Items tagged by aanewman in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)

Open Scholar Stars interview series: Interview with Dr. James L. Smith

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 03:40:00 -0400

Real Open Science happens in translation. In the continuous exploration of how the core values of Open Science – such as innovation, transparency, accountability, equity and social-cognitive justice in knowledge production – make sense in our own scholarly practices and in the variety of contexts our work is embedded into. Only by listening to and understanding truly diverse voices can we gain a deeper understanding of the various issues surrounding Open Science in the arts and humanities. By launching the DARIAH Open Scholar Stars interview series, we wish to share a range of perspectives and personal experiences of researchers, librarians, and other practitioners with openness to explore these pathways to the open research culture, to strengthen our communities of practice and to learn how to put things into practice more easily. In the first episode, we talk to Dr. James L. Smith, Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow in geography at Trinity College Dublin, editor and Open Access advocate about the many ways in which creativity and openness fuels his scholarship.

A Guest Post from CCC - Top 5 Resources on Transformative Agreements

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 03:36:00 -0400

Transformative Agreements are a popular topic of conversation these days – but do you ever feel like you need a quick refresher course on the topic? Read, watch, or listen to the items below for a deeper practical understanding of Transformative Agreements, fast.

Springer nature agrees new transformative deal with Norway

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 06:47:00 -0400

Springer Nature and the Unit consortium in Norway have agreed in principle a transformative read and publish deal for 2020- 2022. This will allow researchers in Norway to read articles in journals on SpringerLink and Norwegian authors to publish Open Access (OA) in all of Springer Nature’s Open Choice portfolio of hybrid journals, meaning all primary research articles with corresponding authors from Norway will be open and immediately available from the point of publication. In addition, an agreement has been reached to ensure all Unit members are able to continue to access research published in Springer journals throughout 2019.

Universities and funders share cost of open access publishing in new agreement

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 06:46:00 -0400

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and research funding organisations should share the costs of scholarly publishing. This is one of the National Library of Sweden’s recommendations in aiming towards a system of immediate access to scholarly publishing. In a new pilot agreement, it becomes reality. The Swedish Research Council, Formas, Forte and Vinnova fund 50 percent of the cost of publishing in Springer Nature’s fully open access journals. This is the first agreement of its kind that the publisher Springer Nature signs with a library consortium. Through the agreement, the publisher will receive an advance payment for articles accepted for publishing in Springer Nature’s fully open access journals.

Springer Nature Signs First “Pure OA” Deal

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 06:43:00 -0400

Springer Nature announced two new agreements with the Bibsam consortium in Sweden and Norway's Unit consortium. It signed a deal with Bibsam to allow Swedish researchers affiliated with institutions in the consortium to publish in over 570 of Springer Nature's open access journals without having to directly pay APC costs. Bibsam also renewed its read and publish agreement with Springer. Springer and Norway signed a read and publish deal that will allow Norwegian researchers to publish open access in over 2000 journals.

Open access and Plan S: what do key stakeholders think?

Fri, 03 May 2019 11:04:00 -0400

The International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP)’s first white paper, ‘A multistakeholder discussion on open access and medical publishing’, was announced at the 15thAnnual Meeting of ISMPP. As described in a recent article for the MAP newsletter, the white paper examines the evolution of open access (OA) publishing and its implications for publishers, funders, industry, learned societies, academic authors and patients.

University of Missouri System forms task force to review journal subscriptions, open access publishing | Leadership News | University of Missouri System

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 06:33:00 -0400

University of Missouri System President Mun Choi today announced the formation of the Open Access Publishing Task Force, calling for members of the task force to examine the rising costs of journal subscriptions and review the many open access opportunities available.

Researching Rumors About Open Access Dissertations

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 10:27:00 -0400

We thank Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for contributing the following guest post, which provides some background on their recent book chapter “Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual.” For years, we have encouraged researchers at our institution, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, to consider the benefits—for others, themselves, and their fields of study—of making their scholarship available open access. In doing so, we have found allies, some already committed to open access and some newly swayed by our arguments.

Alternative Access to Elsevier Articles

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 09:31:00 -0500

"UC has announced that it will not be signing a new contract with Elsevier at this time. Elsevier is expected to begin limiting UC’s access to new articles through its online platform, ScienceDirect, possibly very soon. This will mean some changes to how UC scholars access certain Elsevier journal articles."

In push for open access, UC breaks ties with publishing giant Elsevier

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 02:49:00 -0500

"The University of California system took a bold stand today in its push for publicly-funded UC research to be accessible to the world, free of charge. It chose not to renew its nearly $11 million-a-year scholarly journal subscription to publishing industry giant Elsevier, producer of more than 1,500 scientific journals."

Celebrating the public domain in 2019

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 11:10:00 -0500

"2019 is a special year for the public domain, the out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. Normally, each year on the 1st of January a selection of works (books, films, artworks, musical scores and more) enter the public domain because their copyright expires – which is most commonly 70 years after the creator’s death depending on where in the world you are. This year, for the first time in more than twenty years, new material entered the public domain in the US, namely all works that were published in the year 1923."

Is it possible to decolonize the Commons? An interview with Jane Anderson of Local Contexts

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 11:08:00 -0500

Traditional Knowledge Labels

Joining us at the Creative Commons Global Summit in 2018, NYU professor and legal scholar Jane Anderson presented the collaborative project “Local Contexts,” “an initiative to support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, Inuit, Metis and Indigenous communities in the management of their intellectual property and cultural heritage specifically within the digital environment.” The wide-ranging panel touched on the need for practical strategies for Indigenous communities to reclaim their rights and assert sovereignty over their own intellectual property.

