The Battalion - October 22, 2018 by The Battalion

Jesse Everett — THE BATTALION

A&M Libraries participate in a national movement to provide students with affordable scholarly journals.

Access for all

Libraries participate in worldwide movement to increase availability of academic reserach By Meagan Sheffield @mshef350

Jesse Everett— THE BATTALION

Mathematical sciences senior Shelby Thompson (right) interviews economics junior Emily Spears for her radio show.

Promoting accessible research will be the central focus for Texas A&M University Libraries as they celebrate the 11th annual International Open Access Week Monday through Sunday. Open Access Week is a global effort among libraries and research institutions that started in 2007. According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, open access is defined as “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” This year’s campus events will include a documentary screening and lectures from Texas A&M’s dean of libraries and the co-founder of Retraction Watch. Director of the Office of Scholarly Communications Bruce Herbert has organized Open Access Week at A&M since the university started participating in 2013. “Open Access is an issue that libraries have embraced all over the world,” Herbert said. “It’s a really simple idea, but it’s really powerful.” According to Herbert, there are more than 100,000 scholarly journals in the world, and about 20,000 of them are open access. Texas A&M University Libraries currently subscribes to about 75,000 journals and pays about $24 million per year in subscription fees. “[Many students] conduct some kind of research and many times, they publish their work,” Herbert said. “You do all that work, you submit it to a journal, and then we have to buy it back, and you don’t get paid anything. It’s crazy.” However, open access journals don’t require a subscription fee and only charge the author a small fee to publish an article. Digital Collections Management Librarian David Lowe said using open access journals is the best option for research authors and consumers. “We see the cost [of journal subscriptions] going up way beyond inflation rates [and] even profit rates of other businesses of other industries,” Lowe said. “Open access [allows the libraries to] provide access to [journals] with different arrangements of making sure the money goes to the right places so that people get paid for the work that they do.” Open access also applies to textbooks. Biology senior lecturer Andrew Tag helped put open access textbooks into use in all BIO 111 and 112 classes this semester. Normally, the biology textbooks cost around $200, but now they use OpenStax. According to Herbert, this change has saved about $600,000. “[Biology instructors] already knew that a significant proportion of our students did not get a textbook, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want one,” Tag said. “Even a used textbook is not cheap.” Using a free online textbook has given the professors more flexibility in designing coursework because introductory courses do not need some of the information present in commercial textbooks. Students are also given the option to use the free online textbook or to buy the printed copy for around $50. “One of the cool things that I’ve seen is that I have students come in now with [the book on their] tablet, and they’re taking notes in the actual book,” Tag said. “Before, that almost never happened, partly because they would have this enormous text that weighed like 500 pounds, and they’re blowing out a disk in their back carrying it across campus.” The university libraries also help faculty and graduate students publish their research in open access journals with the Open Access to Knowledge Fund. Associate professor of veterinary integrative biosciences Sarah Hamer has published four articles using OAKFund. “As our research team is growing, we’re able to do more research and publish more papers,” Hamer said. “We really want others to be able to read and build on our research findings, and we would hate for there to be a barrier.” For a full list of Open Access Week events, visit library.tamu.edu.

Underground voices of A&M KANM Student Radio DJs share new sounds with fellow Aggies By Claudia Soto @cisoto98 With a passion for music at the helm, Texas A&M’s student-run radio station has been welcoming new and old staff members to their studio this semester, along with a new faculty adviser. KANM DJs continue to bring their underground music to the surface as its

members are encouraged to explore new sounds that everyone can tune into. Instructional assistant professor of sociology and KANM adviser Warren Waren said the station sees a lot of students who want to share their passion for specific genres of music. “I’m delighted that students not only have a lot more opportunities to hear new music, but like what we do at KANM,” Waren said. “I think it’s really helpful and healthy for young people to be passionate about music and to share it.” Applied mathematical sciences senior

Shelby Thompson is a longtime member of KANM, now serving as station manager. Thompson said the station’s staff focuses on presenting a wide variety of new music for students to discover. “It’s a lot of people who appreciate more underground music, so they really want to find artists that they think other people will enjoy and spread that,” Thompson said. “Inherently, more people that join tend to like underground, but there’s definitely variety when it comes to that.” RADIO ON PG. 4

Graphic by Jesse Everett

Statistics and other information via Schroders asset management company and federalreservehistory.org.

A decade later: The 2008 financial crisis Texas A&M researchers reflect on the great recession and its causes By Henry Mureithi @HenryMureithi5 September 2018 marked 10 years since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, throwing the global financial industry into crisis and sending the U.S. economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression. According to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the economy is now growing stronger at an annualized quarterly pace of 4.2 percent, with unemployment at just 3.7 percent after spiking above 10 percent in 2009. Some financial professionals predicted the crisis, with varying arguments, ac-

cording to Anwer Ahmed, the department of accounting’s Ashley ‘88 and David Coolidge ‘87 chair in business. “We just got a paper accepted for publication which shows that bank executives and directors with prior crisis experience did foresee or predict the 2008 crisis and took steps to mitigate the effects, such as limiting their exposure to mortgage-backed securities,” Ahmed said. Regardless, Ahmed said most people in mainstream finance did not foresee or predict the depth of the crisis. “They were earning such high fees or compensation from the transactions they engaged in that it distracted them from questioning the reasonableness of their assumptions,” Ahmed said. With the benefit of hindsight, Ahmed said the financial crisis was deepened by some mix of government policies and pri-

vate-sector actions. “It was a combination of factors including government policies such as keeping interest rates low to stimulate the economy, deregulation of banking and inadequate supervision of markets like the credit default swaps market,” Ahmed said. “[Other factors included] incentive systems that motivated excessive risk-taking and deal-making, insatiable demand for securities that were considered low risk but offered relatively high returns and bursting of the real estate bubble.” Some, like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, argue that the government did not spend enough time and energy helping homeowners, which would have prevented some of the worst effects of the crisis. FINANCIAL ON PG. 2

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