Steering Committee Update - August 31, 2010

• Alan Boyd asked if the infrastructure committee needs additional topics to discuss. Carol Holliger suggested that the infrastructure committee should review the staff survey results.

• Amy Badertscher reported that staff development committee has just received the survey results and has not yet met to discuss them. She reminded the steering committee of the two Gadget Days scheduled for the 18th at Denison and the 28h at Oberlin. The comments from the survey will likely influence the topics discussed and demonstrated during the Gadget Days.
  

• Campus reports included a new proposal at Kenyon. The significant issue for this proposal is the requirement by the faculty member to control the timing of the open publication of the results. After some discussion of this (because the spirit of the Mellon NGL Grant is to have the materials made openly available as soon as possible), the steering committee decided to ask the faculty member to set a date for making the material open, based on the scholarship requirements.
  

• The steering committee discussed the component of grant to encourage open access for scholarly communication. Ray English described the efforts taken to date at Oberlin to encourage and educate faculty on this issue. A long discussion followed, through which it became clear that open access is a large and complicated issue that will take great patience. We reminded ourselves that each campus needs to come up with an approach to address scholarly communication, but that since each campus is at a different point in the understanding and acceptance of open access, each campus plan will be different.