Anderson’s work on Local Contexts is a collaboration with Kim Christen, creator of the Mukurtu content management system and Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University. Local Contexts is both a legal and educational project that engages with the specific challenges and difficulties that copyright poses for Indigenous peoples seeking to access, use and control the circulation of cultural heritage. Inspired by the intervention of Creative Commons licenses at the level of metadata, the Traditional Knowledge Labels recast intellectual property as culturally determinant and dependent upon cultural consent to use of materials.

How can we have an open movement that works for everyone, not only the most powerful? How have power structures historically worked against Indigenous communities, and how can the Creative Commons community work to change this historic inequality?

Jane Anderson discussed these issues as well as some of her more recent work with the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Maine with Creative Commons.

Your project recasts the Creative Commons vision of “universal access to research and education and full participation in culture” through a local and culturally determinant lens. How is the vision of Local Contexts complementary to the CC vision, and how does it come into conflict? The Local Contexts initiative began in 2010 when Kim Christen and I started to think more carefully about how to support Indigenous communities to address the immense and growing problems being experienced with copyright around Indigenous or traditional knowledge. We had both been working with Indigenous peoples, communities and organizations over a long period of time and had increasingly been engaged in a very specific way with the dilemmas of copyright that existed at the intersection of Indigenous collections in archives, libraries and museums. We were able to see more clearly the ways in which copyright has functioned as a key tool for dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their rights as holders, custodians, authorities and owners of their knowledge and culture.

Combining both legal and educational components, Local Contexts has two objectives. Firstly, to support Indigenous decision-making and governance frameworks for determining ownership, access to and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical and contemporary collections of Indigenous material and digital culture. Secondly, to trouble existing classificatory, curatorial and display paradigms for museums, libraries and archives that hold extensive Indigenous collections by finding new pathways for Indigenous names, perspectives, rules of circulation and the sharing culture to be included and expressed within public records.

Inspired by Creative Commons, we began trying to address the gap for Indigenous communities and copyright law by thinking about licenses as an option to support Indigenous communities.

Our initial impulse was to craft several new licenses in ways that incorporated local community protocols around the sharing of knowledge. Pretty quickly however we ran into a significant problem: with the majority of photographs, sound recordings, films, manuscripts, language materials that had been amassed and collected about Indigenous peoples, and that were now being digitized, Indigenous peoples were not the copyright holders. Instead, copyright was held by the researchers, missionaries or government officials who had done the documenting or by the institutions where these materials were now held. Or – at the other end of the spectrum, these materials were in the unique space that copyright makes – the public domain. This meant that not only did Indigenous peoples have no control over these materials and their circulatory futures, they also could not apply any licenses – either CC ones or ones that we were developing. This was a problem that we responded to by developing the TK Labels.

Why is it important to problematize the ways in which universal access can undermine cultural participation, particularly for traditionally marginalized groups? Local Contexts is an effort to initiate questions about how ideas of the universal operate by pointing to sites of difference and locality, especially in how knowledge is shared, circulated and expanded. The vision of Local Contexts emphasizes specificity – that the circulation of knowledge and culture depends upon relationships and context – and if these relationships are formed unevenly, or privilege one cultural perspective above another, then that inequity continues to create a range of future problems.

One of the motivations behind Local Contexts, and this is an interesting question for Creative Commons to consider as well is: what would it look like if we invested time and support to Indigenous communities who have been disproportionately affected by colonial property laws – including copyright. How does access and openness perpetuate a colonial agenda of taking? And what can be done to change this direction? Where does the Creative Commons community come in to help think through these issues in conversation with Indigenous peoples and through Indigenous experiences? Is it possible to decolonize the commons? What would it look like to imagine a commons that is not totally open, but one that has an informed and engaged approach to openness; one that foregrounds the histories and exclusions embedded within calls for openness and open access. What would it mean to ask questions about the privilege that openness calls for and embeds?

We believe that Local Contexts is one of many efforts that are needed in order to take on this expansive problem. If you start thinking about what kind of information has been taken (through unethical and inappropriate research practices for instance) from Indigenous peoples, communities, lands and territories – and how this has been done without consent and permission, it is possible to start seeing the extent of the problem. For example, Indigenous names have been used for names of cars (Cherokee); for software (Apache); for varieties of strawberries (Sto:lo). For Indigenous peoples, names are not just words in common, they have embedded temporal and relational meanings including integral connections to place. For Indigenous peoples, names matter and are not open for others to use in ways that minimize and reduce them for commercial gain. How have settler-colonial laws and social frameworks created the conditions where no permissions are required to use Indigenous culture? What is the impetus to use Indigenous culture in these ways? Who benefits from using these exclusionary and extractionist logics?

Reciprocal Curation Workflow

How does information colonialism impact the communities where you work? How are you working to mitigate exploitation of cultural resources? Information colonialism is an everyday problem for all the communities with whom we work and collaborate. It is not only the legacies of past research practices, but how these are continued into the present. There are more researchers working in Indigenous communities now than there were at the height of initial colonial documenting encounters from the 1850s onwards – and the same logics of extraction through research largely continue. This means that many of the same problems that we are trying to address in Local Contexts – namely the making of research derived from Indigenous knowledge and participation often conducted on Indigenous lands as owned by non-Indigenous peoples – continues.

There is an enormous need to support Indigenous communities as they build their own unique IP strategies and provide resources that assist in this project. At Local Contexts we are committed to this work and we provide as many resources as we can towards this end. Importantly we work directly with communities, and the resources we produce and offer come from these partnerships. We continue to develop tools and resources from direct engagement with communities. Partnering with the Penobscot Nation we just received an IMLS grant to run IP training and support workshops for US based tribes over the next two years. These trainings center Indigenous experiences with copyright law and the difficulties communities have negotiating with cultural institutions over incorporating cultural authority into how these Indigenous collections are to be circulated into the future.

