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Implementing Open Access Dissertation Deposit at the University of Chicago
No full textAs conversations around research accessibility continue to grow, universities play an important role in making scholarship widely available in response to federal mandates for public access to research and global initiatives such as the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. In Summer 2024, the University of Chicago Dissertation Office answered that call by requiring all doctoral dissertations be deposited in Knowledge@UChicago, the University of Chicago Library\u27s institutional repository. This transition to making doctoral dissertations open access exemplifies the following principles of the University of Chicago Library: (1) meeting the information needs of the University both as stewards of an outstanding research collection and as leaders in open scholarship and (2) championing openness as the organizational default by opening scholarship for use and impact, facilitating the widest access to collections and spaces, and practicing transparency as an organization.
This presentation will explore the process and steps involved for implementing the Dissertation Office\u27s open access dissertation policy as well as the motivations for opening access to UChicago\u27s doctoral scholarship. Additionally, we will discuss concerns by students and faculty regarding embargo options, copyright considerations, and implications for future publication to offer insight and strategies for addressing potential barriers. We hope that our experience will provide a model for other institutions considering a similar transition to making their dissertations open access
Welcome and Keynote: Mobilizing to Defend Research Against U.S. Government Censorship: An Origin Story and An Invitation
No full textOpen Access and AI - How to Safeguard Your Published Work in a Time of Unmitigated Co-option
No full textThe meteoric rise of generative artificial intelligence has exposed a precarious fault line within the open access movement: the unchecked appropriation of scholarly labor by proprietary AI systems. While open access was designed to democratize knowledge, it is now being exploited by tech corporations who ingest publicly funded research to power closed-source AI models, often without citation, attribution, or consent.
This dynamic disproportionately affects Black scholars, academics, and authors, whose work has long been under-cited, under-platformed, and devalued within traditional scholarly ecosystems. As AI models draw indiscriminately from the open web and academic repositories, the historical and ongoing unpaid intellectual labor of Black thinkers is absorbed into algorithmic systems that rarely, if ever, acknowledge their contributions, further replicating epistemic erasure in the digital age.
This presentation examines the ethical and political tensions that arise when open access is co-opted by AI, particularly as governments vacillate between funding public research and subsidizing private innovation. Drawing from global case studies and existing advocacy efforts, I explore licensing strategies, institutional safeguards, and collective actions that can help scholars, especially those whose labor has been historically exploited, retain agency over their work.
To defend research today means not only resisting government censorship, but also confronting the algorithmic commodification of public knowledge. It means demanding equity in who gets cited, who gets compensated, and who gets to remain visible in the archives of the future
Increased melt from Greenland’s most active glacier fuels enhanced coastal productivity
Get PDFSeasonal phytoplankton blooms in Greenland’s coastal waters form the base of marine food webs and contribute to oceanic carbon uptake. In Qeqertarsuup Tunua, West Greenland, a secondary summertime bloom follows the Arctic spring bloom, enhancing annual primary productivity. Emerging evidence links this summer bloom to subglacial discharge from Sermeq Kujalleq, the most active glacier on the Greenland Ice Sheet. This discharge drives localized upwelling that may alleviate nutrient limitation in surface waters, yet this mechanism remains poorly quantified. Here, we employ a high-resolution biogeochemical model nested within a global state estimate to assess how discharge-driven upwelling influences primary productivity and carbon fluxes. We find that upwelling increases summer productivity by 15–40% in Qeqertarsuup Tunua, yet annual carbon dioxide uptake rises by only ~3% due to reduced solubility in plume-upwelled waters. These findings suggest that intensifying ice sheet melt may alter Greenland’s coastal productivity and carbon cycling under future climate scenarios
Automated design of scaffold-free DNA wireframe nanostructures
Get PDFComputer-aided design has become common practice in DNA nanotechnology, and many programs are available that make the sophisticated design processes accessible to both the core research community and curious scientists in other fields. However, most of the design tools are committed to the scaffolded DNA origami method. Here we present an automated design pipeline for creating DNA wireframe nanostructures based on a scaffold-free molecular self-assembly approach. Unlike in the DNA origami method, scaffold-free designs are not built around a global backbone strand but are constituted entirely of short, locally intertwined oligonucleotides. This overcomes many limitations inherent in scaffolded nanostructure designs, most notably the size constraints imposed by the length of available scaffold strands, and the topological and algorithmic challenges of finding feasible scaffold-strand routings. In practice, this leads to simpler design flows and opens up new design possibilities. To demonstrate the flexibility and capability of our approach, we generate a variety of complex DNA wireframe designs automatically from 2D and 3D mesh models and successfully realise the respective molecular nanostructures experimentally
A protocol for the development of a validated scale of household water insecurity in the United States: HWISE-USA
Get PDFBackground New metrics of household water insecurity have been validated for low- to middle-income countries, but it is unclear how these measurements apply to the experiences of people living in high-income countries. This project aims to develop and validate a novel metric for household water insecurity experiences in the United States (HWISE-USA) using a cross-sectional design and data from the Southwest, Midwest, and Western regions. Methods We outline the protocol for the development and validation of a novel household water insecurity scale for the United States to address this scientific need, including the following key steps: (1) item development through literature and theory; (2) pre-testing of items and expert review; (3) scale development and item reduction; and (4) scale validation. To assess the performance of the HWISE-USA scale, we will follow the same scale development analytics on a separate, quasi-nationally-representative U.S. sample. The scale will be generated from household survey data collected from communities at risk of water insecurity throughout the United States. Discussion We explain how a novel metric of water insecurity experiences for households in the United States has important implications for resource allocation, structural interventions, public health and infrastructure planning, and reductions in inequalities