Doctoral candidate Siyao Cheng was awarded a 2026 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies. Cheng is one of six recipients of the fellowship, awarded annually to doctoral students actively working on their dissertations in library and information science, information studies, informatics, or a related field. The amount awarded for each fellowship is $3,000.
Siyao successfully defended her dissertation proposal, "Reconsidering Copyright Education: Learner-Centric Pedagogies for Improving U.S. Undergraduate Copyright Literacy," in August 2025 and plans to defend her dissertation by August 2027. Her dissertation committee includes Associate Professor Melissa G. Ocepek (chair and research director), Professor Michael Twidale, Affiliate Associate Professor Sara Benson, and Tomas A. Lipinski, adjunct lecturer at the iSchool and professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Cheng’s dissertation abstract reads as follows:
Copyright is an everyday legal framework embedded in undergraduate students’ personal, academic, and professional lives; their copyright literacy is pivotal to ethically and legally interacting with copyrighted materials they routinely encounter. If undergraduates receive any formal copyright education, it is often delivered by academic librarians. However, research indicates that many librarians lack comprehensive training, and therefore confidence, to meet these students’ needs. This dissertation proposes to improve this situation by offering practical, ready-to-use lesson plans that help academic librarians build confidence and be poised to teach this important topic, both to themselves and all undergraduate students. To achieve this aim, the project conducts the following stages of research: syllabus analysis, lesson plan design, and a three-phase experimental study. The long-term goal of the lesson plans developed through these research stages is for undergraduates to acquire a competent level of copyright literacy, enabling them to make informed decisions when navigating copyright issues in college and beyond.