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
Check back throughout the week for profiles on several of UNCW's Open Access Champions!
Friday
Eric Rawls
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4852-9961
Dr. Eric Rawls is an Assistant Professor in UNC Wilmington's Department of Psychology within the College of Science and Engineering. His research focuses on cognition neuroscience and overlaps with topics like executive function, substance use, computational modeling, EEG, and individual differences. Dr. Rawls joined UNCW as a new faculty member in 2024 and is establishing a neuroscience lab in which graduate and undergraduate students can build research experience. Because open science is a core tenet of the Rawls Lab, they are partnering with UNCW Library to provide scaffolded training on the knowledge lifecycle to student lab members. Dr. Rawls's open data and open access publication records serve as a strong examples for his students about the value of an open scientific future. We are proud to celebrate Eric for helping build and lead a new generation of open knowledge advocates.
"Open science made my career. During my doctoral studies, I quickly had to learn how to run advanced analyses of human brain data, and I wouldn't have succeeded if it weren't for the generous support of previous scientists who have developed and released open access code and programs. I started working after getting my doctoral degree right before the COVID-19 pandemic began. During the pandemic, I was kept afloat, scientifically speaking, by the donations of scientists before me to open data archives and to complete data collection for the sake of secondary studies. I currently mentor multiple students working with open datasets in multiple different states and countries. That's the beauty of open science: it globalizes and democratizes scientific knowledge. Here at UNCW, I aim to make all of the data we collect in my lab open and available for analysis. After all, it's a big part of what got me here."
- An integrated multimodal model of alcohol use disorder generated by data-driven causal discovery analysis
Alcohol use disorder (AUD) has high prevalence and adverse societal impacts, but our understanding of the factors driving AUD is hampered by a lack of studies that describe the complex neurobehavioral mechanisms driving AUD. We analyzed causal pathways to AUD severity using Causal Discovery Analysis (CDA) with data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP; n = 926 [54% female], 22% AUD [37% female]). We applied exploratory factor analysis to parse the wide HCP phenotypic space (100 measures) into 18 underlying domains, and we assessed functional connectivity within 12 resting-state brain networks. We then employed data-driven CDA to generate a causal model relating phenotypic factors, fMRI network connectivity, and AUD symptom severity, which highlighted a limited set of causes of AUD. The model proposed a hierarchy with causal influence propagating from brain connectivity to cognition (fluid/crystalized cognition, language/math ability, & working memory) to social (agreeableness/social support) to affective/psychiatric function (negative affect, low conscientiousness/attention, externalizing symptoms) and ultimately AUD severity. Our data-driven model confirmed hypothesized influences of cognitive and affective factors on AUD, while underscoring that addiction models need to be expanded to highlight the importance of social factors, amongst others.
Thursday
Beverley McGuire
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4133-5830
Dr. Beverley McGuire is a Professor in UNC Wilmington's Philosophy & Religion Department within the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. She is also the QEP Director for Seahawks Advancing Interdisciplinary Learning (SAIL). Her research interests broadly include Chinese Buddhism, comparative religious ethics, and religious studies education. Partnering with UNCW Library, Dr. McGuire was a recipient of the Thomas W. Ross Fund Publishing Grant from the University of North Carolina Press, which defrays UNC Press publishing costs for scholarly content generated in the University of North Carolina System. With that support, Dr. McGuire chose to make her book Mind the Gap openly accessible through UNCW's institutional repository, adding to a growing list of open access publications (like McGuire, 2020 and McGuire, 2021). We are proud to celebrate Bev as a partner in sharing knowledge without barriers, both at UNCW and beyond.
"As a public scholar, I want to make my research as open and accessible as possible. I felt especially called to make Mind the Gap accessible so that instructors could use it in their First Year Seminars without worrying about adding to the skyrocketing costs of textbooks. I consider mindfulness to be a powerful resource for navigating the discomfort and ambiguity of transitions, so I want to share it with as many students and instructors as possible. I also seek out open-access journals when I publish academic articles because it will reach a broader readership, and I've found that my area of research (Buddhist board games, views of karma, approaches to digital media, etc.) appeals to the general public as well as scholars and religious practitioners."
