Features
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Fair use rights to conduct text and data mining and use artificial intelligence tools are essential for UC research and teaching
The UC Libraries strive to preserve fair use rights when licensing electronic resources—including the fair use rights to conduct computational research and incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) tools in academic studies and scholarship. Academic scholars like those on our campuses use licensed content for computational research, sometimes referred to as text and data mining, or TDM. As the electronic resource licensing landscape has evolved, there has been a concerning rise in publishers’ attempts to restrict fair uses, particularly for TDM and any use of AI tools in the process. Fair use restrictions on computational research and AI usage have deleterious effect: […]
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Remarks by Günter Waibel on federal public access policies and institutional investment
The following remarks were made by Günter Waibel, Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director of CDL, at the public workshop “Enhancing Public Access to the Results of Research Supported by the Department of Health and Human Services,” held at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in Washington DC, November 30 – December 1, 2023. My name is Günter Waibel, and I am the Executive Director of the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President. I’ll focus my remarks on the implementation of the 2022 White House OSTP guidance by agencies, publishers and institutions. For publishing, […]
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Open Book Collective: Collective Path Toward an Open and Sustainable Monograph Future
The Open Access (OA) publishing movement is at our doorstep. However, as an academic community, we are not yet ready to fully embrace and support the OA monograph transformation. Books continue to lag behind journals in terms of OA publishing, infrastructure, and distribution. The Open Book Collective (OBC) provides some key solutions for the existing challenges while charting a new collective path toward an open and sustainable monograph future. The proliferation of OA policy mandates and library-funded OA pilots led by academic publishers or scholar-led presses combined with recent developments in infrastructural support for OA book publishing are important milestones […]
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The Future of Digital Publishing
This article was first published in Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, in the special supplement “Imagining the Future of Digital Publishing.“ The authors respond to a series of questions posed by the journal editorial board about how digital publishing is transforming scholarly communication. How do you view the relationship between digital publishing and peer review? Are there other ways to create and assess legitimacy and scholarly rigor in digital publication spaces? Peer review has long been held as the gold standard for article evaluation. At its simplest, the goal of peer review is to ensure that a published article in […]
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Images, Copyright, and the Future of Digital Publishing in the Arts
This article was first published in Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, in the special supplement “Imagining the Future of Digital Publishing.“ Publishing in many arts disciplines is enriched by, and may rely on, the use of images. Authors have long found the hurdles and the fees for using these images to be daunting, and the move to digital publishing can make this problem worse. Open access publishing can prove even more challenging. If scholarship in art history, art criticism, visual studies and other fields is going to thrive in a future where digital and open access publishing are […]
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What to do when a journal acts unethically
There are thousands and thousands of academic journals in the world, and not all of them are great to work with. Some issues are fairly common, like delayed peer-review and publication or a lack of transparency. Once in a while, though, authors face problems with journals that go beyond the typical challenges of a journal that is low on staff or editors that are too busy. Here are a few examples of deceptive or problematic behavior that authors have encountered: Most authors are unprepared for conflicts like this because they’re rare; authors are used to their contacts at journals behaving […]
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Pathways to Open Access: Open Infrastructure and CDL
The Pathways blog series highlights CDL’s efforts on various pathways to open access and illustrates how diverse approaches can complement and reinforce each other–and how they can raise productive tensions that push us to think more critically about the work we do. We believe this kind of approach can move us toward true and comprehensive transformation of the scholarly communications landscape. What is the strategy described in this post? In this post, we focus on open infrastructure. While this topic is not always prominent in discussions about open access, it has become an essential part of our strategy at CDL and underpins […]
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Pathways to Open Access: Library Publishing/Repository Services and CDL
The Pathways blog series highlights CDL’s efforts on various pathways to open access and illustrates how diverse approaches can complement and reinforce each other–and how they can raise productive tensions that push us to think more critically about the work we do. We believe this kind of approach can move us toward true and comprehensive transformation of the scholarly communications landscape. What is the strategy described in this post? This post discusses the California Digital Library’s eScholarship Publishing and Repository Services as core pathways to open access at the University of California. Ellen Finnie’s prior post in this series focused on the […]
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Pathways to Open Access: Transformative Agreements and CDL
The Pathways blog series highlights CDL’s efforts on various pathways to open access and illustrates how diverse approaches can complement and reinforce each other–and how they can raise productive tensions that push us to think more critically about the work we do. We believe this kind of approach can move us toward true and comprehensive transformation of the scholarly communications landscape. What is the strategy described in this post? This post explores one path to open access: CDL’s efforts to advance transformative agreements. UC’s strategy for this pathway is grounded in what UC stakeholders refer to as the “moral imperative […]
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Why the UC Research Data Policy is Important
What do a court case victory over PETA, recovered research data from a ransomware attack, and a dispute over Alzheimer’s data have in common? They are all front-page examples of UC stepping in to protect its investigators and data assets to ensure continuity of research. However, there are plenty of other examples of UC’s commitment to protecting the ability of its employees to conduct research that often don’t catch the eyes of news outlets. They include, for example, sifting through regulations affecting research, working with funding agencies to clarify proposed policy changes, executing complex research agreements to further collaborations, and […]
