UTA ResearchCommons: Bringing UTA to the Global Community

Our colleague Jessica McClean, Director of Open Educational Resources, offered the first post in the “Open @ UTA Libraries” series with a brief overview and framework for the open work that we do at UTA Libraries. Today, we have teamed up to provide more detail on one aspect of our open work! We are Dr. Leah McCurdy, Director of Open Partnerships and Services, and Vanessa Garrett, Digital Publishing Librarian. In this post, we provide more information about UTA ResearchCommons, our institutional repository that permanently preserves and provides access to scholarly, curricular, and professional resources developed by UTA community members.

That last statement may be surprising, especially given the name “ResearchCommons.” In many cases, institutional repositories solely focus on research outcomes like scholarly articles, graduate theses and dissertations, and undergraduate research papers and capstone projects. UTA ResearchCommons certainly hosts such items but also invites resources focused on curricular innovations, like Dr. Robin Jocius’ EDUC 4647 students’ projects in spring 2023. Dr. Jocius partnered with then-UTA Libraries K-12 Librarian Morgan Brickey-Jones (now Director of Community Engagement) to develop an assignment with senior students majoring in Education to create curricula for a K-12 STEAM summer camp (that was implemented in the Central Library in April 2023!). These lesson plans are openly licensed, so they are available for anyone to access and implement in their own context. Furthermore, by sharing their work in the UTA ResearchCommons, Dr. Jocius’ students earned publication credit for their resume and a permanent record of their wonderful work. 

UTA’s institutional repository also includes resources and outcomes resulting from UTA staff’s professional activities and development. For example, many of UTA’s librarians have published presentations given at professional conferences and policies they have developed to organize their work in the Libraries. Sharing materials like this supports the Librarian profession as well as the documentation of our work at UTA Libraries over time. UTA ResearchCommons also hosts an archive of the African American Faculty and Staff Association Newsletters documenting the exemplary work of AAFSA. These are the resources beyond traditional scholarly research that we can also offer to the public through our institutional repository to demonstrate our accomplishments and commitments.

In addition to the broad range of resource types provided, it is important to recognize that ResearchCommons is an open access institutional repository that offers all resources it contains freely to our campus community and the public.

Let’s dive into the importance of open access first. Why care? Traditionally, scholarly/research content and resources have been made available to others via commercial publishing in the form of books and articles in scholarly journals/periodicals. This system requires authors to transfer their rights of intellectual property and copyright to the commercial publisher (giving the publisher the authority to both distribute and own the content). Only if a scholarly book is commercially successful would an author see any compensation for that work from the publisher through royalties negotiated as a percentage of sales. So, in the long-established scholarly publishing system that functions through the commercial sector, academic authors lose the rights to their own work and rarely see financial benefits. Faculty see benefits as part of the tenure system and research cohorts in academia through promotion, increasing salaries, and prestige building.

The author’s experience is at least somewhat better than the reader’s experience. A reader of such scholarly publications must either pay out of pocket for access or be a member of an institution like UTA, whose library pays subscriptions to the commercial publishers on behalf of all the university’s readers. Students typically foot this bill; it is their fees that support the library budgets that pay into the commercial scholarly publication system. Authors lose their rights but gain some prestige and promotion, while students gain access only after paying into the system and will lose access once they leave the university. Readers without any ties to a university or similar institution only have the option of paying out of pocket for access to scholarly content and research, typically amounting to a very high price.

That is, unless institutions have an open access institutional repository, like UTA ResearchCommons. Open access has many benefits, including mechanisms to ensure authors retain their rights while sharing through Creative Commons licenses, which also instruct readers/users on what they can do with the resource. Future posts will discuss Creative Commons in depth and other copyright-relevant cousins like Fair Use. Stay tuned for more on those topics! Dr. Zui Pan, Professor of Graduate Nursing in the UTA College of Nursing and Health Innovation, notes:

“Open access publishing usually is more transparent, and makes our work more visible and accessible. For example, one of our papers in 2017 was published in an open access journal and now has been cited by 342 [other papers].”

That is incredible impact! A citation count of 100 puts an article in the top 5%. But 342 takes that to another level! An example direct from UTA ResearchCommons of incredible impact is a research poster by Aaron Newland and Kevin Nguyen, students working in the UTA Cardiovascular Research Laboratory, that has been viewed 11,273 times! That’s what open access can do for research visibility. As Dr. Pan and her colleagues in STEM fields are well aware, many funding agencies now require publications resulting from research they fund to be open access, including federal funders. Such mandates and awareness about impact are growing in the Social Sciences and Humanities as well.

The fact that the UTA ResearchCommons is available to the public offers incredible value to our communities beyond higher education. This service allows members of the public to engage with research, no matter their affiliations, ability to undertake higher education, or financial opportunities. This means that our parents, our children, and underserved global communities can access information that can be valuable to them. For example, Dr. Xian Liu, a graduate of UTA’s Geriatrics program and a former student of Dr. Pan, writes:

“[Our work makes] contributions to the advancement of the cardiac and cancer research fields. Cardiac disease and cancer are the top 2 leading causes of death in the United States; any research that studies the complex relationship between the two may help improve patient health outcomes for both of these debilitating conditions. … Most specifically, we would like the public to be more aware of the link between anthracyclines and cardiac disease. Since anthracyclines are such a common class of anti-cancer drug, we believe it is important for there to be accessible resources for patients and anyone curious enough to seek out more information about the potential effects of treatment.”

You can read more about the important and life-saving research in Dr. Liu’s dissertation entitled “Dysregulated Calcium Signaling in Cardiomyocytes from Diabetic Atrial Fibrillation to Chemotherapy-Induced Cardiac Hypertrophy” in the UTA ResearchCommons. For members of the public (and the authors of this blog post), understanding every bit of Dr. Liu’s dissertation is not possible, but we can engage with her introductory and concluding remarks that reflect the significance and implications of this research to be more informed about our own health outcomes.

That’s what institutional repositories can do: get academic information out to the people who it can benefit, beyond just those who have paid/have privileged access. We at UTA Libraries Open Partnerships and Services Department are awaiting all our UTA colleagues who want to get their research, curricular materials, and professional resources out to their neighbors and beyond. We will get your work out there. It will be seen, and it will change the world.

Get in touch with us at librariesops@uta.edu!

The cover image for this blog post is "Opened Padlock with Banner" by Leah McCurdy, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. It is a derivative of a CC0 public domain image, and was modified to add the "Open @ UTA Libraries" banner.