Fondren provides expertise, space, and information resources to deepen the impact and visibility of research by Rice faculty, staff, and students. As an intellectual hub, Fondren is well-positioned to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration; it also provides diverse expertise to support research and teaching.
Accessibility Audit of website
In the spring of 2024, Rice’s Digital Accessibility office used the software Level Access to improve accessibility on the library’s website at library.rice.edu. Fondren’s Web Developer, Jeff Koffler, has been spearheading the project on the library’s side, with input from the library webteam committee, which includes members from across the library, including the User Experience Office, Woodson Research Center, Access Services, Digital Scholarship Services, Cataloging & Metadata Services, Acquisitions, and the Kelley Center for Government Information, Data and Geospatial Services.
Accessibility Level Access project was a manual audit that looked at the landing page, a library catalog search results page and generic search page. Other pages are also under consideration for review, including the floor maps page, and department pages. The Level Access project will also make learning and education pages available to help improve our ability to correct issues. There is a dashboard provided to review the progress, and multiple stakeholders in the library are working on improving the accessibility of the library website. Fondren staff also use an inline accessibility check, Editoria11y, which helps ensure staff are creating accessible webpages during the creation and editing of library website pages.
Debra Kolah
Open Access Support
In pursuit of our goal to "deepen the visibility and impact of Rice research" from our Strategic Plan, Fondren Library supports the Open Access (OA) publication of works by Rice researchers in several ways. Unlike many academic publications, OA research materials are not kept behind costly paywalls; they are free for anyone to download and use. Fondren Library's funding for OA publications increases the potential for researchers outside of wealthy institutions, even within our own community, to access, cite and use the scholarship generated at Rice and at other universities. Details for our OA support programs may be found at [libguide url] https://libguides.rice.edu/openaccess.
Article Processing Charges
Fondren Library helped fund the Article Processing Charges, or APCs, for numerous Rice researchers in Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24). Journals frequently levy these charges for the OA release of an article. Under our program, a corresponding author from Rice who has exhausted other means for funding the OA publication of an article may apply to Fondren Library for up to $1500 toward the article's APC. This benefit may only be used for publications in fully OA journals. In FY24, eight Rice researchers were granted $11060 to publish OA in this way.
Fondren also supports APC grants through membership with Public Library of Science (PLOS, a fully OA publisher) and with the OA publications from Springer Nature/Biomed Central. Under both of these arrangements, Fondren Library pays 50% of the APCs for Rice's researchers. In FY24, Fondren supported six articles published with PLOS for $7119, and three articles published with Spring Nature/Biomed Central for $3935.
In addition, Fondren Library helped negotiate discounts with the publisher Elsevier for our researchers to publish OA in their journals. Under this agreement in FY24, 7 articles were published OA with a total discount of $2331.
Transformative Agreements
One of the most recent and important ways Fondren Library is supporting the OA publication of Rice research is through entering into transformative agreements with scholarly publishers. Transformative agreements support the transition from paywalled journals to full open access. Payments for these agreements include both subscription costs, which cover access or reading costs, with publishing costs, which cover fees to publish open access that are otherwise charged to authors. Relieving authors of fees to publish research helps to support the transition to open scholarship. These agreements can also result in significantly higher costs for libraries and institutions. Fondren carefully considers agreements that benefit Rice and that offer sustainable costs.
Through our transformative agreements in FY24:
- Six Rice authors published OA with Cambridge University Press
- One Rice author published OA with Company of Biologists
- 12 Rice authors published OA with Sage, saving APCs worth $40,400
Fondren also entered a transformative agreement with the Royal Society in FY24 and began talks with other publishers. While questions of cost and sustainability for these agreements have not been fully answered, the library considers this path to Open Access an important and beneficial one for our researchers.
Supporting OA Books and Journals
Fondren Library has supported the Open Access release of books since 2016 through programs such as Knowledge Unlatched, TOME, and MIT Press Direct to Open. We also offer grants to Rice book authors, and to OA book publishers such as punctum books through the Scholarled program of the Open Book Collective.
In FY24, Fondren directly supported the OA release of two books. First, for Sidney Lu of the Transnational Asian Studies department, Fondren gave a subvention of $10,000 to University of California Press for the OA release of his book, Collaborative Settler Colonialism: Japanese Migration to Brazil in the Age of Empires, forthcoming February 2025. Second, for Reto Geiser of the School of Architecture, Fondren covered the costs of OA image rights for his book, Giedion and America, which was released in a new OA edition by its publisher, gta Verlag.
Fondren has supported open access journal publishing in several ways. We participate in Subscribe to Open (or S2O) programs such as Annual Reviews and Berghahn Open Anthro, through which subscription fees are directed towards making journals open for everyone. Fondren has also supported Diamond OA journals, defined as journals that charge neither subscription fees to libraries nor APCs to their authors; instead, costs are borne by institutions or organizations. On the advice of Prof. Niki Clements from the Department of Religion, Fondren granted $4500 to the journal Foucault Studies, known as “the only international journal in the English language devoted to the work and influence of Michel Foucault.” Our pledge roughly coincided with the conference, “Foucault: Genealogies for the Future” hosted at Rice on April 18-19, 2024.
