ThinkTech surpasses 3,000 OA works

Institutional Repository Faculty Research Collection surpasses 3,000 Open Access works ahead of Open Access Week 2023

By Heidi Winkler, Associate Librarian for Digital Services

During the summer of 2023, the ThinkTech Institutional Repository Faculty Research Collection reached a major milestone. First created in 2005, the collection logged the deposit of its 3,000th open access (OA) work in August 2023, and it only continues to grow as the Texas Tech University community continues to publish OA scholarship. Even though it's called the “Faculty Research Collection,” this section of the TTU ThinkTech institutional repository is home to OA scholarship authored by TTU faculty, staff and graduate students from across campus. ThinkTech is an online publishing and archival service for the TTU community that scholars may use to distribute and archive their scholarly works with no limitations on content or format. You might also recognize ThinkTech as the home of the university's Electronic Theses and Dissertations collection. While most of the works in the Faculty Research Collection are peer-reviewed journal articles, the collection also provides access to materials that traditional publications cannot, such as conference presentation slide decks and posters, technical reports and white papers.

What is Open Access?
According to SPARC, a non-profit organization that advocates for research and education systems that are “open by default and equitable by design,” of which the TTU Libraries is a full member, OA is best defined as “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” In the last 20 years, the OA movement has radically transformed the publishing landscape and has challenged how academic publishers, researchers and funders approach how scholarship is published and who pays for it. Faculty members are expected to demonstrate the impact of their research for tenure and promotion while also shouldering the financial burden of the shift to article processing charges (APCs) to fund OA in high-impact journals. The TTU Libraries endeavors to both advocate for the principles and advantages of OA scholarly publishing as well as for the evolving needs, rights and expectations of the authors who create scholarship. 

Community over Commercialization: International Open Access Week 2023
Every year, SPARC sponsors International Open Access Week as a chance to celebrate and raise awareness around the global of progress toward the open sharing of knowledge. In 2023, Open Access Week will be observed October 23-29, and this year's theme is Community over Commercialization, intended to encourage “a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.” This year's Open Access Week theme encourages people to consider in their local contexts how the research community can move away from corporate academic publishing business models that value profit over researchers and the public interest. How can we better serve the academic community through already existing community-controlled infrastructures, such as pre-print servers, open publishing platforms, and repositories like ThinkTech?

One of the great advantages of institutional repositories like the ThinkTech Faculty Research Collection is that we provide researchers the opportunity to make their journal articles OA for free. For those journals under a hybrid OA or subscription-based publishing model, publishers usually allow an earlier draft version of an article, known as the accepted manuscript, to be deposited to the author's institutional repository and made public, often after a short embargo. You can find more information about what your journal allows in your publishing agreement, or the TTU Digital Services Librarian would be happy to help you locate this information online. Repository-based open access is a great option for researchers because it makes the work open to readers at no cost to either the reader or the author. Including your work in the Faculty Research Collection affords your work greater exposure, makes it more discoverable online, and will likely result in increased citations.

As you publish subscription-based journal articles, don't be surprised if you receive an email from the TTU Digital Services Librarian asking you for your accepted manuscript. This librarian will do the hard work of creating the digital record in the Faculty Research Collection and navigating publisher embargoes. All you need to do is hang on to that final draft!

The ThinkTech Institutional Repository Faculty Research Collection exemplifies the Texas Tech University Libraries' commitment to empower faculty across disciplines to disseminate their research globally. For more information, please visit the collection at http://facultyresearch.lib.ttu.edu or email Heidi Winkler, Associate Librarian for Digital Services, at heidi.winkler@ttu.edu.