Open Access @ UNCW
For more information about open access publishing and support for open access at UNCW Library, check out this LibGuide and/or contact our Open Knowledge & Research Impact Librarian at the links below.
Open Knowledge & Research Impact Librarian
Congratulations to UNCW's 2025 Open Access Champions!
Mudassar Iqbal Arain
Mudassar Iqbal Arain
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1797-9927
Dr. Mudassar Iqbal Arain is a Clinical Assistant Professor in UNC Wilmington’s School of Nursing. His research areas include clinical trials, pharmacovigilance, patient adherence, and quality of life studies among older adults. Of his 58 works indexed by OpenAlex, over 75% have been published open access. Much of his research relies on open data sharing practices—particularly via collaboration with researchers at the University of California San Diego, where Arain is an affiliate faculty member. He also mentors UNCW students in open science practices, exploring preprint dissemination, FAIR data sharing principles, and ethical clinical data management practices. We are proud to celebrate Mudassar for his production of, and education about, transparent, reproducible, and socially responsible scholarship.
“Open scholarship empowers researchers, students, and communities by removing barriers to knowledge. It encourages transparency, collaboration, and innovation, ensuring that the benefits of research are shared widely, not just with those who have privileged access. To me, open access is a vital step toward building equity and trust in science.”
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Association of Pharmacologic Markers of Anti-Tumor Necrosis Factor-α Activity and Etanercept Effectiveness in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis
Therapies targeting tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα), including etanercept (ETN), have become a mainstay in the treatment of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). As a result, this work seeks to evaluate the relationship between pharmacologic markers of ETN activity and clinical effectiveness in a cohort of patients with JIA. This is a single-centered, open-label, prospective, cross-sectional study of patients with JIA (n = 26) receiving maintenance ETN. Determination of ETN effectiveness was based on the absence of active arthritis in any joint at the time of sample collection. Patient plasma samples were collected and analyzed for ETN concentrations, anti-ETN antibodies, anti-TNFα activity, and TNFα concentrations. ETN was effective in 46% (n = 12) of patients assessed at the time of sampling. No differences in baseline demographics were observed between patients based on effectiveness. Median [IQR] plasma ETN concentrations were 2094 [1384, 2680] ng/mL. Anti-ETN antibodies were undetectable in all patients. Plasma anti-TNFα activity varied 32-fold and was directly proportionate to plasma ETN concentrations (ρ = 0.75, p = 3.8 × 10−3). Plasma TNFα concentrations were 9-fold higher than previous measurements in patients with JIA not receiving anti-TNFα therapy (p = 3.6 × 10−9). ETN effectiveness was associated with 21% higher ETN concentrations (p = 0.36), 52% higher plasma anti-TNFα activity (p = 0.14), and 84% higher plasma TNFα concentrations (p = 0.008). Among pharmacologic markers of ETN activity measured, plasma TNFα concentrations are most strongly associated with ETN effectiveness in JIA.
Colleen A. Reilly
Colleen A. Reilly
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8959-8525
Dr. Colleen A. Reilly is a Professor in UNC Wilmington’s Department of English and currently serves as President of UNCW Faculty Senate. In addition to authoring a number of open access publications, Reilly has served editorial roles for several open access journals. Among many contributions as co-editor of UNCW’s Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education, Reilly helped index JETHE in the Directory of Open Access Journals, an important step for legitimization and discovery. In her courses on writing and design, she promotes copyleft practices, such as the use of Creative Commons licenses, and asks students to contribute to shared knowledge sites like Wikipedia. We are proud to celebrate Colleen for her longstanding leadership and advocacy on behalf of open scholarship.
“My commitment to open access scholarship was fostered by my experiences in graduate school in the late 1990s, which coincided with the rapid growth of the web. The ethos at the time highlighted the potential democratization of online information dissemination and access (information wants to be free). I became a reviewer and editor for the online open-access journal, Kairos (founded 1996), because I wanted to participate in providing options for scholarly production outside of corporate venues that simultaneously harnessed the affordances of online environments, including the integration of audio, video, and nonlinear textual navigation. Open access scholarship and teaching resources can incorporate greater innovation and creativity and respond more nimbly to contexts and technological developments than corporate paradigms allow. Open access materials can also reach readers and learners beyond university settings and across the globe.”
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Teaching wikipedia as a mirrored technology
Digital spaces on the World Wide Web can be consumed as windowed technologies, providing apparently transparent access to information, or as mirrors, multi–layered and complex, requiring critical reflexivity for productive participation. Approaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology exploits its potential as a pedagogical tool with which students can improve their research practices and writing proficiency in digital environments. Students can learn to grapple with Wikipedia as a complex, living discourse community, whose rhetorical practices and technical conventions they must learn in order to make contributions to it that are accepted by fellow editors of the site and withstand its unique editorial processes. By writing for Wikipedia, students become critical users of this digital resource, develop rhetorical and technological proficiency, and generate texts that prompt real–world response and provide potentially useful information for fellow users of this massive digital resource.
