Go behind the scenes and get up close and personal with selected highlights of the ATC Collection in the Special Collections Research Center.
Tuesday, May 23
5:00pm – 7:00 pm
Fenwick Library, Room 2001
Presentation By:
Brian B. King, Former Publisher, Appalachian Trail Conservancy
With pre-recorded remarks from Mills Kelly, PhD, Director, Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History and New Media
RSVP By May 12, 2023
Shelley Locke
slocke@gmu.edu
The University Libraries Student Assistant Scholarship Endowment fund was created to recognize and support student employees who have demonstrated outstanding work performance in the University Libraries while meeting the academic requirements of their coursework at Mason. The purpose of the endowment is to award scholarships each year to provide assistance with student employees’ educational expenses at Mason.
The scholarship awards are made possible by the generosity of many Mason alumni and donors who funded the endowment, with the initial challenge gift coming from a Mason alumna who was a former library student employee.
Scholarship Eligibility Criteria
Applicants must possess the following attributes:
Scholarship Application Requirements
A complete application will consist of the following:
Scholarship Application Deadline
Applications must be submitted via e-mail to library@gmu.edu by 11:59 p.m., Friday, June 30, 2023. Late applications will not be accepted.
Scholarship Selection Process
Scholarship recipients will be selected by a committee appointed by the Dean of Libraries and University Librarian and notified prior to the start of the fall semester. The number of award recipients may vary per academic year. This scholarship is not renewable.
Scholarship Award
The awards (one undergraduate student and one graduate student) will consist of a $1,000 scholarship to each recipient, distributed in two payments at the beginning of the fall and spring semesters. The award will be applied to the recipient’s student account at Mason. In the event the recipient should decide not to return to Mason or not to continue working in the Libraries, the award will not be dispersed to the individual, and the committee may select an alternate candidate.
The Mason Libraries are changing how we support open access (OA) publishing. We are pivoting from paying OA fees for a limited number of individual articles each year to investing in collective action initiatives that fund hundreds of OA publications. OA publishing makes scholarly articles freely available online, so that anyone, regardless of their institutional affiliation, can read articles free of charge. By supporting OA, the Mason Libraries contribute to making the results of academic research available to researchers, learners, and policymakers around the world.
From 2012 to 2023, the Libraries supported OA publishing by helping Mason researchers cover the fees some journals charge to make an article OA. These OA fees range from a few hundred dollars to over ten thousand dollars per article. Mason students and faculty without grant funding could apply for financial assistance via the Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund (OAPF). In its ten years of operation, the OAPF contributed almost $400,000 towards over 300 OA journal articles with Mason corresponding authors.
While the OAPF was impactful at the individual level, it could not advance system-level change in scholarly publishing. Today there are many more options for supporting OA, including options that reject the idea of charging authors fees to publish OA. The University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, and other research universities have already retired their OA article publishing funds in favor of more sustainable, scalable, and equitable channels.
After a decade of supporting faculty and student publications, therefore, the OAPF will be redirected to support three high-impact, collective action approaches to OA. First, the libraries will contribute to “Diamond” OA initiatives that charge no fees to authors or readers, such as MIT Press’s Direct 2 Open. Second, we will participate in innovative “read and publish” agreements negotiated by VIVA, our statewide academic library consortium. These agreements cover both subscription access to a publisher’s journals and OA publishing fees in that publisher’s journals for all VIVA authors. Finally, we will continue to support OA infrastructure programs such as ArXiv e-print archive.
Going forward, Mason authors will continue to enjoy options for fee-free and discounted OA publishing via VIVA’s read and publish agreements and any additional agreements that can be negotiated by the Mason Libraries on their own. These deals provide full funding for all OA articles, where the OAPF could only cover a portion of more costly fees. In 2022 alone, VIVA’s state-wide agreement with Wiley funded 49 Mason-authored OA articles, amounting to over $150,000 in APCs. In the same year, VIVA’s agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery funded 47 Mason-authored OA articles, valued at an estimated $70,000. By working at scale with other Virginia institutions, Mason Libraries’ collections funding can go further, providing far more OA capacity than has been possible through the article-level impact of the OAPF.
As of January 2023, Mason authors may publish OA journal articles at no cost through VIVA’s read and publish agreements with the following publishers:
In addition, Mason authors may deposit their preprints or eligible published work in our institutional repository, Mason Archival Repository Service (MARS).
The Libraries are committed to advancing sustainable, scholar-led, not-for-profit, and fee-free open access. Email publish@gmu.edu to learn how the Libraries can help you open up your work to a wider world of readers and increased impact.
The Mason Libraries Undergraduate Research Prize has been awarded to Jae Hoon Jeong for the paper “Enhancing Public Trust in the Accounting Profession in the United States: A Review of Literature.” In making this award, the selection committee noted about this paper, which was written for ENGH 302: Advanced Composition in the Fall 2022 semester, “The topic was timely, and the paper was well written and engaging. The committee was impressed by Jae Hoon Jeong’s use of a variety of scholarly sources for the literature review. It was evident that the applicant spent significant time researching, as Jae Hoon Jeong cited a variety of authors from multiple scholarly journals. We wish all the applicants success in their academic endeavors.”
In receiving this award, Jae Hoon stated, “I wanted to express my sincerest thanks for selecting me as the award recipient for the 2023 Undergraduate Student Research Prize. It is truly an honor to receive this recognition, and I am grateful for the support and resources provided by the library throughout my research process.
The library’s extensive collection of books, databases, and other resources, as well as the helpful assistance of the librarians, staff, and faculty, were invaluable in helping me to complete my research project. Without their support, I would not have been able to achieve the level of depth and analysis that my paper required.
Thank you again for this wonderful opportunity and for all that you do to support student research. I look forward to continuing to make use of the library’s resources and services throughout my academic career.”
A heartfelt thank you to the 2022-23 AY Selection Committee: Ashley Blinstrub, Student Success and Inclusion Librarian, Jennifer Disano, Executive Director, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Alyssa Fahringer, Digital Scholarship Consultant, Katara Hofmann, Peer Referral Coach Manager
Congratulations to Jae Hoon!
Anne C. Osterman, Interim Dean of Libraries and University Librarian
Our new exhibit in Fenwick is officially open! From February 2nd through April 2nd, you can view Kat Thompson’s Looking For My People at the Fenwick Gallery.
Kat Thompson, “Looking for My People,” 2022
About the Artist:
Kat Thompson is an artist based in Virginia who works in photography, textile, sculptural collage, and installation. She confronts her dual American and Jamaican identity through projects that depict traces of her family’s journey using personal and found materials. Her focus is to uncover stories that mirror parts of ourselves back to us, including our histories, current realities, and future possibilities. Thompson is an alumna of George Mason University where she received her BFA in Photography. She is currently completing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Thompson is an alumna of George Mason University where she received her BFA in Photography. She is currently in the process of completing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. In 2021, Thompson was awarded a Young Alumni Creative Development Grant from Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, and she previously had a solo exhibition in the Buchanan Hall Atrium Gallery.
More details at: fenwickgallery.gmu.edu/exhibitions/looking-for-my-people/