Author Archives: Allegra Swift

About Allegra Swift

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.

2021 Open Education Week Events

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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.

Related Guide: OER for Students

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) 

Related Guide: OER for Faculty

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

Pedagogy and Profession CFP

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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!

The Merchant – Ellesmere Chaucer by AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

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.

For consideration in the Fall 2021 issue of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, please submit your contribution at https://escholarship.org/uc/ncs_pedagogyandprofession by 15 May 2021.

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.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the editors at ncs.pedagogyandprofession@gmail.com.

________________________________________________________

New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

Lisa Lampert-Weissig, University of California-San Diego, @TalesoftheNight

Katie Little, University of Colorado

Eva von Contzen, University of Freiburg, @eva_von_c

Candace Barrington, Central Connecticut State University, @CBarrington

UCSD OER on East Asian History

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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. 

UC scholar publications:

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.”

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d699767#metrics

International OA Week 2020 at UC San Diego and Beyond

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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.

Open Access Week 2020 banner from SPARC

Oct. 20, 2020 from noon – 1:00pm PST

“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. 

SPARC 2020 News August 31, 2020

“Predatory” Publishing: Addressing Bias and Avoiding Pitfalls

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Oct. 20, 2020 from noon – 1:00pm PST

Find slides, recording, transcript here

#oaweek2020 @UCSDScholComm

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.

Related UC San Diego Library research guides:

Resources for choosing and evaluating journal publishing venues : Includes the library’s evaluation tool for making values-based decisions without bias..

Resources for evaluating book publishing venues

Related research and information:

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]

Critical Race & Ethnic Studies 101 (Alamri): Privilege & Bias in Scholarly Publishing – a UC Merced Library course guide.

The Knowledge G.A.P. research and publications

Session recordings from the OA Scholarly Publishing 2020 Conference: Open Access in a time of Global Challenge

Scholarly Communication Institute 2019 projects and teams

[We’ll post slides and recordings in November 2020.]

Building Structural Equity and Inclusion: Open Educational Resources and Affordable Course Materials

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October 22, 2020 from noon to 1:30 pm PST for International Open Access Week 2020, “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.”

An open access virtual workshop for instructors given by UC San Diego Librarians; Allegra Swift, Laura Schwartz, and Dominique Turnbow.

Digital Book by EFF-Graphics / CC BY 3.0 US (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/deed.en)

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.

October 22, 2020 from noon to 1:00 pm PST for International Open Access Week 2020, “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.”

While many of the benefits of using openly licensed materials remain constant, their importance is amplified as students are facing decreased bandwidth and access, and increased financial and emotional obstacles due to the pandemic. We will identify the issues of exclusive practices and discuss opportunities to improve our pedagogy to engage students and contribute to a more positive, holistic, and successful academic experience.

Registration link for this free online session. Join us as we explore strategies for ensuring your students can access and engage with the resources you need to support your instruction.

Benefits of Open Educational Resources (OER):

  • Immediate and sustained access. Students, faculty, and researchers are dispersed across the globe. OER do not require VPN or subscription access. Students will have access at the start of their course and well beyond for future reference.
  • Free to use. OER can be read, adapted, modified, and shared at no cost to the reader. Freedom from financial burdens are especially important and appreciated during this time of economic instability.
  • Adaptability. Many instructors are faced with loss of access, for a variety of reasons, to their teaching materials as we’ve had to rapidly shift to online teaching. Quality educational materials can be adapted to fit your needs if they are openly licensed.This workshop is even more important as we anticipate that we will remain in distance learning mode until at least the fall, and want to do all we can to ensure continuity of access and affordability for our students.

Related guides and research:

UC San Diego Library Guides: OER for Faculty and OER for Students

NAACP Advocacy to Promote Use of Open Education Resources Resolution

Equity & Openness : Perspectives from North American colleges and universities

COVID-19 Reflection: How OER contributes to our equitable education system

Everyday Social Justice: Using simple words to talk about equity and oppression

Registration link

Related UC San Diego Library Guides: 

Related research and information:

We’ll update this post with slides and recording after the event.

Citizen Science Webinar – June 10

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Those of you interested in Citizen Science – register for the webinar on 10 June “Citizen Science At Universities: Trends, Guidelines and Recommendations”. To attend the webinar, please, register here.