The 6 CC licenses are designed to be simple and self-explanatory, but there are 17 Traditional Knowledge labels and four licenses, creating an intentionally local and culturally dependent information ecosystem. As a project both inspired by the Creative Commons licenses and in conversation with them, how do these labels better serve the contexts in which you work? The 17 TK Labels that we have reflect partnerships that have identified these protocols as ones that that matter for communities in the diverse circulation routes for knowledge. What is important about the TK Labels part of the Local Contexts initiative is that they are deliberately not licenses. That is, we are not limited by the cultural (in)capacities of the law. Indigenous protocols around the use of knowledge are nuanced and complex and do not map easily onto current legal frameworks. For instance, some information should never be shared outside a community context, some information is culturally sensitive, some information is gendered, and some has specific familial responsibilities for how it is shared. Some information should only be heard at specific times of the year and still for other information, responsibility for use is shared across multiple communities.

The Labels embrace this epistemological complexity in a different kind of way – and they allow for flexibility as well as community specificity to be incorporated in ways that settler-colonial law cannot accommodate.

For instance, a central pivot of the TK Labels project from CC is that the TK Label icon remains static, but the text that accompanies each Label can be uniquely customized by each community and they maintain the control and the authority over the text. This is the sovereign right that every community has to determine and express their unique cultural protocols. Alongside this, the TK Labels also expand the meaning of certain kinds of legal terms, which have been historically treated as normative – for instance, attribution. With the TK Labels – attribution is usually the first label that a community identifies and adapts for their own purposes. This is because it has been Indigenous names – community, individual, familial that have been left out of the catalogue and the metadata. For example, the Sq’ewlets, a band of Sto:lo in Canada translated attribution as skwix qas te téméxw, which literally means name and place. (See how they use their labels.) For the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Maine, attribution is Elihatsik translated “to fix it properly”. The intention in the Passamaquoddy meaning of attribution is a specific call out for addressing mistakes in an institutional and therefore also in settler cultural memory.

What is one interesting outcome of your recent work? One of our most important recent projects has been working with the Passamaquoddy Tribe to digitally repatriate and correct the cultural authority that the Passamaquoddy people continue to assert over the first Native American ethnographic sound recordings ever made in the US in 1890. When these recordings were made by a young researcher who visited the community for three days, they functioned as a sound experiment allowing for greater documentation of Indigenous peoples languages and cultures. The recordings were never made for the Passamaquoddy community but for researchers in institutions. This is evidenced by the fact that these recordings were not returned to the community until the 1980s – some 90 years after they were made. When this initial return, on cassette tapes, happened in the 1980s, the quality of the sound was poor. For community members thrilled to hear ancestors again after so long it was simultaneously heartbreaking not being able to hear what was being said.

From Passamaquoddy People Website

In 2015, the Library of Congress’ National Audiovisual Conservation Center (NAVCC) included these cylinders in their digital preservation program for American and Native American heritage. At the same time as this preservation work was initiated, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, Local Contexts and Mukurtu CMS joined together for the Ancestral Voices Project funded by the Arcadia Foundation. This project involved working with Passamaquoddy Elders and language speakers to listen, translate and retitle the recordings in English and, for the first time in the historical record in Passamaquoddy; explaining and updating institutional knowledge about the legal and cultural rights in these recordings; adding missing and incomplete information and metadata; fixing mistakes in the Federal Cylinder Project record and implementing three Passamaquoddy TK Labels. These add additional cultural information to the rights field of the digital record – in both the MARC record and in Dublin core – and provide ongoing support for how these recordings will circulate digitally into the future.

Library of Congress record with TK labels

Changing how these recordings are understood in the Library of Congress and in the metadata into the future was only one part of this project. A complimentary part was working with the Passamaquoddy community to create their own digital platform for the cylinders, embedding them and relating them to other Passamaquoddy cultural heritage. The Passamaquoddy site utilizes the Mukurtu CMS platform and allows for differentiated access at a community level and for various other publics. It does not assume that everything created by Passamaquoddy people is for everyone, including non-Passamaquoddy people. It embeds Passamaquoddy cultural protocols as the primary means for managing access according to Passamaquoddy laws. This is then what is also translated into the Library of Congress through the TK Labels.

Working with Passamaquoddy Elders and language speakers to decipher the cylinders and for tribal members to now be singing these songs and teaching them to their children was what the work within this project required. When the Passamaquoddy recordings with community determined metadata and TK Labels were launched at the Library of Congress in May 2018, Dwayne Tomah called on the strength of his ancestors, and sang a song that had not been sung for 128 years. The ongoing strength of Passamaquoddy culture, language and Passamaquoddy survivance was felt by everyone who was in the room that day. The TK Labels were an important piece of this project as they functioned as a tool to support the correcting of a significant mistake in the historical record: namely that the Passamaquoddy people unreservedly retain authority over their culture which had been literally taken and authored by a white researcher from 1890 until 2018. (Read more in the New Yorker.)

What are you working on now? At an international and national level, the TK Labels are an intervention directed at the level of metadata—the same intervention that propelled CC licenses to the reach they have today. Our current work at Local Contexts is threefold. We are finalizing the TK Label Hub. This will allow for a more widespread implementation of the TK Labels. It will be the place where communities can customize their Labels and safely deliver them to the institutions that request them and are committed to implementing them within their own institutional infrastructures and public displays. Our current work with the Abbe Museum in Maine will see the TK Labels integrated into the Past Perfect software as well, allowing for implementation across a wide museum sector. We continue to expand our education work on IP law and Indigenous collections for communities as well as institutions. More generally we believe that any education on copyright must have the history and consequences of excluding Indigenous peoples from this body of law incorporated into how it is taught and understood.

