By Nancy Foasberg

Happy Open Access Week! This is your Scholarly Communication librarian again, back with some tips for finding great resources online.

Consider this scenario:  You are doing some research, and you come across an article or a book chapter that looks perfect, but it’s not available at Falvey Library. Of course, you should use the library’s Interlibrary Loan services, but there’s also a chance you might find it freely available online.

These are also great resources to remember once you’ve graduated! Open access resources are available regardless of whether you are affiliated with a university or not.

Browser Extensions

Open Access Button or Unpaywall.  These are both browser extensions that search for legal, openly available versions of articles.

If you check Google Scholar for openly available versions of an article, either of these extensions will come in very handy.

When you come across a paywalled article, the browser extension will pop up a padlock symbol – green if the article is freely available somewhere, and gray if it isn’t.

If you see the green padlock, you can click on it for a free version of the article.

Searching for Open Resources

You could always search the Directory of Open Access Journals, which allows you to search for articles published in open access journals, or OpenDOAR, which allows you to search materials in open access repositories.

Alternatively, you could search a repository directly, like arXiv, PubMedCentral, or CORE, or you can use Google Scholar to uncover materials in the myriad repositories that are out there.

You’ve likely heard of Academia.edu and ResearchGate. I am slightly reluctant to recommend these resources because, much like social media sites, their objective is to gather user data, and it’s not very clear what they are doing with that data. However, these sites are very popular and many scholars upload their works there.

If you’re looking for primary sources or otherwise older materials, you might try HathiTrust Digital Library, which includes both open access and public domain items. If public domain items are of interest, you might also consider looking at the Library of Congress Digital Collections, or perhaps Wikimedia Commons.

The library also has a guide to open access and freely available resources with several additional helpful suggestions.

But What about Textbooks?

That’s a great question! The cost of textbooks is a major concern, and my colleague Linda Hauck has blogged about affordable class materials before.

The library has some great tips for saving money on textbooks, including using the library’s collection or reserves, or borrowing from another library via EZBorrow.

If your textbook isn’t already on reserve at the library, you can ask your professor to put it on reserve – any print textbook and some electronic textbooks can be made available this way.  (If you feel shy about asking your professor to do this, your subject librarian may be able to help.)

If you do need to buy your textbooks, you can get a better deal at the bookstore by taking advantage of the Wildcard discount (for more information, see the Affordable Materials Project page) or using the textbook price matching program.

And if you’re having a financial emergency, please apply for the Student Hardship Fund.

Getting Help

Another great way to find open access resources is to talk to your friendly scholarly communication librarian! You can contact me at nancy.foasberg@villanova.edu.

And again, you should always feel free to use Interlibrary Loan to access resources we don’t have available here.

Nancy Foasberg is Scholarly Communication Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Nancy Foasberg

Open Access Week: What is Open Access?

Hi! I’m the new Scholarly Communication Librarian here at Falvey Library, and one of my major responsibilities is to promote and support open access! For Open Access Week this year, I’ve planned a series of blog posts about open access, why it’s important, and what open access activities are going on here at Villanova.

What is Open Access?

Open access is the practice of making scholarly works available without price or permission barriers.

Free from price barriers means that if a book or an article is open access, you can legally read it online without paying.

Free from permission barriers means that you can distribute, reuse, or remix the materials that you find. This is often achieved by applying a Creative Commons license to the work. However, for many open access strategies, removing permission barriers is considered less important than removing price barriers.

The Open Access Movement consists of scholars, authors, librarians, publishers and others who advocate for open access materials. It’s been around for a long time. Many would date the dawn of the OA Movement from three conferences held in Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin in 2002-2003, leading to what’s known as the BBB definition of open access.

For a quick video explanation of open access, see Open Access Explained!

Benefits of Open Access

Open access allows anyone to gain access to scholarly resources, including:

• Practitioners who may not have institutional access (for instance, doctors and nurses)
• Faculty and students at institutions that don’t have or can’t afford a subscription, including less-well-resourced institutions and those in the Global South*
• Independent researchers
• Journalists and popularizers
• Curious members of the public

This means that scholarly research can reach a broader audience and accomplish more in the world. This helps those that are looking for access, and it also helps the authors who want more recognition for their scholarly work.

A secondary benefit of open access is that it has the potential to save money. In the 1990s, serial costs began to rise more quickly than library budgets at most libraries. Open access was seen as one solution; if materials could be made freely available, libraries could be freed from some of these burdens.  This is especially appealing because the work of scholarly authors, editors, and peer-reviewers is usually considered as part of their overall employment and is not compensated by the publishers.

