The Grand Valley State University Student Senate had two speakers at its meeting last week who spoke about student success and Scholar Works, which gives students open access to scholarly and creative works.

The first guest speaker at the meeting was Nancy Giardina, the vice provost for student success at GVSU. Some of her many duties include acting as the official liaison between her office and Student Senate, overseeing instructional support services, and overseeing the blueprint for student success.

“The blueprint for student success is a pathway to help students in all years to see critical landmarks and hit those landmarks to graduate on time,” Giardina said.

The blueprint is different from MyPath because, where MyPath is more like a technical degree audit, the blueprint is more like a conversation with an adviser, Giardina said. “The blueprint is packed with information from students and faculty.”

“We have gotten national recognition, and other schools use it as a model,” Giardina added.

The second speaker at the meeting was Sarah Beaubien, who is the scholarly communications outreach coordinator at university libraries. She talked about Scholar Works and some of the history of open access, as well as the problems that publishers and subscribers had with the costs involved.

“All of us as taxpayers are funding it, and it’s the publishers that are profiting,” Beaubien said. “The profit margins of the publishers are huge, bigger than large companies like Apple, because they charge so much to get access.”

Beaubien said that now, things are changing with open access. There are now government and institutional mandates that if they give grant money to do research, the researcher is required to publish it in an open access repository somewhere.

“More and more institutions are doing this because they don’t want to pay to do the research and also pay to subscribe to it,” Beaubien said.

She also gave advice to the senators as future authors: “Fight for your rights as an author. Anything you create in a tangible medium is yours and you can protect that. Anything of your making is yours until you give it away. Make a stand on your behalf.”

Also mentioned in the meeting, the educational affairs committee is finalizing the Fall Break resolution and has created a survey for both students and faculty to get their input.

“We really need to get student and faculty input to make the proposal stronger and be able to give evidence that people are behind it,” said Katie Carlson, vice president of the educational affairs committee.

To fill out the survey, visit www.gvsu.edu/studentsenate.
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