This article was written by Abbey Heflin and edited by Kimberley R. Barker
The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, in alignment with University of Virginia Libraries, is committed to making scholarship in the biomedical field more affordable, sustainable, equitable, transparent, and open. To address this growing topic, the Health Sciences Library has created the Sustainable Scholarship @ the HSL webpage to provide the UVA Health community with basic information and resources to learn more about open access and its global movement, hot topics in open scholarly publishing, and information on sustainable scholarship at UVA.
This year, the HSL will host an asynchronous online event for Open Access Week 2020 focused on educating UVA Health about important topics around open access and how the HSL and University Libraries can help! Information about the event will be posted on the Sustainable Scholarship @ the HSL webpage. Content will be released on October 19, 2020 and will remain active on the Sustainable Scholarship webpage – no registration is required!
Don’t miss the Virginia Research Libraries (VRL) virtual forum!
(See the full release on the UVA Libraries News Blog.)
Representatives from the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason University, Old Dominion University, William and Mary, and James Madison University will soon be in contract negotiations with Elsevier, the largest science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) scholarly publisher. Working as a group, they will be discussing the unsustainable cost of accessing Elsevier’s academic journals and options to make their public universities’ research more accessible to the public that paid for it.
On Oct. 2 at 9:30 a.m., the group will host a Sustainable Scholarship Virtual Forum to share information about the group’s collective priorities concerning equity, accessibility, and costs of bundled scholarly journal packages. Forum moderator Brandon Butler, the University of Virginia Library’s Director of Information Policy, will also pose questions to the panel for discussion. Registration is open to all interested faculty, staff, students, and community members. Attendees can submit questions or discussion topics surrounding negotiation priorities and sustainable scholarship in advance, through the forum’s registration site.
If you have any question, please contact Abbey Heflin, Head of Collections Management via email aeh6m@virginia.edu, or fill out an Ask Us! form.
Arian Abdulla
This article was written by Andrea Denton, and edited by Kimberley R. Barker
Biomedical Information Specialist Arian Abdullah, Ph.D., has accepted a position as manager of the Joan Staats’s Library at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. His last day at the Health Sciences Library will be October 9, 2020. Though we will miss him, we realize that Arian’s new position is a great career opportunity at a renowned biomedical research institution in a beautiful part of the country, and understand his decision.
We are grateful for all that Arian has accomplished during his time with us. Through his knowledge and hard work, the Research and Data Services Department expanded its research impact services, providing reports to individuals, departments, and schools about their publication metrics. He also provided expertise in the emerging areas of rigor and reproducibility, scholarly publishing (including avoiding predatory journals and finding repositories for publications and data), open science, and specialized information resources and processes for biomedical researchers such as NCBI databases, cell line authentication, and antibody validation. Our Research and Data Services team will not be the same without him.
Of his time here in Charlottesville and his departure, Arian said, “It's been a wonderful experience to be part of the Health Sciences Library, and I will miss my colleagues and the many other partnerships that I have developed here at the University of Virginia. I look forward to seeing my HSL colleagues at future conferences.”
With Arian’s departure, Andrea Denton, Research and Data Services manager, will serve as the liaison to the Biomedical Sciences departments.
Many thanks to Arian for all of his hard work. We wish him all the best in his new role!