OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: WHAT FACULTY AUTHORS CAN DO TO ENSURE OPEN ACCESS TO THEIR WORK THROUGH THEIR INSTITUTION

The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of research by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked environment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches, accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complex research challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite these opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even the wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and students. To take advantage of the opportunities created by the Internet and to further their mission of creating, preserving, and disseminating knowledge, many academic institutions are taking steps to capture the benefits of more open research sharing. Colleges and universities have built digital repositories to preserve and distribute faculty scholarly articles and other research outputs. Many individual authors have taken steps to retain the rights they need, under copyright law, to allow their work to be made freely available on the Internet and in their institutionâ s repository. And, faculties at some institutions have adopted resolutions endorsing more open access to scholarly articles. Most recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step. The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the universityâ s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. As of March 2008, a proposal is also under consideration in the University of California system by which faculty authors would commit routinely to grant copyright permission to the university to make copies of the facultyâ s scholarly work openly accessible over the Internet. Inspired by the example set by the Harvard faculty, this White Paper is addressed to the faculty and administrators of academic institutions who support equitable access to scholarly research and knowledge, and who believe that the institution can play an important role as steward of the scholarly literature produced by its faculty. This paper discusses both the motivation and the process for establishing a binding institutional policy that automatically grants a copyright license from each faculty member to permit deposit of his or her peer-reviewed scholarly articles in institutional repositories, from which the works become available for others to read and cite.

Services to support BU Authors with Open Access Issues

A working paper written for Boston University Libraries to foster discussion about how to provide better support for BU faculty authors.

How Locally Designed Access and Use Controls Can Prevent the Tragedy of the Commons in a Mexican Small-Scale Fishing Community

The Seri people, a self-governed community of small-scale fishermen in the Gulf of California, Mexico, have ownership rights to fishing grounds where they harvest highly valuable commercial species of bivalves. Outsiders are eager to gain access, and the community has devised a set of rules to allow them in. Because Seri government officials keep all the economic benefits generated from granting this access for themselves, community members create alternative entry mechanisms to divert those benefits to themselves. Under Hardin’s model of the tragedy of the commons, this situation would eventually lead to the overexploitation of the fishery. The Seri people, however, are able to simultaneously maintain access and use controls for the continuing sustainability of their fishing grounds. Using insights from common- pool resources theory, I discuss how Seri community characteristics help mediate the conflict between collective action dilemmas and access and use controls.

The Emergence of Access Controls in Small-Scale Fishing Commons: A Comparative Analysis of Individual Licenses and Common Property-Rights in Two Mexican Communities

Addressing global fisheries overexploitation requires better understanding of how small-scale fishing communities in developing countries limit access to fishing grounds. We analyze the performance of a system based on individual licenses and a common property-rights regime in their ability to generate incentives for self-governance and conservation of fishery resources. Using a qualitative before-after-control-impact approach, we compare two neighbouring fishing communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Both were initially governed by the same permit system, are situated in the same ecosystem, use similar harvesting technology, and have overharvested similar species. One community changed to a common property-right regime, enabling the emergence of access controls and avoiding overexploitation of benthic resources, while the other community, still relies on the permit system. We discuss the roles played by power, institutions, socio-historic, and biophysical factors to develop access controls. © 2012 The Author(s).

Breaking New Ground: The First Generation of Women to Work as Professional Authors in English Canada (1880-1920)

In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, large numbers of Canadian women were stepping out of the shadows of private life and into the public world of work and political action. Among them, both a cause and an effect of these sweeping social changes, was the first generation of Canadian women to work as professional authors. Although these women were not unified by ideology, genre, or date of birth, they are studied here as a generation defined by their time and place in history, by their material circumstances, and by their collective accomplishment. Chapters which focus on E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), the Eaton sisters (Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna), Joanna E. Wood, and Sara Jeannette Duncan explore some of the many commonalities and interrelationships among the members of this generation as a whole. This project combines archival research with analytical bibliography in order to clarify and extend our knowledge of Johnson’s and Duncan’s professional lives and publishing histories, and to recover some of Wood’s “lost” stories. This research offers a preliminary sketch of the long tradition of the platform performance (both Native and non-Native) with which Johnson and others engaged. It explores the uniquely innovative ethnographic writings of Johnson, Duncan, and the Eaton sisters, among others, and it explores thematic concerns which relate directly to the experiences of working women. Whether or not I convince other scholars to treat these authors as a generation, with more in common than has previously been supposed, the strong parallels revealed in these pages will help to clarify and contextualize some of their most interesting work.

Isolation and cloning of exendin precursor cDNAs from single samples of venom from the Mexican beaded lizard (Heloderma horridum) and the Gila Monster (Heloderma suspectum)

Reptile venoms are complex cocktails of bioactive molecules, including peptides. While the drug discovery potential of most species remains unrealized, many are endangered and afforded protection under international treaties. In this study, we describe how potential clinically important bioactive peptides and their corresponding mRNAs can be structurally characterized from single, small samples of reptile venom. The potential type-2 diabetes therapeutics, exendin-3 and exendin-4, from the Mexican beaded lizard (Heloderma horridum) and the Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum), respectively, have been characterized at both protein and nucleic acid levels to illustrate the efficacy of the technique and its contribution to biodiversity conservation.

Rastros del exilio e inspiración autobiográfica en las historias de "Las confidentes" (1997) de Angelina Muñiz

La vida y obra de Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (1939) han sido fuertemente influenciadas por el exilio sufrido por sus padres. Por azares del destino, la escritora nació en Hyères, Francia y enseguida la familia se instaló en París en espera del término de la guerra de España. Después de la trágica muerte del hermano mayor y una vez Franco en el poder, se embarcan rumbo a Cuba, donde pasan tres años paradisíacos alejados de España, de la guerra y del resto del mundo. Finalmente en 1942, se trasladan a México donde se establecen de forma definitiva. El libro Las confidentes (1997) contiene quince historias que van desarrollando algunos de estos puntos decisivos en la personalidad de la “hispanomexicana”. En ocasiones los elementos autobiográficos sobrepasan la personalidad de los protagonistas y en otras el exilio es el motor de la narración.