Finally we just developed 2 specific labels for cultural institutions. The Cultural Institution (CI) Labels are specifically for archives, museums, libraries and universities who are engaging in processes of collaboration and trust building with Indigenous and other marginalized communities who have been excluded and written out of the record through colonial processes of documentation and record keeping.

These CI Labels, alongside the TK Labels for communities and our education/training initiatives help close the circle, so that the future circulation of these cultural heritage materials, that have been held outside of communities, can be informed through relationships of care, responsibility and authority that reside within the local contexts where this material continues to have extensive cultural meaning.

Read more about the role that CC licenses play in the dissemination of traditional knowledge from our research fellow Mehtab Khan and listen to Jane Anderson speak about her work with the Passamaquoddy archives on the podcast “Artist in the Archive.”

The post Is it possible to decolonize the Commons? An interview with Jane Anderson of Local Contexts appeared first on Creative Commons.

Open-access policy and data-sharing practice in UK academia

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 11:03:00 -0500

"Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing. Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding. However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice. It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority. It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing. A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies."

#1Lib1Ref: An Easy Gateway to Wikipedia Editing – ACRLog

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 10:38:00 -0500

"If you haven’t heard yet, the latest round of #1Lib1Ref is currently underway. This initiative, running from January 15 to February 5 this round, encourages librarians to add one missing citation to a Wikipedia article. Much has been written before about Wikipedia, its uses in libraries, and how librarians can help to improve Wikipedia. Check out Siân Evans’s post from a few years ago to read a bit more about that."

Setting our Cites on Gender: Toward Development of Inclusive Scholarly

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 11:21:00 -0500

Understanding gendered practices and biases in scholarly communication can help librarians develop the right mix of relevant faculty support to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion on our campuses, while contributing to broader work in strengthening equity in research practices. A number of recent studies explore gender differences and biases in peer-review and citation practices, which are key issues for librarians to consider when providing services in these areas. This work reports on a study to understand gender-specific faculty practices throughout the research and scholarly lifecycle, with particular focus on awareness of and attitudes toward online research profile development, open access, and citation metrics and practices. We completed brief structured interviews with 20 faculty across disciplines and at varied points on the career trajectory, divided evenly by gender identification, in order to understand the following: Are there differences by gender in what scholarly profiles and social media accounts faculty wish to maintain? Which impact measures are prioritized, and how and why are these profiles and measures used? What motivates faculty to participate in open access publishing, or what are the deterrents? Considering the answers to these questions, how do librarians best market and deliver the appropriate services as we struggle for funding and time? Results showed that our male subjects were more active in the areas we explored while several women indicated hesitancy to engage in scholarly online profile building due to personal security and privacy issues based on being female. Female subjects had direct examples of gender biases they or their colleagues had experienced, whereas several male subjects acknowledged biases but were not aware of particular examples in their disciplines. Few subjects of either gender deemed traditional impact measures as an accurate reflection of the importance of their work, and most subjects suggested measures that would be more meaningful and more customized to illustrate real-world value. This study has illustrated the array of faculty needs on our campus as well as the array of mindsets and gendered experiences that we must consider when providing faculty research services; future work exploring gendered practices by discipline and faculty rank will further elucidate these considerations.

A Massive Amount of Iconic Works Will Enter the Public Domain on New Year’s Eve

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 02:49:00 -0500

"When the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, movies, songs, and books created in the United States in 1923—even beloved cartoons such as Felix the Cat—will be eligible for anyone to adapt, repurpose, or distribute as they please. "A 20-year freeze on copyright expirations has prevented a cache of 1923 works from entering the public domain, including Paramount Pictures’ The Ten Commandments, Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim, and novels by Aldous Huxley."

A New Method for Estimating OER Savings

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 11:10:00 -0500

"Earlier this year, SPARC launched a community-wide effort to track $1 billion in worldwide savings through the use of OER, responding to a challenge issued in 2013. At the 2018 Open Education Conference, we announced that the OER movement had successfully reached this important milestone. This is the first of a multi-post series explaining our calculations behind the $1 billion, and what comes next."

Marketing via Email Solicitation by Predatory (and Legitimate) Journals: An Evaluation of Quality, Frequency and Relevance

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 07:54:00 -0500

"Open access (OA) journals have proliferated in recent years. Many journals are highly reputable, delivering on the promise of open access to research as an alternative to traditional, subscriptionbased journals. Yet some OA journals border on, or clearly fall within, the realm of so-called “predatory journals.” Most discussion of such journals has focused on the quality of articles published within them. Considerably less attention has been paid to the marketing practices of predatory journals—primarily their mass e-mailing—and to the impact that this practice may have on recipients’ perception of OA journals as a whole."

Alma users get a new tool to make it easier to deliver Open Access in ILL

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 03:57:00 -0500

"This year, we released DeliverOA to make it easier to find self-archived Open Access versions of articles and deliver them inside ILL workflows in major tools. Today, we’re releasing an update to make it easier to deliver Open Access content for practitioners using Alma, by Ex Libris. Alma is a major tool for document-delivery practitioners around the globe."

Scaling the Mission: The Met Collection API

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 03:18:00 -0500

"Today, The Metropolitan Museum of Art launches a new public API for the collection. Through The Met Collection API, users can connect to a live feed of all Creative Commons Zero (CC0) data and 406,000 images from the The Met collection, all available for use without copyright or restriction. The Met Collection API is another foundational step in our Open Access program, helping make the Museum's collection one of the most accessible, discoverable, and useful on the internet. The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can now connect to the most up-to-date data and images of artworks in The Met collection, representing five thousand years of human history."

Weighing the Costs of Offsetting Agreements

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 03:07:00 -0500

"Along with others from the Big Ten Academic Alliance, I had the pleasure of participating in the Choosing Pathways to Open Access forum hosted by the University of California Libraries in Berkeley last month. The forum was very well orchestrated, and it was valuable to see pluralism in libraries’ approaches to open access. (The UC Libraries’ Pathways to Open Access toolkit also illustrates this.) The forum rightly focused on identifying actions that the participants could take at their own institutions to further the cause of open access, particularly with their collections budgets, and it recognized that these actions will necessarily be tailored to particular university contexts."