The next post in this series will consider the question of open access and library costs a little further.

How is Open Access Achieved?

There are many, many business models that can support open access.  The two major “routes” to open access are via the publisher (also known as “gold open access”) and via self-archiving (also known as “green open access”).

Under gold open access, the publisher makes journals (or books) freely available, rather than relying on purchases or subscriptions. While gold open access is commonly associated with author fees, the majority of gold open access publications do not charge such fees! To distinguish between publications that charge fees and those that don’t, some people refer to fee-free open access as “diamond open access.”

Under green open access, the authors, with the publishers’ permission, share their work after publication, either on their own websites or in repositories – sites for sharing scholarly works. Green open access often does not remove permission barriers, but it is important because it allows authors to share their works and still choose where they publish.

What’s Next?

Watch this space for more Open Access Week posts!  Planned posts include:

• “Community over Commercialization,” this year’s Open Access Week theme
• Finding open access works for your research
• Open access journals hosted by Falvey Library, including a brand-new one, Puncta
• What a Scholarly Communication Librarian can do for you!

Also, please consider joining us Tuesday, October 24 at noon for a virtual workshop on Building Your Scholarly Profile!  All are welcome, but faculty and graduate students will be able to best benefit from this workshop.

*This formulation can be problematic because it positions the Global North as creating knowledge and the Global South as passively receiving it.  Suffice to say, this is not the case.  Here is a little more information on open access in the Global South.

Nancy Foasberg is Scholarly Communication Librarian at Falvey Library.

This Open Access Week, join Nancy Foasberg, Scholarly Communication Librarian, for a virtual tutorial on building your scholarly profile on Tuesday, Oct. 24 from 12-1 p.m. Participants will learn how to curate their online presence to best showcase their scholarly achievements. The session will include information on ORCID, Google Scholar, subject repositories, scholarly social networks, and maybe even your own website. All are welcome, but faculty and graduate students will be best able to benefit from this workshop.

REGISTER HERE. This event is sponsored by Falvey Library.

Falvey Library, as a member of the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation, has a new agreement with the American Chemical Society known as “Read + Publish” or a transformative agreement. As a result of this agreement, all Villanova researchers who have articles accepted by ACS journals have the option to make them open access at no charge. Prior to this agreement, Villanova authors who wanted ACS articles to be open access had to pay an article processing charge. Although authors without access to funds can apply for funding from Falvey’s Scholarly Open Access Reserve (SOAR) Fund, this fund is limited and awards a maximum of $2,000 per article.

Kelly D. Good, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was the first author to take advantage of this new agreement. She had previously been awarded partial funding through SOAR for this article. Dr. Good said, “While the SOAR program is certainly helpful, it required an application and follow up, whereas the deal with ACS made the process very easy and smooth…it almost seemed too good to be true! I didn’t need to plan ahead and “opt in” to open access–the deal with ACS meant my entire article was fully funded without me needing to go through any extra steps.”

Kevin Minbiole, PhD, Associate Dean of Research, Professor of Chemistry, and the second author accepted since this agreement was signed had this to say: “I am simply delighted that the Villanova library has teamed up with the American Chemical Society to allow faculty publications to be open access! We have already published two of our works in ACS journals so far this year on novel disinfectants, and the ability to reach much wider reading audiences is a huge help to my research program.”

Authors may make their articles open access through the normal publication procedure used by ACS. More details can be found at ACS Read + Publish Agreements – ACS Open Science.

Authors interested in funding for open access for non-ACS journals may apply to the SOAR fund: https://library.villanova.edu/about-falvey/library-initiatives/open. Questions regarding SOAR or journal selection may be addressed to Science and Engineering Librarian Alfred Fry.

Alfred Fry is Science and Engineering Librarian at Falvey Library.

By Jutta Seibert

This fall, Ugegbe: Jọnalụ Ụwandịigbo joined a small group of peer-reviewed academic journals published and hosted by Falvey Library. Ugegbe is published entirely in the Igbo language, one of the major languages spoken in Nigeria. It is also the only peer-reviewed journal published in Igbo and, thus, a powerful symbol of Igbo vibrance, despite the much debated UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) prediction that Igbo is a dying language. Falvey Library and its staff are proud to support this new open access publishing project, which reflects the Library’s values of openness, inclusion, and excellence.

