Friends of the UNCG Libraries

The Friends of the UNCG Libraries elected new officers at their recent annual meeting, a celebration of blues featuring scholar and author Bill Ferris and blues artist Logie Meachum and friends. Outgoing chair Tom Kirby-Smith served as master of ceremonies at the event, attended by 250 members and other attendees. The new Chair of the Friends is Howard Covington of Greensboro. A native of Concord and a graduate of the University of Florida, Covington is a much-respected journalist and author. While with the Charlotte Observer, Covington was the creator and lead reporter on a multi-part series on occupational health hazards in the textile industry. This series won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as well as more than a dozen other national reporting awards, including the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards. He was executive city editor of the Greensboro News & Record before leaving the newspaper business to write and to manage his own publishing compa

In early February 2012, the University Libraries and the Office of Research & Economic Development created an Open Access Publishing Support Fund in order to support faculty, EPA employees, and graduate students who are becoming increasingly involved in open access publishing. The first grant of $1,000 from this fund was recently awarded to Robert Hans Stavn, Professor of Biology, for his article, “Mass-specific scattering cross sections of suspended sediments and aggregates: theoretical limits and applications,” Optics Express 20 (1): 201-219 . The Open Access Publishing Support Fund is a pilot project that is funded at $11,500, and the primary guidelines for the fund are that the author/applicant must be a member of the full-time faculty, a full-time EPA employee, or an enrolled graduate student; the article must be published in a peer-reviewed open-access journal; the article processing fee must have been paid no more than three months prior to submission of the application;

In September 2010, after attending an international medical education conference, several UNCG nurse practitioner faculty returned to campus discussing the need for a journal specifically designed for nurse practitioner education. At the time, there was no individual journal that focused on this important professional subject, and articles that did focus on the subject were spread around the literature in a variety of journals, with no journal focusing any great amount of attention on nurse practitioner education. Soon after the nursing faculty returned to campus, however, in a serendipitous development, the University Libraries announced the availability of Open Journal Systems (OJS) software. OJS is an open-source software that is specifically designed to assist faculty and researchers in publishing peer-reviewed open-access journals, and it supports journal management through every stage of the peer-review and editorial process, from the submission of each manuscript to the final p