Monica T. Rother
Monica T. Rother
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9659-5210
Dr. Monica T. Rother is an Associate Professor in UNC Wilmington’s Department of Environmental Sciences. Her research areas broadly include forest ecology, biogeography, and dendrochronology (tree-ring science). She directs the Trees & Forests Lab at UNCW’s Center for Marine Sciences, where she educates her graduate students on the value of open science and open publishing. Rother publishes much of her peer reviewed work openly, but also demonstrates her commitment to actively sharing that knowledge beyond the academe. As a leader in the Longleaf Tree-Ring Network, she collaborates with fellow researchers to share data openly with the tree-ring research community and with the public. We are proud to celebrate Monica for eliminating barriers to environmental knowledge that meaningfully affects us all.
“My commitment to open access stems from its power to make scientific knowledge accessible to the wider world, not just academia. I conduct applied research in the field of forest ecology, and I know that in order for that work to be impactful, it needs to be widely available. I also see open access as a social issue; by making my classes and research open access, I ensure that everyone has the opportunity to engage.”
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A tree-ring record of historical fire activity in a piedmont longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) woodland in North Carolina, USA
Background: Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) ecosystems were historically widespread in the North American Coastal Plain and in some southeastern piedmont and montane settings. The naval stores industry, deforestation, and other human activities resulted in an extensive loss (c. 97% loss) of the original woodlands and savannas. Longleaf pine ecosystems are maintained by frequent surface fire which promotes successful regeneration and maintains open canopy conditions and a largely herbaceous understory. Fire regimes (including the frequency and seasonality of fire) likely varied across the entire range of longleaf pine and through time; further research is needed to elucidate this variability.
Results: We used fire scars in stumps and snags to reconstruct fire history in a piedmont longleaf pine ecosystem in North Carolina. For each tree sampled, we examined multiple cross sections to avoid omission of fire events recorded by smaller fire scars. Our samples revealed evidence of frequent fire (c. 3–4-year fire interval) beginning in the early eighteenth century and extending to the mid-nineteenth century. Fires occurred in the dormant and early earlywood positions of annual rings and were likely human ignited.
Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first tree-ring-based fire history in longleaf pine of the piedmont. As such, it offers a rare glimpse into historical fire activity in a now scarce but important ecological setting. More research is needed to develop additional fire chronologies in the piedmont region, including for longer periods of time and for larger spatial areas.
Robert S. Santucci
Robert S. Santucci
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7141-1403
Dr. Robert S. Santucci is an Assistant Professor in UNC Wilmington’s Department of World Languages and Cultures. His research focuses on questions of food and eating in Latin literature and Ancient Roman culture, and what the foods that people ate, as well as the ways in which they ate, tell us about cultures, identities, communities, and differences. Santucci is leading in his field by actively pursuing open publishing venues, despite their slower disciplinary development. We are proud to celebrate Rob for his commitment to sharing intellectual contributions as openly as possible, so that we might better understand our past and ourselves.
“My discipline, Classical Studies, often has a reputation for being stuck in the past. After all, we study people who have been dead for 2000 years. But Classical Studies has fortunately begun embracing open-access scholarship, in part because we need to do what we can to counteract rampant misinformation about Ancient Greece and Rome and its use in supporting ideologies that seek not to educate and build a constructive future for all, but instead to oppress people based on erroneous understandings of the ancient world. I encourage not only my colleagues at UNCW but my disciplinary colleagues around the world to do what they can to make our important work more accessible.”
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Seneca’s revisionist history of seafood; or, teaching philosophy with fish
Seneca’s interest in writing about seafood, as he does in the Epistulae Morales (EM) and Naturales Quaestiones (among other texts), is not only a product of its clear application to moral philosophy, an example of luxurious food for an individual to avoid, but Stoic natural philosophy. The seafood in the EM and NQ helps explain various aspects of Stoic cosmology, with special attention to concepts of relationality, to a readership familiar with fish from the Roman literary (especially satiric) tradition. Writing about seafood thus presents an opportunity for the Stoic philosopher writing in Latin to connect with his literary audience and to rehabilitate fish, usually considered a symbol of luxury and excess, as part of the Stoic pedagogical project. At the same time, Seneca hereby introduces a creative perspective on Stoic cosmology.
