OU Libraries Monthly Feature: Profiles in Open Featuring Michele Eodice

“Profiles in Open” regularly features OU scholars who advocate for open access and make their work openly accessible, benefitting authors, readers, funders, the public, and others. Check out this month’s profile of Dr. Michele Eodice.

Michele Eodice is the Senior Writing Fellow in the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of Oklahoma. In this role she is a resource for faculty writers on manuscripts and proposals and offers writing retreats, writing groups and workshops, and individual faculty coaching. From 2006-2018 she directed the OU Writing Center and served as Associate Provost for Academic Engagement. From 1998-2006 she was the founding director of the writing center at the University of Kansas. Dr. Eodice is currently an editor of the online open access journal, Writers: Craft & Context, published in partnership with the University of Oklahoma Libraries on the Open Journal Systems platform.

Dr. Eodice is a co-editor of "Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers," recipient of the International Writing Centers Association Outstanding Book Award for 2020. Other books include First Person 2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy, The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice, Working with Faculty Writers, The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching, and Writing in Higher Education, Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering, and (forthcoming in 2023) Teaching Meaningful Writing.

Her research focuses on faculty and graduate student writers, and she studies undergraduate student writing experiences through the Meaningful Writing Project, launched in 2010. Her career-long scholarly interests include collaborative authorship, writing groups, mentoring and coaching writers, and writerly identity. Her community service includes facilitating digital storytelling with community members and facilitating writing groups with writers who are incarcerated.

Why do you think open access is important to the OU community?

Through my work in the Center for Faculty Excellence, I witness the directions our faculty research is taking. It is becoming highly convergent and even more collaborative, so we want and need access to the best science—the best writing and the timeliest data—and making this available to all through open access is not just showcasing publications by OU scholars, it is supporting the convergent research, allowing emerging researchers to build on what is happening, and, most important, broadening participation to include more voices and perspectives. I think open access will evolve to be a platform for more transparent peer review and a plurality of voices and less about the transaction of publishing.

As a co-founder and co-editor of the open-access journal Writers: Craft & Context, what do you see as the primary benefits of such publishing partnerships between scholars and academic libraries?

I think libraries/librarians have always been the bridge between scholars and the world out there—they are always thinking ahead. We (including Sandy Tarabochia, University of Oklahoma and Aja Martinez, University of North Texas) had a vision of what we wanted as editors, and OU Libraries had the staff, expertise, space, time, and genuine interest in guiding us to develop the journal online. This is a solid and positive partnership. It was smart to develop and grow the Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication department. The team is so responsive and knowledgeable.

How do you think open access and other open research practices support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts?

The equity and access promise of OA is truly enacted. For example, recently our editorial team questioned the use of “blind review” as a term in the publication process. We were about to request a change in the Open Journal System when OJS itself decided to make that change in the infrastructure—which can potentially shift how people think about peer-review integrity—to “anonymous/double anonymous” rather than using an ableist term. The OISC unit advocated for this to happen, and we appreciate their shared commitment. What comes next, I think, is likely a more transparent/shared open peer-review apparatus that invites real-time input from a range of scholarly perspectives.

From working with some Indigenous scholars in Canada, I’ve learned about the concept and practice of Knowledge Mobilization. This concept moves us away from traditional dissemination practices [sent to one journal/limited readership/paywall, etc.] to really moving the work, circulating, to reach new audiences, be accountable to readers, honor multiple ways of knowing, genuinely serve communities, and help solve real problems more broadly. It is less about how many citations you get in print—and more about how your work can truly move into communities. We do our work using public funding—so let’s let the public know what we are finding out that can really make a difference.

You were at the University of Kansas when they passed the first institutional open-access policy. What inspired faculty at KU to develop the policy, and what lessons do you think that holds for the University of Oklahoma?

I was not directly involved in that effort at KU—but I was very influenced in my thinking by my late friend Richard Fyffe, who at that time (early 2000s) was assistant dean for scholarly communication in the KU Libraries. He really had vision and he had a true intellectual grasp on how complex scholarly communication is/will be and named the tensions between academic culture as gift economy and the imperative for publication to function as value in a market economy. Librarians/libraries anticipated many of the advances and challenges in the area of scholarly communication, thank goodness!