The Eugene McDermott Library celebrated our faculty authors at an event last week. The reception honored authors, book editors, translators, and other creative works, such as the writing of scores, recordings, and art exhibits created in 2022. 2023 marked the 16th year of the reception. Since its inception, the library has added more than 1,100 faculty works to the collections.
Provost Inga Musselman opened the event and thanked the faculty present for their scholarship. She also recognized the efforts of the library staff. Davin Pate, the Assistant Library Director for Scholarly Communications and Collection Development, analyzed the publications honored for the year. Over 40% of the works were produced by members of the Arts Humanities and Technology faculty. The Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science represented 16% of the total works, while the Jindal School produced 12%. Brain and Behavioral Science and Economic Political and Policy Science each created 9% of the honored works. Other Schools included Interdisciplinary Studies (7%) and Natural Sciences and Mathematics (5%).
This year the library introduced a new segment to the event that honored faculty who took advantage of the library’s transformative agreement contracts. The contracts enable our authors to retain their copyright while foregoing the usual article processing charges required to make their work open access. McDermott Library continues to add transformative agreements. At present, agreements cover newly created works in the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM Open), Cambridge University Press journals, and Sage Publishing. An additional contract will be available in August 2023 covering the publications of the SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Finally, the UT System Digital Library is negotiating a contract for the American Institute of Physics, which will be announced once the terms are negotiated.
The open access segment of the event included the Jonsson School and the Economic Political and Policy Sciences faculty. It is hoped that in the coming year, other schools will take advantage of the transformative agreements and publish in open-access journals to create open scholarships for all.
Special thanks to Davin Pate, Matt Young, Dr. Thomas Allen (University Archivist), Brooke Johnson (Course Reserves), the library liaisons to our Schools (Sarah Dornbach (NSM), Holly Whistler (IS), Alexander Rodriguez (ECS), Loreen Henry (JSOM), Matthew Makowka (AHT), Chris Edwards (BBS), and Ellen Safley (EPPS), as well as the acquisitions (Natasha Zinsou) and cataloging/processing (Misu Kim and Mingyu Chen) units of the library.