Allegra Swift is the UC San Diego Library’s Scholarly Communications Librarian. She spends her days infusing research and scholarship support with critlib, digital citizenship, and digital literacy ideals.
Learn about open access publishing opportunities through the UC’s transformative agreements (open to UC authors) and other avenues open to all authors.
The UC San Diego University Librarian, Erik Mitchell, will give an update on the UC Transformative Agreements and where we are in the process of increasing sustainable journal subscription access and OA publishing discounts or full-coverage for UC authors.
Allegra Swift, UC San Diego Scholarly Communication Librarian, will discuss OA publishing avenues for authors whose chosen publishing venue or format is not covered by the UC agreements.
In partnership with the Library and UCSD CALPIRG Affordable Textbooks Campaign, theUC San Diego Rady School of Managementwill host a webinar next Friday, June 4th at 11 AMPST titled, Adapt Your Course Materials and Save Students Money. While business-flavored, the content is cross-disciplinary as we’ll learn about UCSD student body textbook costs and access concerns, introduce quality open-access material tailored to the varying fields of business & management, and offer options for publishing your own materials.
We hope this webinar will serve as a starting point for establishing affordable and equitable course materials across your departments and campuses. We look forward to seeing you next Friday for this impactful learning opportunity! Zoom registration Link
This past year, in an effort to lower course material costs for our students, members of our faculty implemented various resources available to them to offer their materials… I thank those who have adapted … and helped students by lowering their out-of-pocket costs. However, in order to advance in this collective effort, I believe we need the involvement of campus partners.
Estefania Perez UC San diego rady school of management Undergraduate Education Program Assistant
These virtual events are open to all and hosted by the UC San Diego Library and the UCSD PIRG Students.
UC SAN DIEGO STUDENT OPEN EDUCATION INITIATIVES & CALIFORNIA’S HIGHER EDUCATION COLLABORATIVE OER EFFORTS
March 3, 2021 on Zoom at 11:30 pm – 12:30 pm PST
Recording, slides, and resources can be found here: White, S., Jhaveri, A., Swift, A., Calia, C. N., Pilati, M., & Dillon, D. (2021, March 30). 2021 OE Week UC San Diego Student Open Education Initiatives & California’s Higher Education Collaborative OER Efforts. Retrieved from osf.io/vjnq4
Textbook and course material affordability has been an obstacle to students’ success even before the pandemic but even more crucial to address as students have been experiencing increased financial instability. UC San Diego student groups and local community college faculty are leading initiatives to address these inequities and set the system right.
Sky-lauryn White and Aanvi Jhaveri, student representatives for the UCSD CALPIRG, and Cianna Calia, Chair of the UCSD Students for Open Access, will discuss their initiatives, a UC Open Textbook Grant Program through the UC Regents that would incentivize faculty to use open textbooks and a course-marking initiative. The PIRG students will disclose the results of their faculty survey and debut their student testimonial video. These innovative and dedicated students are partnering with faculty, the Library, and the campus bookstore to bring equity and access to all.
Michelle Pilati, Psychology Professor at Rio Hondo College and Faculty Coordinator for the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) OERI, is a former statewide academic senate president for the California Community Colleges, will discuss the interrelatedness of OE and the California public school systems, UC system Chancellor’s Offices, and CA legislators.
Dave Dillon, Distance Education Coordinator, Counseling faculty, Professor, #oer textbook author at Grossmont College (UC Santa Cruz alum) will discuss how Z-courses have positively impacted students, many of whom transfer to UC San Diego.
UC FACULTY AUTHORS OF OPEN ACCESS EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES: TAKING ACTION FOR A MORE EQUITABLE AND AFFORDABLE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
March 8, 2021 on zoom at 4:00 pm -5:30 pm PST
Recordings, slides, and resources can be found here: Swift, A., Jhaveri, A., White, S., Forman, F., Glusko, R. J., & Styler, W. (2021, March 30). 2021 OE Week: UC Faculty Authors of Open Access Educational Resources: Taking Action for a More Equitable and Affordable Student Experience. Retrieved from osf.io/fhecy
Faculty concerned about high-priced educational materials that do not meet their curricular needs have taken to creating open access educational resources to reduce cost for their students, to have more control over the content they assign in class, and to provide accessible resources to learners and institutions around the world. Learn from faculty who use and create open educational resources, what support they have in the process, and about the impact on their pedagogical practices and their students’ academic and personal well-being.