Fondren also currently supports two publishing platforms (DSpace and Open Journal Systems) for locally-produced and managed open access journals. Current library-supported OA journals include Transnational Asia and Dialogues Across Health, Science, Humanities, and Archives.
Collections Highlights & Challenges 2024
Investments
Fondren’s advances in supporting open access scholarship are detailed separately. Here we highlight other strategic collections and content investments from the past year:
Recognizing the importance of primary source material to interdisciplinary scholarship, Fondren used collection fund reserves to purchase updates to the Adam Matthew (AM) Core Portfolio and Research Methods Primary Sources tool and the Gale 2023 collections. These acquisitions include primary sources such as historical film and newsreels, colonial documents, and newspapers, that support exploration of diverse topics including sexuality and gender, and environmental history. Along with the source material from AM and Gale, the AM update provided new case studies and research guides to support students as they learn the skills of analyzing primary source content.
In collaboration with OIT’s Learning Environments department, Fondren significantly increased support for streaming film in the classroom through database collections and individual titles. In fall 2023 alone, we supported nearly 300 requests for course-related film content, including classes such as ENGL 398: Slavery in 20th Century Film and Fiction, SPAN 406: Latin American Cinema, and FWIS110 Reading Innuendo: Representing Sexuality in Golden Age Hollywood.
Fondren continually works to expand our collections with high quality digital content obtained at a favorable price and under terms that benefit our researchers. In spring 2024, we obtained eight Springer ebook collections providing access to 5,255 titles in the areas of biomedical and life sciences, mathematics and statistics, physics and astronomy, chemistry and material science, computer science, earth and environmental science, engineering, and intelligent technologies and robotics. These collections are robust resources for students, faculty, and professionals with patterns of heavy and sustained use. All ebooks are provided without digital rights management (DRM), promoting flexibility of use and unlimited concurrent users.
Challenges
In a year where departmental requests exceeded available central funding, Fondren was pleased to receive partial support of our FY25 budget request. We are also keenly aware that the stable pricing trends of the pandemic are now behind us. Inflationary pressures are leading to cost increases in all areas. While we have used collecting funding reserves to make strategic purchases, it is not sustainable to continue funding from our dwindling reserves. Growth strategies are needed to support a growing campus with significant ambitions for excellence in teaching and research.
New publishing models such as transformative agreements (TA) are playing a significant role in advancing open scholarship. These agreements shift the commitment of library funds away from traditional journal subscriptions and towards open access publishing support, including fees to publish that would be otherwise borne by authors. While there can be significant benefits to these agreements, they also carry complex cost models that often entail increased costs that most research libraries, including Fondren, are not funded to support. Close work with Rice leadership and researchers will be critical as we seek to identify sustainable institutional strategies for addressing these costs. Fondren has entered into five TA agreements with publishers over the last year.
Fondren is fortunate to have a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled facility to house infrequently used library research materials and support their long-term preservation. Fondren continues to make strategic use of the Library Service Center (LSC) to alleviate crowding in our book stacks and improve stewardship for materials that may be at risk due to concerns with areas of Fondren’s main campus facility. In early 2024, over 30,000 items were selected from the 2nd-floor stacks and relocated to the LSC. This work will continue.
Rice Research Repository
The Rice Digital Scholarship Archive is now the Rice Research Repository!
In Fall 2023, Fondren Digital Scholarship Services rolled out major changes to its digital repository, now known as the Rice Research Repository (R-3). The updated user interface accompanies a renewed focus on research created by members of the Rice community.
R-3 provides access to research produced at Rice University, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, research center publications, datasets, and academic journals.
Benefits of using R-3 include:
- Discoverability: Content is indexed by search engines such as Google and Google Scholar. Fondren staff support robust metadata creation, which further enhances discoverability. Rice departments, centers, and institutes can create customized collections to highlight all of their research in one place.
- Citation and attribution: All content in R-3 receives a persistent URL. DOIs are available upon request.
- Long-term preservation and access: Fondren Library is committed to maintaining R-3, with content regularly backed-up as part of its preservation plan.
OneSearch Digital Collections
The OneSearch Collection Discovery area of the Fondren Library website continues to provide a curated, digital gateway into Fondren’s diverse holdings. New Collections for this fiscal year include:
- Celebrating Hip-Hop
- Brown Fine Arts Library
- Asian Studies Reference Alcove
- Personal Finance
- Here on Earth
Other staff members and departments have also taken an active role in creating new Collections:
Fondren website gets a refresh
Small substantive changes were made to the library website in the summer of 2024, after user testing by the User Experience Office, feedback from multiple user groups, including our Fondren Ambassadors, and the Fondren Library webteam.
The new look features:
- New more visible "Ask Us" button
- Streamlined links under the search bar to core library tools
- Quick links to highly used services and resources (this was recommended by our students in spring testing!)
Future improvements planned for the website in the summer of 2025, include a reenvisioned Help page, and new streamlined Suggest a Purchase forms for users to request items that they would like the library to purchase for the collection.