Mind the GapISBN: 9781469672984Mind the Gap encourages you to be mindful of that gap that takes place in various transitions in life: when you go away to college, travel to a foreign country, move to a new city, or start a new job. Until you start to feel at home in your new environment, you must negotiate feelings of discomfort. Mindfulness draws attention to your experience of transition, enabling you to cultivate an embodied presence, receptivity, and awareness of whatever arises in yourself and your surroundings, without judging or rejecting your experience. All too often, when we feel uncomfortable or unsettled, we immediately want to alleviate our feelings of discomfort by seeking comfort or distraction. When we do this, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to grow and develop in new ways. This book shows how attending to change, ambiguity, and discomfort can help you manage transitions that you will inevitably face in your life. You will learn how to be mindful of your breath, body, feelings, emotions, and thoughts, as well as how you might cultivate kindness, compassion, joy, and spaciousness in your life and relationships with others. By developing the core ability to attend to what you do, what you think, and what you say, you can enhance your own well-being as well as your relationships with others.
Wednesday
Frederick Bingham
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9848-7141
Dr. Frederick Bingham is a Professor in UNC Wilmington's Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography in the College of Science and Engineering, and a faculty member in UNC Wilmington's Center for Marine Science. His research focuses on circulation, mass water transportation, and sea salinity in the field of oceanography (including examples like Gordon et al., 2015 and Hasson et al., 2019). Much of Dr. Bingham's work has received support from funders like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). According to InCites, over 75% of his publications indexed on Web of Science are openly accessible, demonstrating a commitment to openness that also aligns with most federal funder expectations about public access to supported research. We are proud to celebrate Fred for exemplifying the rigor and broad impact facilitated by open science.
"I have been involved in managing field data collected in NASA-funded projects for the past 15 years. For example, I was the one who submitted all of the datasets for this project. As a government agency (NASA funds come from the taxpayers - all of us), NASA has the mandate to make the data they collect available to anyone who wants to use it immediately, or as soon as possible. In addition, they strongly encourage researchers who use NASA-funded data to publish their results in open access journals. Given this, I have been witness to the agency's push to transform to the world of open science. This means not simply publishing in open access journals, but also sharing data, results, code and other parts of the research process both before and after publication. This kind of sharing makes for better science, more robust, more efficient, more reproducible, and more equitable."
- Salinity and Stratification at the Sea Ice Edge
The Salinity and Stratification at the Sea Ice Edge (SASSIE) project is a 2022 NASA field experiment focused on understanding the dynamics and impacts of near-surface anomalies generated by melting sea ice. In the western Arctic, salinity controls upper ocean stratification and heat is stored subsurface. Melting sea ice leaves a thin, stable layer of fresh water on the sea surface that can isolate this heat. SASSIE will test the hypothesis that in areas where the fresh layers generated by summer ice melt persist, the ocean surface cools quickly, creating conditions favorable for rapid ice advance in autumn. SASSIE sampled the transition from summer melt to autumn ice advance in the Beaufort Sea in August-October 2022, making intensive in situ and remote sensing observations within ~200 km of the sea ice edge. Detailed measurements of upper ocean and surface salinity and temperature, air-sea fluxes, surface waves, and sea ice properties were collected from ship-based sensors and numerous autonomous assets. Airborne sensors measured SST, SSS, wind speed, and visible imagery of sea ice.
Tuesday
Richard M. Clerkin
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7603-6865
Dr. Richard Clerkin is a Distinguished Professor in UNC Wilmington's Department of Public and International Affairs within the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. His research focuses broadly on understanding why people voluntarily contribute to the common good and on the challenges and opportunities in a systems approach to building nonprofit capacities.
Christopher R. Prentice
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0959-117X
Dr. Christopher R. Prentice is a Professor in UNC Wilmington's Department of Public and International Affairs within the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts. He is also the Director for the Center for Social Impact. His research interests include nonprofit management, financial management and decision making, and cross-sector collaboration.
Dr. Clerkin and Dr. Prentice serve as Co-Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs (JPNA), one of several Diamond Open Access journals led by UNCW faculty and/or hosted by UNCW. JPNA is a strong example of a well-run journal, complete with indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals as well as in Web of Science and Scopus, and is hosted on the excellent Open Journal Systems platform offered by the Public Knowledge Project. Given the established relationship between open access publications and increased citation counts (Eysenbach, 2006; Piwowar et al., 2018), Dr. Clerkin and Dr. Prentice are not only supporting the usability of public and nonprofit affairs research for practitioners, but are also building a discoverability advantage for authors. We are proud to celebrate Rich and Chris for their contributions to a more open academic publishing landscape.