Why did Villanova University become the home of Ugegbe? First of all, one of the editors of the journal is Chiji Akọma, Chair of the Global Interdisciplinary Studies Department and Professor of English at Villanova. Second, while Ugegbe is in many ways unique, it is not uncommon for academic journals in African languages to be published or hosted in the diaspora. The Global South remains an unequal partner in global scholarly communication networks. Factors that impinge on access include the cost of journal subscriptions, article publication fees imposed on authors, the dominance of a few languages in global research communities, and membership on editorial boards of academic journals.

So why publish an academic journal in Igbo? Given the sheer numbers of native Igbo speakers worldwide – roughly 30 million – the question should really be: Why not publish a journal in Igbo? There is ample evidence of the cognitive value of mother tongue instruction especially at the elementary and secondary levels. Yet youth in many countries, especially those with histories of colonial conquest, are expected to learn in languages other than their native tongues. Language builds community, carries cultural values, and is in many ways fundamental to one’s identity. Many nations recognize the value of instruction in the native tongue but lack the means to extend native language instruction to the university level. Ugegbe is a vital building block to create a research level platform for Igbo. But equally important, as Akọma put it, “Ugegbe is premised on the promotion of indigenous languages as complete and legitimate vehicles for communicating the cultural and intellectual production systems of these communities.”

Many Villanovans may not be aware that they are familiar with the work of one or more writers whose native tongue is Igbo but who write in English: Chinua Achebe wrote the arguably most widely read and studied African novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). He also wrote a short essay about the role of English in African literature, “English and the African Writer” (Transition 75/76 (1997): 342-49). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Genius Grant, is best known for her acclaimed novel Americanah (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle award.

Drafting this post, I looked for examples of academic journals published in African languages and was surprised how difficult an endeavor this turned out to be. Admittedly, some African languages are spoken by comparatively small populations. However, Igbo boasts roughly 30 million native speakers, about the same number as all native speakers of all Scandinavian languages put together. I soon came to realize that African languages that were actively used in scholarly communication were generally those that held “official language” status in an African country, such as Amharic in Ethiopia and Swahili in Tanzania. I found a few examples through African Journals Online (AJO). Nevertheless, the vast majority of African journals hosted on AJO is published in English, including 257 Nigerian academic journals. Academic journals in a few African languages, such as Amharic and Swahili, do exist, but they are very rare gems indeed.

Falvey’s journal hosting program currently encompasses eight academic journals. The program dates back to 2010 and utilizes the Open Journal System (OJS) platform, a free journal publishing software, created and distributed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). The contents of these journals can be freely accessed from anywhere. The driving force behind PKP and OJS is John Willinsky. OJS lays claim to being “the most widely used open source journal publishing platform in existence, with over 25,000 journals using it worldwide.” PKP also offers open source monograph and open conference publishing software. Reasons for making academic journals freely available online (open access model) are generally the same as those given for publishing open access articles in traditional journals: removing access hurdles, preserving academic freedom, increasing the diversity of participants in scholarly communications networks, and reducing market pressures on academic niche journals.

Further Reading

• Bgoya, Walter, and Mary Jay. “Publishing in Africa from Independence to the Present Day.” Research in African Literatures 44, no. 2 (2013): 17–34. https://doi-org.ezp1.villanova.edu/10.2979/reseafrilite.44.2.17
• Madiba, Mbulungeni. “Language and Academic Achievement: Perspectives on the Potential Role of Indigenous African Languages as a Lingua Academica.” Per Linguam 28, no. 2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.5785/28-2-528
• Ondari-Okemwa, E. (2007). Scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century: Challenges and opportunities. First Monday, 12(10). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v12i10.1966
• Ouedraogo, Rakissouiligri Mathieu. “The Use of African Languages in Educational Systems in Africa.” IICBA Newsletter 4, no. 4 (December 2002). https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000231594.locale=en
• Ouane, Adama, and Christine Glanz. Why and How Africa Should Invest in African Languages and Multilingual Education: An Evidence- and Practice-based Policy Advocacy Brief. Hamburg: UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning, 2010. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED540509.pdf
• Nwaubani, Adaobi Tricia. “’We Spoke English to Set Ourselves Apart’: How I Rediscovered my Mother Tongue.” The Guardian, March 14, 2019. Accessed October 21, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/mar/14/we-spoke-english-to-set-ourselves-apart-nigeria-childhood-igbo-language
• Willinsky, John. Copyright’s Broken Promise: How to Restore the Law’s Ability to Promote the Progress of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2023.
  https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/106529

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Jutta Seibert

The Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) may at first glance look like a hold-over from the early internet years, but a closer look quickly reveals its lasting scholarly relevance. This one-of-a-kind library is home to a wealth of sources representative of the width and depth of Marxist thinking worldwide. Scholars can find here the works of most Marxist thinkers and practitioners, selected works of contemporary practitioners, and a range of influential works that predate Marx and Engels.