We’re asking UC San Diego open educational resources authors share:
Your motivations for publishing educational materials in open access
The process you undertook, why you chose the publishing platform you did
And any impact on students, other instructors, and/or the community
Faculty concerned about high-priced educational materials that do not meet their curricular needs have taken to creating open access educational resources to reduce cost for their students, to have more control over the content they assign in class, and to provide accessible resources to learners and institutions around the world. Learn from faculty who use and create open educational resources, what support they have in the process, and about the impact on their pedagogical practices and their students’ academic and personal well-being.
Panelists:
Will Styler (Linguistics, UC San Diego)
Fonna Forman (Political Science and Founding Director of the Center on Global Justice, UC San Diego)
Bob Glushko (Cognitive Science Program, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego alum)
Sarah Schneewind (History, UC San Diego) (pre-recorded interview)
Geisel Library under construction (an2_a1096_250_18), Robert Glasheen Photograph Collection. MSS 154. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb8874924d
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, an #openaccess no-APC peer-reviewed journal, is has made a call for submissions (by May 15, 2021) for their “Pandemic Collection.” This new journal, @NewChaucer_PP offers brief essays on teaching, service, and institutional cultures for teachers and scholars of Chaucer and his age. The journal is published on the University of California’s eScholarship #OA repository and publishing platform with a founding editor from the #UCSD Literature Department, Lisa R. Lampert-Weissig.
The first issue launched in December of 2020 and for most of us, it is one of the most positive things to come out of the-year-that-can-not-end-soon-enough!
For our Fall 2021 issue, we are planning a special cluster on the ongoing pandemic and the effects it has had on all of us. Inspired by other projects that assemble responses to the current COVID-19 pandemic (see here, here, here, and here), we have wondered, How will we in the community of medievalists remember the impact of this global crisis? How have we reacted and responded as teachers? As scholars? In order to create a collective assembly of voices and experiences, we seek short contributions (ca. 1000-1500w) that consider the writers’ pandemic experiences in the education and scholarly contexts where they work, learn and create. Contributions will appear in the Fall 2021 issue of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession and in the NCS: Pedagogy and Profession Newsletter.
Contributions to the NCS: Pedagogy and Profession Newsletter are considered via a rolling acceptance process. Please submit your contribution as an attachment to ncs.pedagogyandprofession@gmail.com.
Schneewind, S. “An Outline History of East Asia to 1200” (2020). Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767
Interview: Allegra swift
Interview transcript: Anna Gabrielle F. Isorena
Interview recording editing and textbook final formatting: Haneen Mohamed
A demon from The Chʼu SilkManuscript:TranslationandCommentary(Canberra: Department of Far Eastern History,Australian National University, 1973).
Professor Sarah Schneewind approached the library in the spring of 2019 seeking options for self-publishing a textbook for the UC San Diego undergraduate course HILD 10 East Asia: The Great Tradition: Early History and Cultures of China, Korea, and Japan. She felt that the textbook she had been using was not meeting her needs and students were upset about the high cost of the book. As the Scholarly Communication Librarian focused on supporting the dissemination and sustainability of the scholarship and research produced at UC San Diego, I was excited to be able to work with Sarah to find the best publishing solution to both meet her needs and produce a textbook that could be used by others, without cost or barriers to access. I met with Sarah and consulted with the Digital Scholarship Librarian, Erin Glass, and the subject specialist librarian, Xi Chen. We looked at options such as Lever Press/Manifold, GitBooks, Scalar, Pressbooks, and, eScholarship, the UC’s open access repository and publishing platform.
Ultimately, eScholarship won out. The platform presents a low-barrier to entry as far as technicality and cost. The only restriction to uploading a publication to eScholarship is that authors need to be employed by the UC. Journals published on the platform are an exception – there must be some connection to a UC campus, while authors submitting manuscripts can be from outside the UC. While it is simple to post a pdf, some textbooks produced on eScholarship, such as the climate science OA textbook – Bending the Curve, have a high production value and an entire team to produce the work. Sarah was creating this resource herself without technical support and her only criteria being complete creative control, no book publishing charge (BPC), and provided at no cost to her students.
