Purpose – Multiple disciplines such as finance, management and economics have contributed to governance research over time. However, the full intellectual structure of the governance “field” including the exchange of knowledge across disciplines and the large variety of governance topics remains to be uncovered. To appreciate the breadth of corporate governance research, it is necessary to understand the disciplinary sources from which the research stems. This manuscript focuses on the interdisciplinary underpinnings of corporate governance research.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs bibliometric analysis to trace the evolution of corporate governance using articles included in the ISI Web of Science database between 1990 and 2015. Journals included in these categories encompass a full range of business disciplines and provide evidence of the multi-disciplinary nature of corporate governance. It also uncovers the topics treated by disciplines under the governance umbrella using a machine learning method called latent Dirichtlet allocation (LDA).

Findings – Corporate governance research deals with a number of strategy-related topics. Unlike strategy topics that reside in a single discipline, corporate governance crosses disciplinary boundaries and includes contributions from accounting, finance, economics, law and management. Our analysis shows that over 80% of corporate governance articles come from outside the field of management. Our LDA solution indicates that the major topics in governance research include corporate governance theory, control of family firms, executive compensation and audit committees.

Originality/value – The results illustrate that corporate governance is far more interdisciplinary than previously thought. This is an important insight for corporate governance academics and may lead to collaborative research. More importantly, this research illustrates the usefulness of LDA for investigating interdisciplinary fields. This method is easily transferable to other interdisciplinary fields and it provides a powerful alternative to existing bibliometric methods. We suggest a number of topic areas within library and information science where this method may be applied, including collection development, support for interdisciplinary faculty and basic research into emerging interdisciplinary areas.

Open Access and Open Education both stress the importance of making knowledge available for individuals around the world, regardless of wealth or status. These are not wholly separate ideas, nor are they incompatible practices.

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The Iowa State University Library is active in national and international efforts to transform scholarly communications and, in the process, to advance our own land-grant mission to share the knowledge Iowa State creates with Iowa and the rest of the world. Our library is recognized for its work around transformative open access agreements that enable our researchers’ articles to be published openly. We have invested heavily in green open access as well as in staffing and infrastructure to support the sharing of research data. And we work closely with our campus partners to ensure Iowa State faculty have access to the tools and support services they need to produce and disseminate research of the highest quality and with the highest impact...

Open Access and Open Education both stress the importance of making knowledge available for individuals around the world, regardless of wealth or status.

To better understand the library’s role in student success, this research used student survey data to explore students’ reported library building use, library resource use, library instruction, as well as student perceptions of the library’s role in their success, and how these factors may vary by academic discipline. Cumulative GPAs were also matched with respondents. Quantifying the relationship between library usage and student success is one of the six areas recommended for further research by ACRL. This study focuses on the variation and the uncertainty of the measurement of this relationship across disciplines, using Bayesian multilevel regression methods. Levels of library resource usage and percentages of respondents believing the library contributes very much to the respondents’ academic success vary quite a bit by discipline. In this study, cumulative GPA is higher on average for students who use library resources more frequently, but not for students who receive library instruction. Although, for undergraduates, higher frequency of building usage predicted higher probability of believing the library contributes very much to academic success, it did not predict higher GPA.

Understanding faculty perceptions about OER is a vital step for those hoping to support the growth of OER initiatives at higher education institutions. Faculty members’ perceptions of OER often influence their interest in adopting open educational practices and their willingness to seek out support from campus staff. To explore how faculty members across their four institutions feel about open education, the authors developed a survey to discover faculty members’ (1) perspectives on, (2) barriers to, and (3) beliefs about OER use. The survey corroborated past research findings that faculty often have difficulty finding time to locate and evaluate OER, and that there is a need among the academic community to better compensate educators for their work developing open content. More notably, the authors discovered that the faculty who are aware of library support services and other institutional OER initiatives are more engaged in open educational practices and willing to explore OER, regardless of their prior experience with open education.

A primary motivation for using Open Educational Resources (OERs) is to increase access by reducing students’ financial burden. While this was a motivating factor in this study, the authors also were interested in understanding OER’s impact on student learning. Therefore, this study describes the adaption process for an OER textbook used in a junior-level undergraduate electricity course and evaluates this OER’s effectiveness to increase student access and improve learning over the baseline textbook. A quasi-experimental, non-equivalent design collected exam scores, and self-reported survey responses from n=144 students in a comparison (non-adapted OER; n=83) and treatment (adapted OER; n=61) group was used. Based on Student’s t, Kolmogorov Smirnov, and Chi-square (χ2) tests, the adapted OER was effective at improving access and learning while also saving enrolled students an average of $8,000 per year, collectively. A brief background of OER databases, materials, and methods used to develop the OER and the intellectual contribution of the newly adapted OER, and lessons learned are included in the study.