The toolkit was developed by a quartet of volunteers and stakeholders, including our illustrious UC San Diego colleagues; Linguistics professor and Department Chair, Eric Bacović and Earth and Marine Sciences Librarian, Amy Butros. Our highly esteemed partners at the California Digital Library/UCOP’s Alainna Wrigley and Katie Fortney rounded out the dedicated working group.
The UC OA policies have been helping authors make their work available online for over ten years, but what about publications that predate these policies? Authors with publication lists spanning many decades need additional tools to ensure that their collected works are publicly archived. They may have questions like “Where can I share these?” or “Is it a copyright problem to share them?” or even “I don’t have a copy, how do I find this?”
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.”
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.
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.
In other news: Presentations are available from Open Repositories 2019 recently concluded in Hamburg, Germany. Several presentations on ORCiD have been posted:
Image credit: atlas negative image, SDASM Archives, no known copyright restrictions. Accessed on flickr
Bulk upload?
Content or location questions?
Is there a bug or barrier bothering you?
Just want to get your works in or help your academic community raise the visibility and access to their work?
Alainna Wrigley, Publication Management System Coordinator, and Justin Gondor, the Senior Product Manager, Publishing for the California Digital Library (CDL) will be here to answer questions and help you get as many items as you want into eScholarship. This is a hand-on session that we will repeat in late October for Open Access Week.
By Amy Butros, @ucsdlibrary Subject Specialist for Earth and Marine Sciences and @Scripps_Ocean Liaison.
The HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository with content from a large number of international partners, libraries, institutions, including Google and the Internet Archive. University of California is one of the HathiTrust partners collaborating to improve access to and promote preservation of scholarly materials both digital and print, in a variety of formats.
The UC San Diego Library’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography Collection is the second largest collection in HathiTrust, containing over 111,350 items, books, technical reports, and series in oceanography, earth & marine sciences, plus Scripps Institution of Oceanography publications, with over 21,050 items available open access (OA), full text online viewing and downloading.
Recently, after processing of copyright permission, via a Creative Commons license, a large collection of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) created and produced publications became available as OA. These SIO publications, currently over 500 volumes, are mainly series such as annual reports, technical reports, the SIO Bulletin, plus books covering the significant accomplishments of the institution and evolution of oceanography. These SIO publications are now available for full text access, with the number of items in the SIO Collection growing when authors and publishing groups, rights holders, allow access to their publications by completing the HathiTrust Creative Commons Declaration Form.
A Talk with Brian Nosek: Improving Openness and Reproducibility in Scholarly Communication Thursday, April 19 • 2-4 p.m. Geisel Library, Seuss Room
Shifting the scholarly culture toward open access, open data, and open workflow is partly an incentives problem, partly an infrastructure problem, and partly a coordination problem. The Center for Open Science(COS) is a non-profit technology and culture change organization working on all three. Central elements of COS’s strategy are to provide policy, incentive, and normative solutions that are applicable across institution, funder, publisher, and society stakeholders, and to provide efficient implementations of those solutions with open-source public goods infrastructure that is branded and operated by the communities themselves (OSF).
Brian Nosek is co-founder and executive director of the Center for Open Science, which operates the Open Science Framework. COS is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002. He co-founded Project Implicit, a multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition–thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Brian investigates the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one’s intentions and goals. Nosek applies this interest to improve the alignment between personal and organizational values and practices. In 2015, he was named one of Nature’s 10 and to the Chronicle for Higher Education Influence list.