The Coming Wave of Affordable Textbooks

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 02:58:00 -0500

"This year at the Charleston conference I had the pleasure to moderate a panel on the library’s role in providing affordable textbooks to students. The panel consisted of Mark Cummings, editor and publisher of Choice/ACRL, Gwen Evans, Executive Director of OhioLINK, and Mark McBride, library senior strategist at SUNY."

Free to Use and Reuse – and Animate! A Parade of Posters

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 04:13:00 -0400

"This month, we’re highlighting selections from the Library’s vast international poster collection on our Free to Use and Reuse page – and an animation contest."

Working together towards an Open Access future: Wiley and Hindawi expand open access publishing collaboration | About Hindawi

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 04:08:00 -0400

"Open Access Week is the perfect time to announce that Wiley and Hindawi have expanded their Open Access publishing collaboration. Today’s announcement adds four new journals to the nine currently in the program."

Let’s go! Explore, transcribe, and tag at crowd.loc.gov

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 04:05:00 -0400

"What yet-unwritten stories lie within the pages of Clara Barton’s diaries, writings of Civil Rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell, or letters written to Abraham Lincoln? With today’s launch of crowd.loc.gov, the Library of Congress is harnessing the power of the public to make these collection items more accessible to everyone. You are invited to join the Library of Congress via crowd.loc.gov to volunteer to transcribe (type) and tag digitized images of text materials from the Library’s collections. People who join us will journey through history first-hand and help the Library while gaining new skills – like learning how to analyze primary sources and read cursive."

Why pay for what’s free? Finding open access and public domain articles

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 04:00:00 -0400

"When you hit a paywall, it’s tempting to give up, look for other articles instead, or take your chances trying to get an illicit copy from sketchy bootleg sites. But there are various ways you can often get a legitimate version of the article you seek without having to pay anything. Here are some avenues you can look into."

Attitudes toward Open Access, Open Peer Review, and Altmetrics among Contributors to Spanish Scholarly Journals

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 12:23:00 -0400

This paper aims for a better understanding of the perspectives of contributors to Spanish academic journals regarding open access, open peer review, and altmetrics. Specifically, it explores how age, gender, years of professional experience, and perception and use of social media influence authors’ opinions of these developments in scholarly publishing. A sample of 295 contributors to Spanish academic journals participated in a survey about the aforementioned topics. They were found to hold a favourable opinion of open access but were more cautious about open peer review and altmetrics. The responses of younger and female scholars indicated more reluctance to accept open peer review practices. A positive attitude toward social networks did not necessarily translate into enthusiasm for emerging trends in scholarly publishing. Despite this, ResearchGate users were more aware of altmetrics.

From Statistics to Humans with a Voice

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 12:13:00 -0400

"Earlier this year I visited Área Reconquista, a poor heavily polluted neighbourhood in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, with a group of people who have an interest in community science. We were planning to co-develop an open project on air quality monitoring with the community. It was an important day, as we were going to tell our motivations and discuss if they were interested in the project."

Open Access: The view from Latin America

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 04:16:00 -0400

A perspective on open access in Latin America, from Emma Clarke, Commissioning Editor for Latin America, at Peter Lang Publishers, including the state of OA in Latin America, what challenges exist, changes needed, and what this year's Open Access Week theme "Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge" means for Latin America.

Cambridge Open Access spend 2013-2018

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 04:11:00 -0400

"Since 2013, the Open Access Team has been helping Cambridge researchers, funded by Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the consortium of biomedical funders which make up the Charity Open Access Fund (COAF), to meet their Open Access obligations. Both RCUK (now part of UKRI) and COAF have Open Access policies which have a preference for ‘gold’, i.e. the published work should be Open Access immediately at the time of publication. Implementing these policies has come at a significant cost." This blog post analyzes how funding is spent, which publishers and journals receive the most funds.

2018 Open Access Week in Japan

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 04:02:00 -0400

"The Japan Consortium for Open Access Repository(JPCOAR) has made a special webpage dedicated to support the Japanese community in designing posters, handouts and other graphics for this year's Open Access Week. Along with the official JPCOAR Open Access Week poster, we also have templates our members can use and edit to include information on their own efforts towards Open Access. We will be adding more photos of Open Access Week giveaways and events hosted by our member libraries throughout the week."

Congratulations to the Graduates of our July 2018 Certificate Courses!

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 04:29:00 -0400

From July 16-September 23, Creative Commons hosted two Educator Certificate courses and two Librarian Certificate Courses. Participants from Bangladesh, Canada, China, Great Britain, Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and the US engaged in rigorous readings, assignments, discussions and quizzes. See examples of the assignments that participants participants’ assignments they’ve publicly shared under CC licenses. With the course now complete, we are thrilled to announce 83 new graduates.

The CC Certificate provides an in-depth study of Creative Commons licenses and open practices, uniquely developing participants’ open licensing proficiency and understanding of the broader context for open advocacy. The training content targets copyright law, CC legal tools, as well as the values and good practices of working in the global, shared commons. The CC Certificate is currently offered as a 10-week online course to educators and academic librarians. In 2019, Creative Commons will expand offerings to include 1-week boot camps, a Certificate instructor training, scholarships, and initial translations of the Certificate into multiple languages.

Interested in taking the CC Certificate, yourself? Visit our Certificate website at the end of this month for updates! We will share new updates and open registration for 2019 courses by 31 October.