Matthew J. Schneider
Matthew J. Schneider
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7865-2768
Dr. Matthew J. Schneider is an Assistant Professor in UNC Wilmington’s Department of Criminology and Sociology. He is also a Collaborating Professor with the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center, and co-director of the Sustainability, Equity, and Action (SEA) Lab which investigates “the explicit and tacit modes of social and environmental domination that currently limit our ability to achieve just and sustainable communities.” Schneider’s research focuses on race and racism, social inequalities, environmental sociology, and community and civic engagement. Along with a growing number of access journal articles, Schneider has written many public-facing commentaries and blog posts about his areas of expertise. He shares the value of open scholarship with his students, several of whom have published commentaries of their own under his guidance. We are proud to celebrate Matthew for his broad commitment to public benefit through open knowledge.
“As an environmental sociologist conducting research on community response to (coastal) renewable energy projects and environmental threats, my work is deeply intertwined with ongoing and pressing conversations about environment, climate change, and community impacts. In turn, I see it as my responsibility to contribute to a sociology that is public facing and a public good. Sociology has remarkable potential to contribute to public discourse, to encourage alternative approaches to stubborn social problems, and to engage communities in the co-production of knowledge. None of this can happen, however, from behind a paywall. So, in recent years, I’ve strategically submitted to journals that will publish my work as open access and partnered with organizations that also believe in public scholarship, such as the Ocean Nexus Center. Additionally, by authoring open access commentary pieces and blog-style posts for various outlets, including Fathom and PhotoBook Journal, organizing community presentations with Winyah Rivers Alliance, and contributing to research briefs for practitioners, I aim to create work that is not only accessible to non-academics, but also useful.”
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‘Thank you in advance for not changing my retirement home’s intrinsic beauty’: NIMBYism, environmental privilege and the politics of offshore wind energy
The development of new wind energy infrastructure is widely supported in the United States. Yet, the siting of wind farms is often contentious. This research problematises how local stakeholders frame their opposition to offshore wind projects at a time when the swift adoption of renewable energies is generally seen as a necessity for environmental, social and economic reasons. Through qualitative content analysis of eighty-nine public comments pertaining to offshore wind projects planned off the North Carolina coast, we argue that objections to wind projects reflect an understanding of the infrastructure’s environmental burden and, importantly, a desire to protect environmental privilege. Findings suggest a need for expanded research on the dimensions of privilege that may be at play across wind farm sites and that any consideration of a just transition must consider how expressions of privilege inform environmental political discourse.
Laura Solano-Escobar
Laura Solano-Escobar
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6267-7699
Dr. Laura Solano-Escobar is an Assistant Professor in UNC Wilmington’s Department of World Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on the linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of bilingual language acquisition and the acquisition of Spanish as both a heritage and second language. In addition to prioritizing open access publication venues, Solano-Escobar shares accompanying code and data sets in open repositories to enable future research with those materials, and by doing so, reinforces the values of replicability and transparency in her research. As an instructor, she involves Spanish for Billingual Speakers students in public-facing work as they produce the OLAS: Historias de Migración e Identidad Bilingüe podcast, highlighting stories about immigration and bilingual identity. We are proud to celebrate Laura for the ways she makes important insights available and usable for all learners.
“For me, open scholarship means expanding access to knowledge so that research can benefit not only the academic community but also the broader public. Open access research and practices encourage transparency, strengthen replicability, and create expanded opportunities for collaboration, learning, and the dissemination of knowledge.”
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The production of the subjunctive in child heritage Spanish: an examination of early acquired contexts
The present study examined the production of the subjunctive among 30 child heritage speakers, 30 monolingual children, 15 immigrant parents and 15 monolingual parents in two early acquired deontic predicates that differ in selection type (predicates of volition and reported commands, including querer “to want” and decir “to say/tell”). Additionally, it explored the role of chronological age, proficiency, language exposure and language use on the production of the subjunctive. The results obtained via a sentence completion task showed high rates of subjunctive use among the heritage children. Nonetheless, the heritage children differed from the other groups in the production of alternative responses. Results also showed a significant role of chronological age and proficiency in the probability of subjunctive use. The more proficient and the older the children were, the more they produced the subjunctive. Individual results showed variability in the children’s performance with some children exhibiting categorical use of the subjunctive and others showing variable use of it. The study argues for protracted development stemming from the interaction between age and proficiency. It also highlights the importance of considering individual variability in morphosyntactic acquisition, as such variability reflects the dynamic and individualized nature of bilingual development.
UNCW's 2025 Open Access Authors (to date)
According to the OpenAlex scientific knowledge base, UNCW authors have contributed to over 130 open access publications to this point in 2025, with more on the way! Click the logo to see a list of those publications.