“The mission of Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL) is to curate high quality content in religious studies and related disciplines from publisher websites, institutional repositories, and stable public domain collections. The OADTL uses the world’s most advanced library discovery cataloging and discovery system, OCLC’s WorldShare, to make content easily discoverable and retrievable. The OADTL is staffed by professional librarians and curates content without regard for theological or confessional perspective. It is hoped that the increased access to high quality religious studies content will serve scholars and students of religion….”
Category Archives: oa.religion
Open Access Digitial Library launched | Biblical Studies
MindRxiv Papers
ATLA Publications Moving to Open Access
The American Theological Library Association (ATLA) is moving the Theology Cataloging Bulletin (TCB) and the ATLA Summary of Proceedings, two valued and frequently consulted resources of the ATLA membership and others, to open access. ?
For more than 25 years, TCB has provided readers with information about new and changed Library of Congress subject headings and classification numbers as well as announcements of upcoming training opportunities, a bibliography of recently published articles, and other stories of interest to religion/theology catalogers. The Proceedings is the historical record of ATLA’s annual conference. It includes summaries of pre-conference professional development workshops; reports of business meetings, interest group meetings, denominational sessions, and conversation groups; and the full text or abstracts of plenary sessions, papers, posters, and workshops presented during the conference. Readers of the Proceedings learn about the rich and varied interests of ATLA members and of the work being done in the field of theological librarianship.
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – News & Announcements – PHS shares grant to digitize 18th, 19th century church records
“PHILADELPHIA The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has awarded a prestigious Digitizing Hidden Collections grant to an interdenominational consortium of institutions holding historic records of Philadelphia congregations. The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS), the national archives of the PC(USA), is one of the consortium’s 11 collecting groups. The project was one of 14 recommended for funding in 2017 out of 118 applicants. The $385,000 grant award enables the consortium to digitize and share online more than 41,000 pages of records from the years 1708 to 1870, including baptismal, marriage, bar mitzvah and burial information.”
IGNTP releases Open Data
“The International Greek New Testament Project (IGNTP), established in 1948, is working towards major new editions of the Gospel according to John and the Pauline Epistles using the latest digital tools. The focus of work for these projects is at ITSEE in the University of Birmingham. In a move towards making its data openly available, the IGNTP has now released 350 of its transcriptions of Greek New Testament manuscripts under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, meaning that these files are freely available for re-use.”
Chicago Studies journal flips to open access | Omega Alpha | Open Access
Religious studies scholars not readily adopting open access, according to new Ithaka S+R report | Omega Alpha | Open Access
“Although the report noted that scholars are keen to use online venues like Academia.edu for sharing and discovery of their research among colleagues, they are distrustful or uncertain about open access as a primary publishing model, either due to lack of appropriate open access venues in their (sub-)discipline, a perception of lower academic standards, or that it would not be recognized for tenure or promotion….”
FASTR to be Considered by Senate Committee | SPARC
“After a month of intense conversations and negotiations, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) will bring the ‘Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act’ up for mark-up on Wednesday, July 29th. The language that will be considered is an amended version of FASTR, officially known as the ‘Johnson-Carper Substitute Amendment,’ which was officially filed by the HSGAC leadership late on Friday afternoon, per committee rules. There are two major changes from the original bill language to be particularly aware of. Specifically, the amendment Replaces the six month embargo period with ‘no later than 12 months, but preferably sooner’ as anticipated; and Provides a mechanism for stakeholders to petition federal agencies to ‘adjust’ the embargo period if the12 months does not serve ‘the public, industries, and the scientific community.’ We understand that these modifications were made in order accomplish a number of things: Satisfy the requirement of a number of Members of HSGAC that the language more closely track that of the OSTP Directive; Meet the preference of the major U.S. higher education associations for a maximum 12 month embargo; Ensure that, for the first time, a number of scientific societies will drop their opposition for the bill; and Ensure that any petition process an agency may enable is focused on serving the interests of the public and the scientific community …”
Impact of Social Sciences – Rather than narrow our definition of impact, we should use metrics to explore richness and diversity of outcomes.
“Impact is multi-dimensional, the routes by which impact occur are different across disciplines and sectors, and impact changes over time. Jane Tinkler argues that if institutions like HEFCE specify a narrow set of impact metrics, more harm than good would come to universities forced to limit their understanding of how research is making a difference. But qualitative and quantitative indicators continue to be an incredible source of learning for how impact works in each of our disciplines, locations or sectors.”