mapping, consultation around digital projects and rights issues, and participation in cross-library teams and committees focused on instruction, rights, discovery, workflow creation, and preservation.
Digital Asset Management System
Environmental scan of the needs and requirements for a digital asset management system by Texas A&M University and Libraries communities. A pilot program has been started.
Texas Digital Library Data Repository
A working group designing a TDL data repository that should meeting emerging federal mandates for public access to research data funded by federal agencies.
Research Team Collaboration
Exploring the implementation of Hubzero, a software platform for building web-based collaboratories that support discovery, collaboration, and research data curation.
PIVOT Training
Pivot is a database of research funding opportunities provided to the Texas A&M University community by the Texas A&M Libraries and the Vice Chancellor of Research. Pivot allows research administrators, research development professionals, and individual faculty members the ability to search and track the right research funding opportunities – based upon their research profile.