FAST START Workshop Series for Research Support at OSU: Workshop descriptions

As part of Oklahoma State University’s modern land-grant mission, our faculty are encouraged to disseminate their knowledge to the general public. One way OSU accomplishes that is by providing media access to interview faculty as expert sources. This session will cover tips and tricks on how to work with media and the resources available to you within your college and the Department of Brand Management.

Join faculty and staff from Animal Resources, the Microscopy Facility the NMR Facility, and the Immunopathology Core for an overview of these major research facilities administered and/or supported by the Division of the Vice President for Research or the Oklahoma Center for Respiratory and Infectious Diseases. Personnel will describe relevant services, fees, forms, and other useful information for their facility and there will be time for Q&A at the end of the panel.

This workshop will give a brief overview of the purpose of the IACUC and IBC, specifically describing the Animal Welfare Regulations, NIH Guidelines, and Biosafety Oversight. It will describe what you can anticipate when you submit a project for review. In the second half of the workshop, the presenters will be available for questions about preparing your own projects for submission.

This panel will overview the services and oversight provided by units within University Research Compliance. Join Gina Cosden and Brandon Jordan to hear more about how OSU handles Conflicts of Interest and Radiation & Laser safety and how these offices can help you maintain research compliance. This panel will also discuss National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-33, which has implications for researchers who need to disclose conflicts of interest. 

Learn about the comprehensive resources available to you from the Office of Technology Commercialization and Cowboy Technologies to protect innovations that spawn from your OSU research and development activities utilizing patents, trade secrets, copyrights or trademarks, and also accelerate innovations to market as commercial products and services that make an impact in the world. You’ll hear about resources that span from intellectual property identification and protection services, commercialization funding opportunities, commercialization education and business mentoring, and others.

The Central Sponsored Programs Administration (CSPA) offers a variety of services for faculty, staff, and sponsored programs offices campuswide including grant writing, electronic research administration, and sponsored programs contract review. Dr. Julie Swaringim-Griffin, Assistant Vice President for CSPA, will provide a look into CSPA services and how to access these services to benefit your future proposal submissions and other research activities.

An introduction to a range of subscription library databases (such as Scopus, Academic Search Premier, and others), web based search tools (such as Google Scholar, Lens, Dimensions), browser plugins (such as Unpaywall and scite) to conduct literature reviews. The session will also cover citation tracking, creating alerts, exporting and saving citations, and will take a look at how scholarly literature search tools are leveraging large language models and AI.

OSU Libraries are known for the plethora of services and resources they offer to our campus community. But did you know that many of the services and resources can be accessed online and from a distance? We invite students, instructors, and faculty to explore the various Library services and resources available to them online, as well as services and resources specific to our distance education community. During this session, we will review access to reference resources and opportunities for online research support, instruction, and help when needed.

This session may be helpful for: Undergraduate students, graduate students, concurrent enrollment students, instructors, & faculty

Join us to explore how you can transform your teaching praxis and support student success through OpenOKState and open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) are research, teaching and learning resources intentionally created and licensed to be freely accessed, shared, retained, and in many cases modified at no additional cost to the end user. This session will also provide an overview of funding opportunities available from the Oklahoma Regents for Higher Education aimed at encouraging faculty and instructors to adopt, adapt, or create OER.

The first part of this workshop will detail how to search ScienceDirect, Scopus, and IEEE for engineering topics. This will include expanding a topic for a literature review, creating keyword alerts, and placing references in Zotero. The second part of this workshop will focus on searching for and locating technical standards. Engineers and scientists rely on technical standards to provide definitions and explanations. What are technical standards? Where are they found? What is the role of a standards provider such as IHS Markit? In this workshop you will increase your subject knowledge of standards and answer the basics related to these technical documents.

Zotero is a useful and time-saving software program for managing bibliographies and references, allowing labs and research teams to collect and share citations online. This workshop will introduce participants to the basics of using Zotero, which will include creating and adding references to an library, organizing and managing citations, and using Zotero with Microsoft Word and Google Docs for in-text citations and bibliographies.