The work was not without cost to produce however, and this is an important consideration if libraries are going to support the production of open educational resources (OER). Sarah successfully petitioned for course release to work on the book but it only covered a portion needed. She was able to pay a graduate student to work with me on locating images that were Creative Commons licensed or in the public domain. I also helped the student with template requests for getting permission from rights holders. I was able to employ an undergraduate to format the final pdf. I spent a lot of time giving guidance on discoverability and rights best practices. Sarah good-naturedly called my methods “bullying,” but I would describe myself as persistent 😉 . At any rate we’d agree that the effort was successful. As of this posting, the metrics are pretty impressive for only being online a couple of months. As Sarah said in the interview that I recorded (interview recording and transcript).
“Of course, my colleagues, just like me, have students who have no money, so they’re very happy to have an open access textbook that they can use. On my eScholarship statistics, I had 2,111 views or something on this textbook in the last month since you posted it. Again, I’m never going to attain that on anything that I write just based on my own actual research. I would say, overall, the response numerically has been very good.”
The theme of 2020 OA Week is “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.” Events held around the world during the week of October 19-25 will most likely be virtual and some even open to all – which is exactly how the UC San Diego Library will produce our offerings, online and open access! While we can not meet on campus in-person, we can take the opportunity to collaborate and share across campuses.
Join us for our virtual events described below, follow #OAWeek on Twitter to see the great things happening all over the world, and follow us on Twitter @UCSDScholCom where we’ll post recorded interviews of scholars (faculty, PhD and undergraduate students) talk about OER creation, publishing #openaccess, and the student experience in sharing OA scholarship.
“Predatory” Publishing: Addressing Bias and Avoiding Pitfalls
An open access virtual workshop for researchers given by librarians from University of California at San Diego, Temple University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at San Francisco. See this page for a longer event description.Please see this page for recordings, slides, and resources.
October 22, 2020 from noon to 1:00 pm PST
Building Structural Equity and Inclusion: Open Educational Resources and Affordable Course Materials
An open access virtual workshop for instructors given by UC San Diego Librarians; Allegra Swift, Laura Schwartz, and Dominique Turnbow. See this page for a longer event description. Please see this page for the slides and resources from the presentation.
Openness can be a powerful tool for building more equitable systems of sharing knowledge. Rebuilding research and scholarship to be open by default presents a unique opportunity to construct a foundation that is fundamentally more equitable. Yet today, structural racism, discrimination, and exclusion are present and persistent in places where openness is a core value. As a global community, it is important to understand that the systems and spaces of the present are often built upon legacies of historic injustice and that addressing these inequities is a necessity.
We need to examine who these spaces and systems are designed for, who is missing, who is excluded by the business models we use, and whose interests are prioritized. As we work together to rebuild these structures, we need to commit to moving from conversations to concrete commitments and to hold one another accountable for making real progress.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion must be consistently prioritized year-round and integrated into the fabric of the open community, from how our infrastructure is built to how we organize community discussions to the governance structures we use. International Open Access Week is an important opportunity to catalyze new conversations, create connections across and between communities that can facilitate this co-design, and advance progress to build more equitable foundations for opening knowledge—discussions and actions that need to be continued, year in and year out.
An open access virtual workshop for instructors given by Librarians from University of California at San Diego (UC San Diego, Temple University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of California at San Francisco.
“Mind the Gap,” CC BY (2.0) Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom
“Predatory” publishing, especially in the health sciences, is an ongoing concern and it is essential for researchers to be able to recognize deceptive publishing practices. It is important, though, not to oversimplify what constitutes predatory practices. While using tools like “blocked” or “approved” lists helps researchers avoid predatory publishers, these lists can reinforce power dynamics that exclude marginalized, non-western viewpoints. Come to this session to learn how to balance publishing in high quality open access journals while staying aware of the biases in scholarly publishing. This event is geared towards researchers but is open to all.
Learning Objectives:
Following this session, participants will be able to:
1. Identify the characteristics of deceptive publishing practices in order to avoid their tactics.
2. Understand the inherent and hidden biases in the publication industry in order to challenge their own assumptions.
3. Differentiate the limitations of simplistic lists of deceptive journals and publishers.
4. Assess publishing venues using reliable criteria and resources while avoiding bias.
Harrison W. Inefuku. “Globalization, Open Access, and the democratization of knowledge.” Educause Review (July 2016). [open access]
Harrison W. Inefuku and Charlotte Roh. “Agents of diversity and social justice: Librarians and scholarly communication.” In Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Policy and Infrastructure, edited by Kevin L. Smith and Katherine A. Dickson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). [open access]