As should be expected from a library of Marxist thought, all content is freely available as promised in the MIA’s charter. The texts in the archive are either in the public domain or were published with the permission of the current copyright holder. Other texts, including transcriptions and translations, were contributed by volunteers.

Some core texts are missing because current copyright holders do not permit to share them freely online. Foremost among these is the authoritative English translation of the collected works of Marx and Engels. This 50-volume set was produced through the collaborative efforts of three left-leaning publishing houses: Lawrence & Wishart (London), International Publishers (New York), and Progressive Publishers (Moscow). Initially Lawrence & Wishart permitted the digital publication of the collected works through MIA but later withdrew its permission fearing a loss of revenue. Today, Lawrence & Wishart only grants free online access to the collected works on its own website. The Villanova community has access to this set through the Past Masters collection, and the Library’s print collection. The German edition of the collected works is freely available online.

The New Masses, Nov. 1930 issue.

Despite the gaping hole left by the absence of the authoritative English translation of the collected works of Marx and Engels, there remains a wealth of Marxist thought to be explored. The Beginner’s Guide to Marxism introduces the subject with a carefully curated selection of fundamental Marxist ideas. The works of major Marxist thinkers, such as Marx & Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Mao Zedong, are organized in special sub-archives. MIA can also be explored by browsing through its many subject collections, including archives about branches of Marxism, such as Anarchists and Bolsheviks; key historical events, such as the French Revolution and the Comintern; and related movements, such as the Black Liberation and African Liberation movements. The works of Marxist thinkers who are still alive and politically active are out of scope. The same goes for works that are copyright protected, such as important English translations of the works of Marx & Engels. However, because of the global impact of Marxist thought a wide range of languages and geographical regions are represented in the archive.

The MIA periodicals collection brings together an impressive lineup of socialist and communist newspapers and magazines. They can be accessed through a separate drop-down menu on the archive’s homepage. Most of the periodicals are in English, German, and French. Among the titles are the Black Panther (1967–1976), the Camden Voice of Labor (1912–1920), the Irish Marxist Review (2012–present), the Masses (1911–1917), the Liberator (1918–1924), and the New Masses (1926–1948).

In some cases, only selected articles, as opposed to complete issues, have been digitized. The Rheinische Zeitung is one case in point. Only the articles contributed by Marx are available. The Beijing Review (formerly the Peking Review), an English language news magazine published by the Chinese Communist Party, is not listed on the periodicals menu, but rather the Chinese Communism Archive links to the extensive archive which goes back to the first issue published in 1958 and includes over a thousand issues up to 2006. Besides the works of Marxist thinkers and the extensive collection of periodicals, MIA also offers a small selection of recorded speeches as well as images and short videos.

Each new visit to the MIA promises serendipitous discoveries. On my last visit I found two pamphlet collections from the 1920s: the Little Red Library and a collection of Trade Union Educational League Pamphlets. These pamphlets were published by the Communist Party USA and various trade unions and intended for the education of party and union members. For example, one of the volumes in the Little Red Library was written by Max Shachtman about the Paris Commune, and another one presents Engels’ Principles of Communism in English translation. Make some time and stop by the Marxists Internet Archive! The MIA is linked from the Library’s Databases A-Z list.

Related resources:

• Short biography of Karl Marx from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography written by the indomitable Eric Hobsbawm.
• Short biography of Friedrich Engels from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography written by Gareth Stedman Jones.
• Marx: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed., by Peter Singer.
• Engels: A Very Short Introduction, by Terrell Carver.
• Past Masters (InteLex)
  Features the English language edition of the collected works of Marx & Engels published by Lawrence & Wishart, International Publishers, and Progressive Publishers.
• Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA)
  Launched in 1975 as a collaborative project of the SED (GDR) and CPSU (USSR) and published by the East German Dietz Verlag. The project was transferred to the International Marx-Engels Stiftung in Amsterdam and new volumes are published by de Gruyter since 2013.
• Marx-Engels Werke (MEW)
  Published between 1956 and 1968 in East Germany. Lacks some important works and was replaced by MEGA. Freely available online.
• The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism
• The Cambridge History of Communism (3 vols.)