ABOUT THE WEBINAR: 

A number of European recommendations – including the League of European Research Universities (LERU)’s advice paper “Citizen Science at Universities: Trends, Guidelines and Recommendations” – highlight the importance of creating a single point of contact for citizen science within the institution.

In this webinar, organised by LIBER`s Citizen Science Working Group, four speakers will share what they are doing to devise just the right solution through a three-fold approach: 

  • Current trends within Citizen Science at universities; 
  • A template for a Citizen Science Single Contact Point which your institution could start developing;
  • A snapshot of the forthcoming Research Librarian’s Guide to Citizen Science and the possible roles research libraries could adopt to move the citizen science activities forward.

Examples of UC San Diego Citizen Science Programs, Initiatives, and Resources

Graphic of Citizen Science Projects by Topic, CCBY 2.0 by Sepulte. Based on 2015 data.

For UC San Diego researchers and citizen scientists interested in collecting, curating, preserving, and communicating the data you produce – contact the UC San Diego Library Scholarly Communications and Research Data Curation Program.

Virtual Workshop for Integrating Open and Affordable Materials into Your Course

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What was going to be an in-person workshop co-sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and the Teaching and Learning Commons on campus June 3, 2020 at 10:00am has now been moved online, like just about everything else. We will be sending out a link to register or contact us for access to the virtual classroom.

This workshop is even more important as we anticipate that we will remain in distance learning mode until at least the fall, and want to do all we can to ensure continuity of access and affordability for our students.

Class picture. School of Open. / bagaball / CC BY

While many of the benefits of using openly licensed materials remain constant, their importance is amplified as students are facing increased bandwidth and financial obstacles.

Benefits of Open Educational Resources (OER):

  • Immediate and sustained access. Students, faculty, and researchers are dispersed across the globe. OER do not require VPN or subscription access. Students will have access at the start of their course and well beyond for future reference.
  • Free to use. OER can be read, adapted, modified, and shared at no cost to the reader. Freedom from financial burdens are especially important and appreciated during this time of economic instability.
  • Adaptability. Many instructors are faced with loss of access, for a variety of reasons, to their teaching materials as we’ve had to rapidly shift to online teaching. Quality educational materials can be adapted to fit your needs if they are openly licensed.

Workshop instructors: Allegra Swift, Dominique Turnbow, and Laura Schwartz. UC San Diego Library.

Workshop sponsors: UC San Diego Library Scholarly Communications and UC San Diego Teaching & Learning Commons Engaged Teaching Hub

Open Publishing Fest May 18-29, 2020

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Join an existing session even or propose a new one even as the event is ongoing. Looking forward to learning from the international #OpenPublish community!

Open Publish event toolkit

Open Publishing Fest celebrates communities developing open creative, scholarly, technological, and civic publishing projects. Together, we find new ground to share our ideas.

This is at once a collaborative and distributed event. Sessions are hosted by individuals and organizations around the world as panel discussions, fireside chats, demonstrations, and performances. We connect those points to bring them in conversation with one another and map out what’s next.

We seek to build networks of resilience and care for people working on new ways to develop and share knowledge.

Join us by proposing a session. Proposals will be considered on a rolling basis up to and throughout the fest.

About Open Publish and Open Publish Calendar

OASPA Call for Rapid Reviewers

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Please review the message and Open Letter of Intent below, share this information widely amongst your scholarly communications networks, and, if appropriate, consider signing up as a rapid reviewer here.
– Bernie Folan, OASPA, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

CC-BY 2.0 #WOCinTech Chat- 40 #flickr https://flic.kr/p/Fv3zVg

OASPA has today posted an announcement on our blog about the launch of a new initiative which sees scholarly publishers working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, ensuring that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible.
The group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations — initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview — is taking a collaborative approach to speed up the review process while ensuring rigor and reproducibility remain paramount and has issued an Open Letter of Intent with calls to reviewers, editors, authors, and publishers in the research community. 

The initiative is asking for volunteer reviewers with suitable expertise relevant to COVID-19, from all career stages and disciplines, to add their names to a “rapid reviewer list“. By doing so, these reviewers will be committing to rapid reviewing times, and upfront agreement that their reviews and identity can be shared among participating publishers and journals if submissions get rerouted for any reason.

Additionally, the group is asking all potential reviewers, whether they sign up to the rapid reviewer list or not, to help identify and highlight important and crucial COVID-19 preprints as early as possible, to optimize the limited time of expert reviewers who are subsequently invited to review the most important and promising research by a journal/platform.