UC San Diego Library’s 2021 Open Access Week Virtual Event
November. 3rd at 2:30-3:30 pm [PST]
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.
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.”
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
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.
The George Washington University Master of Professional Studies in Publishing program is soliciting papers for the Journal of Ethics in Publishing, a new, open access journal. The Journal of Ethics in Publishing welcomes articles, case studies, and conference presentations from scholars, students, and publishing professionals on topics including, but not limited to, diversity and inclusion, accessibility, peer review, open access, sustainability, publishing metrics, equity, and other aspects and issues of ethics in publishing. This online journal will be managed by students in the GW Publishing program. We envision publication of the journal commencing in Fall 2020. (post on the G Word blog April 7, 2020)
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