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

The Affordable Materials Project (AMP) and Falvey Memorial Library are set to host a lineup of fall events. AMP is a University-wide collaboration between the Villanova bookstore, Falvey Library, the Center for Access, Success and Achievement (CASA), and the Office of the Provost, all working together to provide faculty with resources and options for selecting high quality, affordable course materials and creating student awareness of affordable options for obtaining course materials. At the conclusion of the spring 2021 semester, AMP celebrated an important milestone—saving Villanova students more than $1 million on course materials!

Join AMP and Falvey Library at one—or both—of these upcoming virtual events:

Best Practices for Course Materials Adoption Workshop (Monday, Oct. 18, at 11:30 a.m.)

Falvey Library staff and Course Materials Manager Bernadette Mania will be holding a workshop for faculty on selecting course materials on Monday, Oct. 18, 11:30 a.m.- 12:30 p.m. via Zoom. Get answers to your questions about course packs, copyright, and e-reserves. Learn about the effort to provide electronic copies of course texts. Hear about resources to help lessen the financial burden of textbooks/course materials on students without sacrificing quality. Please register here.

Authoring an Open Access (OA) Interdisciplinary Textbook: Michael Pagano, PhD, on Liquidity, Markets & Trading in Action (Wednesday, Oct. 27, at 1:30 p.m.)

Join Michael Pagano, PhD, The Robert J. and Mary Ellen Darretta Endowed Chair in Finance, Professor, Finance & Real Estate, on Wednesday, Oct. 27, from 1:30-2:15 p.m. for a virtual talk on authoring the open access textbook Liquidity, Markets & Trading in Action: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. This book will be of interest to finance, economics, and information technology faculty, and includes a TraderEx simulation and ancillary instructor materials. Dr. Pagano will explain the thought process that went into publishing OA, describe the authoring experience, and touch on the OA funding model that made it possible. A description of programs that support OA publishing at Villanova will be included. Please register here.

Both events are open to the Villanova community and faculty everywhere interested in open access publishing. Faculty interested in course adoptions should consider applying for the Open Educational Resources (OER) Faculty Adoption Grant. Designed to encourage faculty to select free, openly licensed textbooks as primary course materials, applications for the grant will be accepted until Saturday, Oct. 30. Faculty members will be required to adopt an OER textbook for a new/existing course taught in spring 2022. The 2021 recipients of the OER Faculty Adoption Grant, Valentina DeNardis, PhD, and Jeanne Liedtka, JD, will save students an estimated $10,000 in one semester while they experiment with new ways of teaching.

Please contact Linda Hauck, Business Librarian, for more information on AMP and open access opportunities.

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

Open the door to research! (Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash)

By Susan Turkel

Villanova University spends a large part of its library budget on online journals, electronic books, and specialized scholarly search engines. These resources, such as Oxford Bibliographies Online, PsycINFO, the ATLA Religion Database, Compendex, and Advertising Age Datacenter, are invaluable resources for students in relevant fields.

The problem, however, is that the Library is essentially renting these resources from vendors, and we are therefore limited in how much we can share and with whom. For example, we would love to make these resources available to Villanova alumni and guests, but the Library is required to sign license agreements with resource vendors that restrict access to current students, staff, and faculty (plus walk-in users, when the building is open to guests). This means that as a student, after you graduate, your remote access to these resources disappears within several weeks.

Start your research here (Photo by Surface on Unsplash)

We have good news! Some publishers and authors choose to make their work available to all, regardless of university affiliation (“open access” resources), and we’ve created a guide listing free and openly available academic search engines, e-book collections, and e-journal collections, along with links to more extensive listings from other libraries.

View the new research guide here: Open Access and Freely Available Resources.

As the guide suggests, a great place to start your research is Google Scholar. This powerful database indexes the full text of online journals in all fields, as well as electronic books and materials in academic repositories. It provides links to full text when possible; if a free version of the item is not available, you can use the author/title/publication information in Google Scholar to request the full article or book via Interlibrary Loan from your public library.

You can also download browser extensions, such as Unpaywall, CORE Discovery, or the Open Access Button, to help you find or request free versions of a resource.

Many of the resources on the new guide are available to all, rather than hidden behind a paywall or licensing restrictions, because they are published as Open Access (OA) projects. Guided by the principle that it is beneficial for society when scholarly research is available without barriers, OA materials are online research outputs that are made available without cost to the reader. Instead, the expenses associated with OA publications are covered by the authors, their institutions, and/or grant funding. There are a variety of OA publications, repositories, software, and projects out there; read more about OA in Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview.