Undergraduate researchers can be a vibrant and valuable addition to your research program. Learn the many ways to engage OSU undergraduates in your work and why you should consider becoming a mentor. We will also introduce funding and support systems for undergraduate researchers. Programs include the Freshman Research Scholars, Wentz and Purdie Research Scholars, Niblack Research Scholars, the AURCA program, OK-LSAMP, and McNair Scholars.

The Carpentries is a global, volunteer-led organization whose mission is to introduce researchers to coding and computing. The Carpentries at OSU has been teaching regular workshops on such tools as Python, R, SQL, Git, OpenRefine and Unix Shell since 2015. Workshops are free and taught for participants with no prior experience. In this introductory workshop we will describe the Carpentries teaching philosophy, provide examples of how the different tools are applied, as well as share tentative plans for fall workshop offerings. The OSU Carpentries community is active and growing. Come find out how you can be a part of it and if it is a good fit for you or for your students.

Getting Started with Servers on Cloud
(Now offered as Data Bytes)

Nikhil Motwani

This session focuses on creating a virtual server by assigning hardware resources to host applications on the cloud, assigning IP addresses, and installing basic system software.

Drilling Down on Data Management and Sharing Plans
(Now offered as Data Bytes)

Dr. Dani Kirsch

Search and Analyze Patent and Scholarly Data with Lens.org
(Now offered as Data Bytes)

Clarke Iakovakis & Suzanne Reinman

Bridging the cultures of scholarly research with invention and industry, Lens.org allows for searching of both patent and scholarly data. With advanced search capabilities, filtering, sorting, graphics, and export options. Lens.org includes 141 million patent records and over 200 million open access scholarly records with links to ORCID. Learn to search both the Patent and Scholarly Search and Analysis databases to supplement traditional literature searches.

Data Management: Planning and Better Practices
(Now offered as Data Bytes)

Clarke Iakovakis & Dr. Dani Kirsch

Research data is a valuable resource. Careful management practices reduce mistakes, improve research reproducibility and facilitate publishing and sharing data. Better practices for different phases of the research data cycle will be discussed including planning for data collection, file management, data security, options for data storage during the project and long term storage of data for sharing after the project is complete. Data management and sharing are also one part of a broader movement toward more open research practices. Please join us and learn these important skills in order to get your research project off to a great start.

Publishing Essentials: Selecting Journals, Avoiding Predatory Publishers, Understanding Open Access, and Exercising Your Rights as an Author
(No longer offered)

Clarke Iakovakis

This course is intended for both new and experienced authors. It will cover a wide range of topics, including tools and methods for evaluating journal quality; defining and identifying "predatory" publishers; understanding open access journals; interpreting your publishing agreement; and exercising your rights to make your peer reviewed manuscripts openly available

Digital Tools for Humanities Research
(No longer offered)

Megan Macken

Expand your traditional Humanities or Social Sciences research using digital tools. This workshop will introduce you to methods, tools, and platforms for digital humanities and social science research. Topics covered may include visualizing digital archives data with Gale Digital Scholar Lab, text analysis with JSTOR's Constellate and the HathiTrust Research Center, and designing web-based digital projects. Please bring your ideas and questions. No prior experience with digital tools required!

Resources for Text and Data Mining
(No longer offered)

Megan Macken

Discover resources for mining the content of journals, digital archives, government documents, books, and social media. Topics covered will include locating content, dealing with roadblocks, and identifying tools for acquiring and analyzing data.

Major Changes to Federal Funding Requirements
(No longer offered)

Clarke Iakovakis

There have recently been some significant announcements related to requirements for federal agencies conducting research and/or awarding funds. In 2021, the White House issued a memorandum (NSPM-33) requiring agencies to establish policies related to the use of persistent identifiers (namely, ORCIDs) for researchers’ disclosure of information during funding application and reporting workflows. Beginning in January 2023, all funding applications to the National Institutes of Health are required to include a Data Management and Sharing Plan outlining how scientific data and any accompanying metadata will be managed and shared, regardless of whether the data are used to support scholarly publication. In August 2022, the Office of Science & Technology Policy issued a memorandum requiring agencies to develop and submit policies for making publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible immediately upon publication.

