Category Archives: News & Notices

2022 Open Access Week – UCSD is OPEN FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE!

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International OA Week https://www.openaccessweek.org/theme/en

Happy Open Access Week 2022! This week our plan is to highlight UC San Diego research, scholarship, and art related to the theme, “Open for Climate Justice.” During #OAWeek, we’ll tweet about publications authored by a diverse range of authors and initiatives happening on our campus. At #UCSD, we have entire centers devoted to bringing about climate justice with everyone from undergraduates, faculty, and community partners working to “make our world a better place.”

The UC San Diego Center for Global Justice has devoted a research cluster to #climatejustice http://gjustice.ucsd.edu/climate-justice/. Check the CFP for an #OA Lecture Video & Digital #OATextbook Chapter to contribute to the 10 UC campus course, Bending the Curve & @eScholarship #OER on climate science, “Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions” 

The #UCSD Center for Global Justice’s founding director is our own political science professor, Fonna Forman. Dr. Forman has written chapters for the OER as well as participated in our #OAW event last year as part of a faculty and student panel on equitable & affordable course materials.

The Center on Global Justice is committed to research, advocacy and consultation on climate disruption and climate justice, working at top-down and bottom-up scales simultaneously to slow the warming, as well as to help vulnerable communities adapt to a warming climate.  New technologies, policies and financial tools must be paired with new social strategies, to produce meaningful change.

Through the UCSD Community Stations, we are committed to advancing new methods of climate education and participatory climate action in close partnership with underserved communities across the San Diego-Tijuana border region.

http://gjustice.ucsd.edu/climate-justice/

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. 

2020 Library Publishing Forum is now virtual and free!

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#LPForum20
May 4-8 | noon to 5 PM Eastern Time

For the first time, the Library Publishing Coalition will host the Forum virtually. Registration is free and open to all, although workshops and experimental sessions will have a limited number of participants.

Library Publishing Forum virtual conference announcement more info bit.ly/virtual-lpf20

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice.

Library Publishing Coalition, Library Publishing Forum

Unlatching @KUnlatched

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10 title(s) have now been unlatched over the last 7 days, please see below the breakdown by collection. The following titles are now available on the Open Research Library (search titles here).

  • KU Open Services
    • Biomaterialbanken – Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen
  • KU Select 2019: HSS Backlist Books
    • Becoming a European Homegrown Jihadist
    • Francophonie and the Orient
    • Heritage and Romantic Consumption in China
    • Medieval Saints and Modern Screens
    • Nazism and Neo-Nazism in Film and Media
    • Women in the Silent Cinema
  • KU Select 2019: HSS Frontlist Books
    • Frontier Tibet
    • Independent Filmmaking across borders in Contemporary Asia
    • Women and Power at the French Court, 1480-1565

In other KU news:

@ucsdlibrary contributes to @KUnlatched. Read #oa chapters and editions in LSP pubs by #ucsd linguists @ryanlepic, @emily_clemily, & the Dean of UCSD Social Sciences, Carol Padden!

Chapter 23 of On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, Relations, Analyses by Ryan Lepic and Carol Padden.
Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics co-edited UCSD’s Emiliy Clem.

COVID19, online teaching, and OER solutions

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Source: Johns Hopkins accessed 2020 March 12

Here at UC San Diego the situation is similar to many other universities as we rapidly flip our classrooms from in person to online due to the #COVID19 situation. The library remains open and librarians mobilize to support our faculty, students, staff, and even the larger public with information on the virus (COVID 19 resources: official word by our health sciences librarian), government resources (Coronavirus by our gov docs librarian), and even legal access to resources as courses are moved online to #flattenthecurve.

This is an opportunity for the campus staff, especially EdTech and Centers for Teaching and Learning as they offer strategies for remote instruction, to partner with libraries. Mention of the application of Fair Use (COVID-19, Copyright, & Library Superpowers) or utilizing Open Educational Resources #OER when posting resources online, even on password protected learning management systems (we use CANVAS) is imperative. Librarians are sharing this information and resources through list-serves (SPARC OER) and guides (also, just straight up talk to your librarian for resources).

OER for Faculty – UC San Diego Library Scholarly Communications
Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). Accessed on Wikimedia 2020 March 12.

The Swedish Elsevier Cancellation Affect

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Researchers from Swedish universities are looking at the impact of cancelling Elsevier contracts.

Consequences of Sweden Cancelling Elsevier : a presentation at the LIBER 2019 conference (June 27, 2019) by Lisa Olsson, Camila Hertil, Frida Jakobsson, and Lovisa Österlund.

The Surveys used to collect the data were posted by the same authors to figshare on Jan 31, 2019. Links are included to the press release, and FAQ on the cancellation and the assignment.

OA textbooks published at the UCs

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UC Berkeley Library just announced the recent publication of an #OER #opentextbook resulting from their @UCBerkekyLib faculty grant program. The library used @pressbooks as a platform for “Interpreting Love Narratives in East Asian Literature & Film.”

CC-BY-SA John Wallace https://berkeley.pressbooks.pub/interpretinglovenarratives/

Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions for the multi UC campus course, Bending the Curve is edited by UC San Diego’s Veerabhadran Ramanathan has previews (OA June 2020) on the UC Office of the President’s section of eScholarship. One of our faculty contacted us to get access so that he can use the preprints for his Fall 2019 semester class!

CC-BY-NC-SA The UC Regents https://escholarship.org/uc/bending_the_curve_digital_textbook

More publishing merger news – the pushback grows

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https://www.infodocket.com/2019/08/13/group-of-textbook-authors-file-breach-of-contract-lawsuit-against-cengage/?utm_source=id&utm_medium=IDTW&utm_campaign=articles

The groups opposing the merger of Cengage and McGraw-Hill are growing. Textbook authors and SPARC, a “global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education,” have joined a coalition of students to bring legislation and focus advocacy efforts on stopping the merger of the textbook publishing giants.

Textbook merger and student pushback

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The U.S. PIRG group, consumer and antitrust groups, and SPARC are submitting letters to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to protest the merger of Cengage and McGraw-Hill, two of the largest textbook publishers.

When Cengage and McGraw Hill announced the merger, the companies claimed it would promote affordability by increasing the use of access codes — where students pay to submit homework online, and automatically bill students for materials. However, due to the lack of other options, the combined company would be able to effectively lock students into paying to submit homework, and eliminate the used book market. 

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, and partners submit letters to DOJ opposing Cengage -McGraw Hill merger. July 29, 2019

At UC San Diego, the LMS has been replaced with Canvas, a system embedded with Cengage, and Wiley, among other systems and products. The Wiley name might be familiar as one of the major journal publishers but the company has been moving into product development engaging the entire research lifecycle as we’ve seen with another high-profile publisher. (ongoing data collection of the rent-seeking and financialization of the academic publishing industry.)

It is worth libraries being conscious of the growing role of Edtech in the schools, colleges and universities that they serve. IFLA has produced this briefing to outline the key ethical and security concerns for libraries to consider, and suggest some ways for libraries to promote responsible and ethical use of Edtech.

Educational Technologies and Student Data – Briefing for Libraries, (July 31, 2019) International federation of Library associations and institutions, FAIFE (Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression) https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/92339

Contact us if you’d like to develop courses that include #OER and affordable course materials to ensure all of your students have access to the educational materials that you assign. Don’t add to the cost burden that students face! This campus is in a high cost housing area and we have high numbers of transfer students and low-income students. OER have been shown to lead to #studentsuccess #retention.

Make Textbooks Affordable – UCSD PIRG campaign