The feminine character and temporal freedom in three historical novels by Angelina Muñiz: Morada interior (1972), "El Mercader de Tudela" (1995) y "La Burladora de Toledo" (2008)

We focus on the representation of time in Muñiz’s historical novels. Concretely, we stress the attitude of the feminine characters towards time and history. Muñiz’s female personages continuously transgress temporal borders and move freely between different historical periods. We relate Muñiz’s particular vision on time and on the separation lines between historical periods to her situation as an exile. The author is continuously crossing borders between the past of her homeland and the present of her adoptive country. We argument Muñiz is recreating this “borderfree” attitude towards time in the female characters of her historical novels.

Crossing the threshold: exile and literature in "El Canto del peregrino" (1999) by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman

This paper analyses the relation between exile and literature in Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s work El canto del peregrino. In this collection of essays, the Spanish-Mexican writer, member of the second generation of Spanish Republican exiles in Mexico, outlines a poetics of exile. From the outset, the relation between exile and literature is presented in terms of identity: while defining exile as “literary form”, the book tends to prefer a metaphorical concept of exile over ‘merely’ historical or referential approaches to it. More in particular, this paper will examine how the author constructs an identity of ‘exiled writer’ based on the close association between exile and literature on the one hand, and on the view of exile as ‘home’ or ‘dwelling’, on the other hand. A second point of interest concerns the discursive impact of this literary and metaphorical concept of exile and the author’s personal experience. A brief analysis of the essayist’s discursive voice and her writing practice shows how Muñiz-Huberman gives shape to an intrinsically complex and paradoxical view on exile.

Crossing borders: Space and identity in the essay by Angelina Muñiz

In this study, we establish a relation between the representation of space in Muñiz’s essays and the construction of the essayist’s complex identity which combines Spanish, Jewish and Mexican traits. We concentrate on Angelina Muñiz’s essays Las raíces y las ramas (1993) and El canto del peregrino (1999). Methodologically, we rely on Maingueneau’s concept of ‘scenography’, according to which the text stages its own situation of enunciation. Our starting point is the triple Spanish-Jewish-Mexican identity of the essayist. Our research question is about how the essayist deals with the space corresponding to respectively the Spanish and Mexican part of her identity. Secondly, we analyse the representation in the essays of a space corresponding to her Jewish roots. We find that Muñiz’s vision of space is not static; the essayist’s vision on space is dynamic, open, free and characterized by a constant free movement across national borders. Similar to the concept of space of the ‘diaspora’, her vision is constructed without the limitations imposed by national borderlines or geographical distances.

Arquetipo y homofobia en el relato mexicano de temática gay

En este trabajo se pretende analizar cómo autores de diversas generaciones han contribuido al arraigo en el inconsciente colectivo, y en la misma literatura, a fijar valores y juicios predeterminados por los dogmas religiosos e ideologías de las instituciones gubernamentales. Para poder entender la evolución de los patrones del arquetipo y la homofobia, el análisis se realizará tomando en cuenta el orden cronológico en que se suceden los relatos, que van de la Revolución al término de la primera década del nuevo siglo, es decir cien años. También se analizarán los tratamientos estéticos y narrativos en los relatos.

"Bobok" y "Pedro Páramo", dos narraciones sobre muertos

El presente estudio realiza un análisis comparativo entre la novela del mexicano Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (1955), y un cuento del escritor ruso Dostoievski que trata también el tema del Más allá, titulado Bobok (1873). Paralelamente, se trabaja con la posibilidad de que el relato ruso hubiese podido ser una más de las fuentes literarias de la novela mexicana, y se trata de determinar las posibles conexiones -directas o indirectas- entre las dos obras. Ambas son puestas en común por su género literario, y a partir de ahí se estudian los elementos constitutivos que tienen en común, sus afinidades y divergencias más llamativas.

La Ciudad de México en las crónicas de José Joaquín Blanco

Este artículo analiza la imagen de la Ciudad de México configurada en la crónica mexicana a partir de los años setenta en especial en los textos de José Joaquín Blanco. Se detiene en el modo en que el género afronta la realidad de una megalópolis que ya solo puede ser asumida de modo fragmentario y múltiple. Entre la utopía y una visión apocalíptica de la ciudad, la crónica reconfigura el espacio y el tiempo urbanos, y formula una nueva identidad crítica gracias a la habilitación de espacios de expresión posibles dentro de las nuevas ciudades modificadas por el capital.

PdT-2: a novel myotropic Type-2 tryptophyllin from the skin secretion of the Mexican giant leaf frog, Pachymedusa dacnicolor.

Amphibian skin secretions represent a unique resource for the discovery of new bioactive peptides. Here we report the isolation, structural and functional characterization of a novel heptapeptide amide, DMSPPWHamide, from the defensive skin secretion of the Mexican giant leaf frog, Pachymedusa dacnicolor. This peptide is of unique primary structure and has been classified as a member of the rather heterogenous tryptophyllin-2 (T-2) family of amphibian skin peptides and named P. dacnicolor Tryptophyllin-2 (PdT-2) in accordance. PdT-2 is the first Type 2-tryptophyllin to possess discrete bioactivity. Both natural and synthetic replicates of the peptide were found to contract the smooth muscle of rat urinary bladder, the latter displaying an EC50 of 4 nM.