1. Library Resources for Faculty

Hello! I am Scholarly Communications Librarian Rebecca Dowgiert (rdowgiert@framingham.edu) and I'm available for everything from individual consults and professional development presentations / workshops / trainings for your college or department, to answering your questions about scholarly publishing developments, such as today's increasingly varied publishing and dissemination options.  Should you wish it, I would also be delighted to offer a course level-appropriate guest lecture about these topics to your students.  I have presented recently to FSU faculty about:

• Data Management Plans (required by many funders nowadays)
• The DMP Tool website (Free website supporting data management plan creation)
• Author's Rights (Better understanding the interplay between your copyrights and today's publishing agreements)
• Open Licenses, Open Journals and Open Repositories (What they are and how they can help increase discoverability of your scholarship)
• The Creative Commons open licenses (the legal tools that that have made the open access journal and OER movements possible)
• The changing scholarly publishing environment in general (What's been changing and why)

I also create and maintain several relevant library help guides, participate in CELTSS professional development events, publish an e-mail newsletter about scholarly publishing and OER news and trends for faculty, and offer FSU faculty professional development opportunities throughout the academic year.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Interested in making any of your courses low or even no cost*?

I will be happy to help you explore your options for reducing the cost of the required course materials for any of your classes. I can help you discover alternatives that can include:

• Materials that the Whittemore Library already owns or subscribes to that students can use at no additional cost
• Open Educational Resources, which are
  • Free
  • Available on the Internet to students from day one of class
  • Openly-licensed so that you can retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute them, OR freely usable in the same ways due to being in the Public Domain and no longer subject to copyright law
• Random, free, useful materials available online (but possibly ephemeral; not guaranteed to be there permanently)

E-mail me for more details, or be more formal about it, and Request a Course Material Affordability Review for Your Course. (requires google acc't log-in)

* This refers to the additional cost incurred by required texts, homework platform access, etc., and not to a discipline's commonly used equipment or supplies. Ex.: art supplies or science lab goggles would not be counted.. For the purposes of their course marking initiative, the Massachusetts DHE has defined 'low cost' as $50 or less, and 'no cost' as $0.

Open Educational Resources are an incredibly useful option for faculty who:

• Want to reduce the (additional, beyond tuition) cost of their courses for students
• Want the freedom / flexibility to have customized, more equitable, and current course materials (especially useful for today's increasingly interdisciplinary new program offerings and diverse students)
• Want course materials that are licensed so as to easily permit them to be using during innovative, open pedagogy techniques, which can help students take ownership of their learning in exciting ways as they help create resources of lasting value

In my role as OER Liaison to FSU's faculty, I have robust experience with OER and am ready to support faculty who are:

• Curious about and just starting to learn about OER and what it can do for them and their students
• Interested in OER and want help with discovery and assessment
• Want to adopt an OER text, but also want to modify or alter the text before they use it with their students
• Want to create a brand new OER resource, such as: textbooks, exam question banks, instructor manuals, lab manuals