UCSD OER on East Asian History

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

Open Publishing Fest May 18-29, 2020

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 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

Social sciences focus in scholarly communication

Where are the social sciences on the scholarly communications continuum?

In the blog post, “If you use social media then you are not working” – How do social scientists perceive altmetrics and online forms of scholarly communication?, based on the authors’ (@stl90 , @Isabella83,c@warfair) co-written article, “When You Use Social Media You Are Not Working”: Barriers for the Use of Metrics in Social Sciences, the authors voiced concern that social scientists are missing opportunities to directly engage in the public discourse due to discipline culture.

Meanwhile, MIT visiting scholar and sociologist, Philip N Cohen, wrote a primer for Scholarly Communication in Sociology that “will offer useful guidance for your career – to help you succeed in a competitive, opaque, inefficient system with little accountability. Knowing how the scholarly communication system works will help you navigate it successfully for your career ends. However, I also aspire to help you see the bigger picture in your career, and become an engaged citizen within this system so that we may work together to improve it.”

Female Rock Climber
Female Rock Climber by Eric Foltz on flickr

Courses  Posted and Registration Open for the 2nd Annual FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI2018)

Courses  Posted and Registration Open for the 2nd Annual FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI2018).  The Institute will again be hosted by the University of California, San Diego from July 30 – August 3, 2018.  See more information here www.force11.org/fsci/2018.

FSCI2018 offers participants 5 days of training and skills development in new modes of research communication.  All levels of participants, from absolute beginners to advancedat scholarly communication, will find courses of interest.  If you are a scholar/researcher, librarian, institution administrator, funding agency manager, publishing administrator/editor, data manager, student, or anyone else who participates in scholarly communication, you will benefit from attending FSCI.

FSCI is organized by FORCE11 (The Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) in collaboration with the University of California San Diego Library.  Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and research funders who study and facilitate new developments in knowledge creation and communication. Membership is open to all who share this interest!

FSCI2018 Course list:

  • Inside Scholarly Communications Today
  • Reproducible Research Reporting and Dynamic Documents with Open Authoring Tools: Toward the Paper of the Future
  • Collaboration, Communities and Collectivities: Understanding Collaboration in the Scholarly Commons
  • Community, Collaboration, and Impact: Open Scholarly Communication for Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Building an Open, Fair, and Sustainable Information-Rich Research Institution
  • Data in the Scholarly Communications Life Cycle
  • The Basics and Beyond: Developing a Critical, Community-Based Approach to Open Education
  • Research Reproducibility in Theory and Practice
  • The Art of Transforming a Research Paper into a Lay Summary
  • Open South: The Open Science Experience in Latin America and the Caribbean
  • Pre- and Post-Publication Peer Review: Perspectives and Platforms
  • Detection of Questionable Publishing Practices: Procedures, Key Elements and Practical Examples
  • Open Data Visualization – Tools and Techniques to Better Report Data
  • Public Humanities as Scholarly Communication
  • Integrating Wikidata with Your Research and Curation Workflows
  • How Much Does Open Access Cost? A Hands-on Approach to Tracking and Analysing Article Processing Charges
  • Publishing Reproducible Code and Data: A Hands-on, Bring-Your-Own-Code Course
  • Opening the Research Enterprise: Partnering to Support Openness in Grant-Funded Faculty Research
  • Implementing Software Citation
  • Mentoring the Next Generation of Open Scholars: Approaches, Tools & Tactics
  • Structural Biology: A Prototypical Case for Publishing Big Data

Contact:  Stephanie Hagstrom fsci-info@force11.org

FSCI 2018
July 30 – August 3, 2018
University of California, San Diego, California
www.force11.org/fsci/2018
Contact:  fsci-info@force11.org