Falvey Memorial Library places a high value on openness. As stated in the Values statement on the Library website,

Openness

We believe that the broad sharing of information, ideas, knowledge, skills, and tools benefits society by enabling information equality, facilitating life-long learning, and driving innovation. We support and encourage open access publishing, open content, and open source software. We strive to make our resources accessible to all. We promote the open exchange of ideas and transparency in communication and decision-making.

Many Falvey initiatives demonstrate our commitment to openness. Here are some examples.

Read freely! (Photo by Ying Ge on Unsplash)

Falvey Open Access Collections

• Falvey publishes several Open Access journals, including American Catholic Studies and the Journal of Big History on our Journals at Villanova University web platform.
• Our Distinctive Collections and Digital Engagement department oversees Villanova University’s Digital Library, which provides access to thousands of digitized books, manuscripts, newspapers, objects, ephemera, theses, broadsides, and other works. It also includes Villanova-authored content including faculty publications sponsored by the SOAR fund and Falvey Scholars award-winning papers. The DL “assembles, presents, and preserves digital collections that support the teaching and research of the campus and the global community of scholars.”

Falvey Open Access Support for Faculty, Staff, and Students

• Falvey provides financial support to qualifying VU researchers who need help paying processing fees in order to publish open access via the Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR) Fund program.
• Sarah Wipperman joined Falvey in early 2020 as our first Scholarly Communications Librarian. Sarah is our expert on helping Villanova researchers navigate copyright, author rights, and making their work more visible and openly accessible.
• Villanova University’s Affordable Materials Project is a campus-wide collaboration that intended to help faculty select high-quality, affordable course materials. The library’s participation includes helping instructors find and adopt open educational resources (OER), which are online, open access course materials.

Falvey Open Software

• Falvey supports open source software: our Technology Team developed and maintains VuFind, a widely used open source library resource portal. When you search our library catalog or look for articles via the library’s search box, you’re using VuFind!

For more information about Open Access, please explore the websites linked above, and/or contact Sarah Wipperman.

Susan Turkel is a Social Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library. Thanks go to Michael Foight, Rebecca Oviedo, Jutta Seibert, Marianne Watson, and Sarah Wipperman for their input on this article.

By Jutta Seibert

Two Soldiers Leading Two Moors before a King.
Illumination from the Vidal Mayor manuscript, Ms. Ludwig XIV 6, fol. 244.
Courtesy of the Getty Museum Open Content Program.

It is generally accepted that diverse religious groups coexisted in medieval Europe, often in close vicinity, but scholars still dispute whether coexistence was sustained through peaceful or violent means. A rich corpus of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic legal texts archived by the RELMIN project sheds light on the regulation of interfaith relations in the medieval Euro-Mediterranean world.

The project focused the efforts of a dedicated group of scholars on collecting, studying, and publishing ten centuries worth of documents related to the legal status of religious minorities in the Middle Ages. From 2000 to 2015, the project built a database that compiled a unique corpus of legal texts with financial support by the European Research Council.

The Advanced Search feature offers a controlled keyword list that takes most of the guesswork out of search term selection. It also offers a format facet that distinguishes between close to fifty different document types, among them legal opinions, hadith, responsa, royal charters, papal bulls, fatwas, and assizes. The documentation for each legal text includes the text in its original language, English and French translations, common English and French titles together with the original title and a descriptive title, known author(s), a reference to the sources from which the original text and the translation(s) were taken, document type, topical keywords, and estimated or known date. Project collaborators contributed historical context and summaries, secondary sources, and, in some cases, a publication history.

The RELMIN database also includes an author index with links to author biographies with cross-references to other texts by the same author. Similarly, the contributors index links to all contributions by collaborating scholars. Dr. Rebecca Winer, Professor of Medieval History at Villanova University, contributed to the archive. There are some signs of neglect such as broken links and images, but the archive is otherwise functional. A tip sheet with detailed instructions can be consulted online.

RELMIN conferences proceedings were published under the series title Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies in collaboration with Brepols. The proceedings are available in the French open research archive HAL and records with links can be found in the Library’s catalog.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.

Open access to information–the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need–has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.

Falvey Memorial Library has committed to support open access journal publication with the Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR) Fund.  This program is designed to provide financial support to Villanova faculty who are interested in publishing in high quality open access journals. Faculty may be eligible to have article processing fees incurred for publishing in open access journals paid by the library.

Learn more about how to engage with Falvey Library’s Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR) Fund!