“JPNA (Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs) being an open-access academic journal is invaluable in democratizing knowledge and fostering inclusivity in academic discourse. By removing paywalls and subscription barriers, it ensures that research in public and nonprofit affairs is accessible to a global audience, including scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and the general public. This open access promotes the dissemination of critical insights and innovative solutions, encouraging evidence-based decision-making and enhancing the impact of research beyond academia. In doing so, JPNA supports the advancement of public and nonprofit sectors by making cutting-edge studies widely available for learning, collaboration, and application.”
- Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs
The Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs (JPNA) is a peer-reviewed, open source journal sponsored by the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The journal is published by the Midwest Public Affairs Conference (MPAC). JPNA focuses on providing a connection between the practice and research of public affairs. This is accomplished with scholarly research, practical applications of the research, and no fees for publishing or journal access. JPNA publishes research from diverse theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary backgrounds that addresses topics related to the affairs and management of public and nonprofit organizations.
Monday
Lenis Chen-Edinboro
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8927-4256
Dr. Lenis Chen-Edinboro is an Associate Professor of Public Health in UNC Wilmington's School of Health & Applied Human Sciences. Her research spans a variety of areas in the public health field, including the health of older and aging adults, food safety and insufficiency, and public health education. According to InCites, over 70% of Dr. Chen-Edinboro's publications indexed by Web of Science are open access, demonstrating her commitment to the free flow of valuable information. See an example below of her work below, published in Innovation in Aging. We are proud to celebrate Lenis for the impact her research makes in the lives of all interested readers.
"I believe that rigorous, peer-reviewed open scholarship is very valuable to the academic community because it increases the level of transparency of research to a broader and more diverse audience. As someone who often works on projects that involve the analysis of data, I am very grateful for the ability to access data that are publicly available or readily available to access through a clear, quick process. No matter what academic institution a person works for or other affiliation a person has, they can access research that is published as open access on their own. For example, as someone who works in fields such as nutrition and public health, I may not readily be able to access peer-reviewed research in other academic areas if without my affiliation with UNCW and UNCW Library. If I weren't affiliated with UNCW, it might be hard for me to access journal articles about neuroscience, for instance. Open access journals such as Frontiers in Neuroscience facilitate access to specialty content and make it much easier to obtain."
- Positive Aspects of Caregiving Are Associated With Lower Risk of Frailty and Sleep Disruption in the National Study of Caregiving
Background and Objectives: Older adult caregivers have compounded risk for adverse health outcomes; however, evidence investigating the association between caregiving and frailty has been limited. In the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC), we examined the cross-sectional association between caregiving experiences and frailty and sleep disruption.
Research Design and Methods: We included 621 caregivers aged 65 and older from the 2011 NSOC round. They completed a phone interview, including 36 items about caregiving. Using principal component analysis, we identified 3 caregiving components: general burden, positive emotions, and financial-led burden. Frailty was assessed via low energy, shrinking, weakness, reduced activity, and poor self-rated health. Sleep disruption was assessed with 2 questions regarding sleep interruption and trouble falling back asleep.
Results: In models adjusted for age, sex, education, depression and anxiety symptoms, and medical conditions, positive emotions were associated with a reduced relative risk of frailty (relative risk [RR] = 0.94, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.90, 0.99) while general burden (proportional odds ratio [POR] = 1.96, 95% CI 1.30, 2.93) and financial-led burden (POR = 1.94, 95% CI 1.22, 3.06) were associated with sleep interruption.
Discussion and Implications: Caregiver burden was associated with increased frailty and sleep interruption. Positive emotions were associated with decreased frailty risk. Interventions aimed at reducing the burden and increasing positive emotions in caregivers may improve frailty outcomes.
UNCW's 2024 Open Access Authors (to date)
According to the OpenAlex scientific knowledge base, UNCW authors have contributed to over 180 open access publications to this point in 2024, with more on the way! Click the logo to see a list of those publications.