Also, stay tuned for an updated list of our Certificate graduates by the end of the year. CC kicked off five new Educator and Librarian courses with 125 participants from 14 countries on 1 October and we look forward to welcoming more Certificate graduates at the end of these courses.

We are inspired by our 83 recent graduates, and filled with gratitude for their amazing work. We congratulate them on successful completion of the Certificate, and look forward to their future open efforts!

The post Congratulations to the Graduates of our July 2018 Certificate Courses! appeared first on Creative Commons.

American Chemical Society (ACS) and Elsevier File Copyright Infringement Lawsuit in U.S. vs. ResearchGate

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 12:22:00 -0400

The American Chemical Society and Elsevier have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland against ResearchGate. The complaint alleges that ResearchGate actively makes scientific articles freely available on its platform in violation of copyright.

International Open Access Week 2018 at the University of East Anglia

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 12:11:00 -0400

The University of East Anglia has organised a programme of events to observe International Open Access Week 2018, incorporating talks, information sessions and hands-on workshops to help researchers make their work open access.

Department of Education awards first-ever OER grant to UC Davis open textbook project

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 03:59:00 -0400

The federal government will award the entire $4.9 million of its first-ever round of OER funding to a STEM-focused open textbook project out of the University of California, Davis, the Department of Education planned to announce Tuesday. The terms of the grant required applicants to submit on behalf of a consortium. Aside from UC Davis, the winning project comprises 11 institutions: three four-year institutions in the Midwest, one community college in Maryland and seven community colleges in California. According to the abstract submitted by the applicant, UC Davis’s project will expand the institution’s existing LibreTexts project “into an expansive living library of content that can be customized to faculty needs.” The team will build over time a library of publications on career and technical topics, with a focus on chemistry textbooks that will add up to a zero-cost textbook option for a bachelor’s degree curriculum certified by the American Chemical Society.

Tips for Successful Student Advocacy for Institutional OA Policies

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 12:00:00 -0400

Two students share their tips for advocating for institutional open access policies as students. Their initial efforts were followed by work by faculty and librarians, leading to the University of Washington passing an open access policy this year.

A Toolkit […?] the Public Domain

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 11:43:00 -0400

"January 1, 2019 is Public Domain Day. This means that all copyrighted works published in the year 1923 will suddenly become available for anyone to publish, distribute, or reuse in their own derivative creations. To seize the moment, our Praxis cohort will spend the next nine months constructing a 'public domain toolkit.' Since the project is still in the conceptual phase when all doors are open and no one knows exactly where it’s headed, now seems like a good time to reflect on what it means to work […?] the public domain."

Guest Post: Why a Society Publisher is Moving Toward Read and Publish Models

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 05:37:00 -0400

"Read & Publish models have been in the spotlight for some time in Europe, and in July they arrived in the US with MIT signing the first such deal with us, the Royal Society of Chemistry. This is significant as it signals the model has appeal to research intensive universities outside of Europe, and global uptake is needed for the model to impact the open access (OA) landscape. Our deal with MIT attracted much attention and comment. Unlike other Read & Publish models, the “Read” component is directly linked to changes in the amount of paywalled content, allowing for a smooth transition toward more OA content in future."

The Plan S conversation continues

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 07:21:00 -0400

"Last week, the 10th Conference of the Open Access Publishing Association was held in Vienna... On the Tuesday afternoon Robert-Jan Smits spoke as part of a panel about Plan S. It was a calm measured discussion where he thanked many people who had worked with them to develop the plan. He noted that things went ‘wild' after releasing the plan, with over 70,000 tweets on the first day. The comments, he said, were mostly positive but there are some negative comments from publishers and some academics – which not surprising because the plan is so robust. He also noted multiple positive comments from developing countries, thanking him 'because they struggle to access research outputs.'"

Big changes for CC Search beta: updates released today!

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 06:20:00 -0400

Today, we’ve released a significant update to our working beta of the CC Search product. We launched the project in February 2017 to provide a new “front door” to the Commons with the ultimate goal to find and index all 1.4 billion+ CC licensed works on the web. Since then, our newly formed tech team – myself, Alden Page, Sophine Clachar, and Steven Bellamy – have been working to move this project toward its next iteration, which I am proud to share today.

More providers, better metadata

This is a work in progress — it has great new features, and also has a few bugs, which we’re working on as we go (you can leave feedback here or file issues at Github). This iteration of CC Search integrates access to more than 10 million images across 13 content providers. The data was obtained by processing 36 months of web crawl data from the Common Crawl corpus (an open repository of web crawl data maintained by the Common Crawl Foundation).

The full list of providers:

Provider	Domain	# CC Licensed Works
Animal Diversity Web	https://animaldiversity.org/	14,839
Behance	https://www.behance.net/	5,245,785
Deviantart	https://www.deviantart.com/	206,506
Digitalt Museum	https://digitaltmuseum.org/	88,970
Encyclopedia of Life	http://eol.org/	547,488
Flickr	https://www.flickr.com/	426,214
Flora-On	http://flora-on.pt/	26,498
Geograph UK	http://www.geograph.org.uk/	1,018,560
IHA Holiday Ads	http://www.iha.com/	2,058,272
McCord Museum	http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/	108,800
The Metropolitan Museum of Art	https://www.metmuseum.org/	96,260
Museums Victoria	https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/	64,719
Science Museum – UK	https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/	14,280

In addition, the new release contains several new features, including AI image tags generated from our collaborator, Clarifai. Clarifai is a best in class image classification software that provides tagging support and visual recognition. Clarifai’s API was integrated in the process-flow as a means to automatically generate tags for the new and existing images. This means that CC search has machine generated tags, user-defined tags, and platform-defined tags that were obtained from the web crawl data. Collectively, these will enhance the user’s search experience and improve the quality of the results. Currently, 10.3 million images have their respective Clarifai tags and the outstanding images will be integrated on an ongoing basis. Thank you to Clarifai for their support.