HPC at OSU
(No longer offered)

Dr. Pratul Agarwal

This session will cover introduction to the High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources at OSU. There are several large Linux clusters (“Supercomputers”) available free of cost for academic research. These include “Pete”, “Cowboy”, the new GPU-enabled cluster “Bullet” and data storage. Additionally, “TIGER” resource provides virtualized instances in a cloud like environment. This session will cover a description of these resources, how to request accounts, and a list of software and HPC support resources available for research and educational computing.

Getting Started with EndNote
(No longer offered)

Victor Baeza

EndNote is a useful and time-saving software program for managing bibliographies and references, allowing labs and research teams to collect and share citations online. This workshop will introduce participants to the basics of using Endnote, which will include creating and adding references to an EndNote library, organizing and managing citations, annotating PDFs, using EndNote with Microsoft Word for in-text citations and bibliographies, and using EndNote Web to save and share citations.

Introduction to ArcGIS Pro
(No longer offered)

Kevin Dyke

For many research projects across a variety of disciplines, visualizing spatial data is a frequent requirement. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used not only to create basic maps, but can uncover patterns and raise new questions about your data. In this session you will learn the basics of digital mapmaking and spatial analysis using Esri’s ArcGIS Pro software.

Getting Started with Experts Directory
(No longer offered)

Clarke Iakovakis

Experts Directory is the faculty research information management system, allowing you to review and add data to create your online profile at https://experts.okstate.edu/. This session is intended to help you get started populating your Experts Directory profile, claim Scopus and ORCID identifiers, review and manage publications and grants, add your professional service, and more in your Experts Directory profile.

IT Resources and Services for Research
(No longer offered)

Raj Murthy

Enterprise Information Technology will be sharing who we are and the services we provide. We will be distinguishing between enterprise IT and departmental IT as well as outlining the resources available to them to assist in their endeavors. Contact information and additional places to access IT services will be provided.

Overview of Library Services for Faculty and Student Researchers and Instructors
(No longer offered)

Matt Upson

This session will provide a basic overview of the services, spaces, and resources available to support faculty and graduate students. Time for Q&A will be provided. Note: This presentation is identical to what was offered during New Faculty Orientation.

Text and Data Mining in JSTOR
(No longer offered)

Megan Macken & Dr. Brandon Katzir

JSTOR offers millions of documents for text analysis in its new platform, Constellate. This workshop will provide an introduction to Constellate’s tutorials, tools, and datasets. Participants will create their own datasets, visualizations, and notebooks during the workshop. We will also briefly cover other tools from JSTOR Labs, including Text Analyzer and Juncture.

Information Literacy and Library Instruction Essentials
(No longer offered)

Holly Reiter

Teaching information literacy is the dual responsibility of faculty and librarians. In an ever-changing, fast-paced information environment, it is imperative that students learn effective skills for finding, accessing, evaluating, and using information sources. This workshop will introduce you to information literacy: what it is and why it is important. It will also share best practices for creating library research assignments and ways to collaborate with librarians to teach information literacy skills in your classes.

Wikidata: Visualizing and Mining Data from the World's Knowledge Base
(No longer offered)

Megan Macken & Dr. Brandon Katzir

You know what Wikipedia is, but what about Wikidata? Find out more about this collaborative data source, how to contribute data, and how to access existing data for research and visualization.

Best Practices for Presenting Online
(No longer offered)

Cristina Colquhoun

Presenting to an online audience is a very different experience than presenting face-to-face. Regardless of your role or reason for presenting online, this virtual session will help you get ready to create and execute an effective online presentation (live or prerecorded) by exploring the details of three phrases: Planning purposefully, setting up the presentation space, and preparing audio/visual settings. Participants will leave with an easy-reference checklist that can be revisited at any time!

Copyright Essentials for Teaching
(No longer offered)

Clarke Iakovakis

This course will cover what you need to know in order to use materials in your teaching without committing copyright infringement. A wide range of topics will be covered, including e-book and article licensing terms; uploading, linking and embedding content in Canvas; a comparison of laws governing face-to-face and virtual teaching; streaming videos; and conducting fair use assessments.