Learn about: Open Media

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Open media is open access, public domain, or licensed-for-reuse video, images, sound, or multimedia. Like other open access content, open media is available for all scholars, students, and the public to incorporate into study, teaching, research, scholarship, creative work, projects, and other uses. In an environment of multimodal digital scholarship and open access values, open media is an increasingly important part of the open access landscape.

Many museums, archives, respositories, and other cultural institutions make the materials in their collections available online without restrictions on reuse. Individuals also contribute to the availability of open media by sharing their work online with a Creative Commons license or public domain designation. Consider publishing and sharing your own media productions with a CC or public domain designation so other scholars and the public know how they can use and build on your work.

Our Open Media Resources guide can help you find open media, and connect you to important open media resources such as openGLAM and the Open Culture blog. Let us know if you have questions or need more information!

Faculty and Open Access

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How can faculty be involved in supporting and promoting Open Access efforts? Here are a few suggestions, adapted from SPARC and International Open Access Week:

  • Submit your research articles to OA journals as appropriate to your field.
  • Deposit your preprints in an OA archive, such as UW’S institutional repository ResearchWorks (learn more about ResearchWorks here).
  • If allowed by the Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA) you signed with your publisher, deposit your postprints in an OA archive like ResearchWorks. If you’re not sure what your CTA allows or have not yet signed a CTA, check out our posts on understanding your author rights, part one and part two.
  • Deposit your data files in an OA archive along with the articles built on them (learn more about data management via our earlier post). Whenever possible, link to the data files from the articles, and vice versa.
  • Explore using Open Educational Resources (OER) in lieu of expensive textbooks in the courses you teach (learn more about OER via our previous post).
  • When asked to referee a paper or serve on the editorial board for an OA journal, consider accepting the invitation.
  • If you are an editor of a toll-access journal, start an in-house discussion about converting to OA, experimenting with OA, and letting authors retain copyright.
  • Volunteer to serve on your university’s committee to evaluate faculty for promotion and tenure. Make sure the committee is using criteria that, at the very least, does not penalize faculty for publishing in peer-reviewed OA journal, and at best, gives faculty an incentive to provide OA to their peer-reviewed research articles and preprints, either through OA journals or OA archives.
  • Work with your professional societies to make sure they understand OA. Persuade the organization to make its own journals OA, endorse OA for other journals in the field, and support OA eprint archiving by all scholars in the field.
  • And last, but certainly not least, educate the next generation of scientists and scholars about OA, and support their efforts to engage with scholarship in this environment (such as participating in UWB’s Open Access research journal, Interdisciplinarities).

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Learn about: Open Educational Resources

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Open Access extends into the classroom via Open Educational Resources. Open Educational Resources (OER) are “teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OER can be full courses, course materials, lesson plans, open textbooks, learning objects, videos, games, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge.”

Interest in OER has grown, both locally and nationally, as traditional textbook prices continue to increase. Recently, the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges published an extensive report on OER usage in WA’s community college system, the White House announced plans to support OER initiatives, and the Affordable College Textbook Act was reintroduced in both houses of Congress.  One of our very own student employees also recently wrote a blog post extolling the virtues of OER as a means of supplemental instruction.

For more information and resources related to OER, check out the Campus Library’s Open Educational Resources guide. If you have any other questions, please contact us.

Learn about: Open Data

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An important facet of the Open Access effort is the emerging movement around Open Data. Open Data is “research data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone—subject at most to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.” For scholars and researchers seeking public or private funding, such agencies increasingly require grant proposals to include data management plans and/or to prioritize public access.

To help you manage this rapidly changing landscape, the UW Libraries created a Data Management guide with a variety of relevant resources and information about producing and disseminating research data. If you are looking for sources of Open Data, federal, state, county, and city repositories are available. Additional resources are listed on our Data Resources guide

You can learn more about Open Data from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and via the Open Data Handbook. If you have any other questions, please contact us.

Celebrate Open Access Week with the Campus Library

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2015 International Open Access Week runs from today through October 25, and to celebrate, we’ll be posting new content throughout the week. Stay tuned!

Check out our previous entries for a refresher on OA and information about UW’s OA resources and recent faculty actions:

 

Coming soon! The new UWB open access journal – Interdisciplinarities

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Our new UWB research journal, Interdisciplinarities, is an ongoing, collaborative process that seeks to highlight the superior research conducted by UWB students, and to provide space for comparing, analyzing, and generally thinking about the ways research and knowledge production intersect.  Our mission is to publish research on a broad range of topics spanning all disciplines, levels of analysis, and national contexts.  With collaboration from the Writing and Communication Center, the Journal offers an opportunity for students (both authors and members of the editorial board) to hone their writing skills and emerge and more effective writers.

The first issue is expected out in Spring 2016.  The call for submissions will be issued in Winter.   More on this to come!