A New Look

The new design allows users to search by category, see popular images, and search more accurately across a wide range of content.

Users can also now share content and create public lists of images without an account using an anonymous authentication scheme. Shares.cc is a new a link shortening system that makes it easy to share cool stuff you find on our platform to social media – users can share both images and lists, no login required. In addition, the new platform provides the ability to filter by provider, license, creator, tag (including those generated by Clarifai), or title.

(Please note: If you made private lists in the previous system, they will not carry over to this release. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. If there is a list you would like us to recover, please email us at info@creativecommons.org.)

With gratitude

CC Search is made possible by a number of institutional and individual sponsors. Specifically, we would like to thank Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, Mozilla, and the Brin Wojcicki Foundation for their support. With the generous support of our funders, Creative Commons is able to significantly advance its work in pursuit of a more open and sharing world that illuminates the Commons and recognizes the major potential of transformative human knowledge.

Full release notes available here.

The post Big changes for CC Search beta: updates released today! appeared first on Creative Commons.

10 years on and where are we at? COASP 2018

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 05:18:00 -0400

"Last week, the 10th Conference of the Open Access Publishing Association was held in Vienna. Much was covered over the two and a half days. A decade in, this conference considered the state of the open access (OA) movement, discussed different approaches to OA, considered inequity and the infrastructure required to meet this need and argued about language."

An open-source solution for soaring college costs

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 03:49:00 -0400

"Every dollar a student can save matters. That is why Virginia recently passed legislation (HB 454) to mandate that every public institution of higher education in the state create a framework to adopt and use open educational resources and low-cost resources across the state. Open educational resources are free and openly licensed learning materials. The motivation behind the bill was the need to establish a framework that would encourage academic leaders and faculty to adopt such materials in the future."

CLC students save more than $850,000 using free textbooks; college announces Illinois Community College OER Summit

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 03:46:00 -0400

"The College of Lake County was one of 11 schools chosen to participate in the 2017-18 OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program to encourage use of free, peer-reviewed textbooks on campus. CLC began the program with 3,455 students using the free textbooks, known as open educational resources (OER). So far, in the 2018-2019 academic year, CLC has grown the impact to 8,661 students, bringing the total student savings from OER to $853,715 per year."

Online instructors can learn from new openly licensed materials

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 04:03:00 -0400

Creating Online Learning Experiences: A Brief Guide to Online Courses, From Small and Private to Massive and Open (Pressbooks, July 2018) is a new openly licensed publication that helps online instructors build online courses.

Traditional Knowledge and the Commons: The Open Movement, Listening, and Learning

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 08:42:00 -0400

CC licenses and public domain tools help individuals, organisations, and public institutions better disseminate digital resources and data, breaking down the typical barriers associated with traditional “all rights reserved” copyright. At the same time, CC licenses can’t do everything for everyone. First, the licenses operate in the sphere of copyright and similar rights. They do not attempt to license, say, personality rights, trademark, or patent rights. Also, the CC community recognizes that voluntary licensing schemes will never be a comprehensive solution for access to and reuse of knowledge and creativity around the world. This is one reason why CC works on international copyright reform issues, including the protection and expansion of user rights.

Another dimension of openness that could be better understood from the perspective of the “open” community is the sharing of cultural works related to indigenous communities. This has been talked about with terms such as “traditional knowledge”. Traditional knowledge consists of a wide range of skills, cultural works, and practices that have been sustained and developed over generations by indigenous communities around the world. These communities hold entitlement over this knowledge as well as responsibility for the preservation of their knowledge, but haven’t always had the autonomy to decide what can be done with their knowledge. International and national instruments have attempted to codify the value of traditional knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples, but the place of such knowledge within conventional intellectual property structures remains deeply contested and uncertain.

These issues and more were brought up at the 2018 Creative Commons Global Summit as well, and has since started an important conversation within the CC community. I’m an attorney and doctoral candidate at UC-Berkeley Law, and over the summer I worked as a research fellow for Creative Commons to conduct an investigation into the current issues regarding traditional knowledge and its intersection with the open movement. A draft of the paper is complete, and we welcome your thoughts and suggestions to it.

In addition, we’ll be hosting a session on the topic on Thursday, September 27 at 3:00p at the 5th Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.

The tension between traditional knowledge protection and IP frameworks is exacerbated by digital technologies that have made the creation, dissemination, appropriation and remixing of knowledge and cultural artifacts easier than ever before. Indigenous communities’ preservation efforts and control over traditional knowledge sometimes also seem to conflict with the ‘open’ ecosystem, which consists of organizations, communities, and individuals supporting open and free culture, open licensing and access to knowledge. This is because traditional knowledge is often perceived as being part of the public domain by default, when it is not.

There is a colonial history of this perception. The doctrine of discovery, which was used to legitimize and expand colonization, held the assumption that indigenous peoples were “uncivilized,” and hence could not own property like European settlers. Therefore, the land and knowledge of indigenous peoples were seen as part of the commons, open for ‘discovery’ and appropriation. Another oft repeated concern that traditional community representatives have voiced at global venues like WIPO is the misuse and appropriation of their knowledge. Appropriation refers not just to taking something of value to a community, but also reaping economic benefit from it. For these reasons, the public domain may be perceived as detrimental to the interests of indigenous communities. It’s important to recognize this because it affects how these communities might perceive open and free culture movements.

Copyright law in particular is based on a number of assumptions that are sometimes at odds with the protection of indigenous knowledge. For instance, sometimes it can be difficult to identify an author of a cultural work because “ownership” might vest in a community, is sometimes continually being invented, or might be passed from generation to generation. The categories of copyright law may not encompass the kinds of expressions found in traditional knowledge. For example, a dance could be manifested in several ways and may have a sequential unique style over several performances. One sequence might be removed and placed in a western song or performance. Not only would there be no protection for this disparate piece, any social or spiritual meaning that might be attached to that dance would also be lost. Furthermore, some traditions are conveyed and preserved orally, and this might not be ‘fixed’ in a tangible form to receive conventional copyright protection.

This perceived disconnect with copyright law in particular puts Creative Commons in a challenging position with regards to indigenous knowledge. On the one hand, Creative Commons strives to make knowledge and information as widely and freely accessible as possible. It seeks to empower individuals who want to define the terms of access to their works. On the other hand, Creative Commons must grapple with ownership structures of traditional knowledge, its position within copyright law, and the terms of access of different kinds of traditional knowledge online. The CC licenses were never meant to be applied to content that is not meant to be shared broadly — so to the extent such content is not intended to be shared broadly or if open licenses do not adequately meet the needs of these communities for reasons described above, then it makes sense not to expect acceptance or use of open licenses as currently available.

Despite these challenges, digital technologies also represent an opportunity to help resolve some of the tensions between IP structures and traditional knowledge and have been used by indigenous communities. Projects like Mukurtu and Local Contexts help preserve and label traditional works while giving indigenous communities autonomy to set the terms for sharing. Local Contexts also provides guidance to indigenous communities about controlling access and preservation of their knowledge. There are flexibilities within CC licenses that could be used in empowering ways by communities that want to make their works open. The conversation needs to involve more communities, policymakers and scholars and the Creative Commons team is exploring the possibilities of working with other projects and involving indigenous communities more closely to understand the role CC licenses could play in the protection and dissemination of traditional knowledge.

The post Traditional Knowledge and the Commons: The Open Movement, Listening, and Learning appeared first on Creative Commons.

SpotOn London 2018 - Open Research #SpotOn18

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 12:28:00 -0400

"SpotOn London is back and ready to push the boundaries of science communication and policy with its one-day conference taking place at The Francis Crick Institute on Saturday, 3rd November 2018. Open Research – Why do it? How do you do it? And what happens when you share your research with others?"

Lifting Our Voices: Highlighting the Global Contributions of Women in STEM on Wikipedia

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 06:20:00 -0400

"In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has been asking vital research questions about the influence of editor diversity (the vast majority [~85%] of Wikipedia editors are male) on the breadth of content available on the site. ... The lack of diversity in Wikipedia biographies of notable individuals extends to women in STEM. Ongoing lack of representation in the largest, most frequently accessed body of knowledge in the world contributes to the silencing of our voices."

Jupyter Notebooks for Digital Archaeology (and History too!)

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 10:29:00 -0400

"As the fall academic term approaches, and we get closer to version 1.0 of the Open Digital Archaeology Text (ODATE), I thought I would share the plethora of Jupyter Notebooks we’ve put together to support the work. (A video showing the whole ODATE project is over here on youtube). The text of ODATE still has some rough edges and there are parts still coming together. Indeed, it will never be finished as it is my hope that it grows and is forked and becomes the kernel for many many coursepacks and workshops and syllabi; more on that later when we’re closer to pulling back the official curtain."

Wheaton College and panOpen Partner to Deliver Open Educational Resources Campus-wide

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 10:16:00 -0400

"Wheaton College and panOpen, a learning platform that supports institutional use of Open Educational Resources (OER), announced a partnership today to provide Wheaton faculty and students with the tools and support to use OER in the classroom successfully... Wheaton will now have its own OER collections, initially curated by panOpen and faculty elsewhere in its network, and organized by department and discipline. Faculty will have access to a broad range of tools for remixing, editing, and collaborating around OER with colleagues at Wheaton and beyond, and they will have dozens of questions types for the assessments that are embedded in the content. Students will enjoy low cost and perpetual access to all of the content for their OER-based courses, and realize the benefits of a truly interactive and immersive learning experience."

MIT Open Access Task Force releases white paper

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 11:17:00 -0400

"The ad hoc task force on open access to MIT’s research has released “Open Access at MIT and Beyond: A White Paper of the MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT's Research,” which examines efforts to make research and scholarship openly and freely available. The white paper provides a backdrop to the ongoing work of the task force: identifying new, updated, or revised open access policies and practices that might advance the Institute’s mission to share its knowledge with the world."

Viability of Open Access Books Remains Uncertain

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:54:00 -0400

"Two years after Simba Information published its first report on the subject of open access (OA) books, the collective business model remains unproven. The latest edition of Open Access Book Publishing 2018-2022 found that despite multiple years of growth at more than 30% CAGR, total revenue generated from book processing charges (BPC) remains small, well under 0.5% of total book revenue, comparable in size to a single university press book publisher or a single open access journal publisher ... Open Access Book Publishing 2018-2022 provides detailed market information for this segment of scholarly book publishing. It analyzes trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2022. The report includes a review of more than 20 notable OA publishers and programs, including InTechOpen, Bookboon.com, Frontiers Media, SciELO, De Gruyter, Brill, Knowledge Unlatched and Springer Nature."

California Bill Is a Win for Access to Scientific Research

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 23:22:00 -0400

"The California legislature just scored a huge win in the fight for open access to scientific research. Now it’s up to Governor Jerry Brown to sign it. Under A.B. 2192—which passed both houses unanimously—all peer-reviewed, scientific research funded by the state of California would be made available to the public no later than one year after publication. There’s a similar law on the books in California right now, but it only applies to research funded by the Department of Public Health, and it’s set to expire in 2020. A.B. 2192 would extend it indefinitely and expand it to cover research funded by any state agency."

Courseware platform seeks a middle ground between publishers and OER

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 08:42:00 -0400

Top Hat strives to get professors to create their own textbooks and make them available free or for sale on its platform. Should traditional textbook publishers be concerned?