UC OSC Blog
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My dissertation is online! Wait – my dissertation is online!? Copyright & your magnum opus
You’ve worked painstakingly for years (we won’t let on how many) on your magnum opus: your dissertation—the scholarly key to completing your graduate degree, securing a possible first book deal, and making inroads toward faculty status somewhere. Then, as you are about to submit your pièce de résistance through ProQuest’s online administration system, you are confronted with the realization that—for students at many institutions—your dissertation is about to be made available open access online to readers all over the world (hurrah! and gulp). Because your dissertation will be openly available online, there are many questions you need to address—both about […]
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Does the UC Open Access Policy miss the mark? Depends on which mark.
Institutional open access policies often get a bad rap. Critics point to their lack of “teeth”; their poor compliance rates; their failure, thus far, to effect substantial change within the economically unsustainable and locked down scholarly publishing environment. Motivated by the desire to free all scholarship from publisher access restrictions and the equally ambitious goal of empowering all authors to retain rights to their scholarly publications, these policies struggle mightily under the weight of expectations. But maybe we are expecting too much — or not enough.
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Check out all the great activities UC libraries are hosting for Open Access Week
October 24-30, 2016 is international Open Access Week. This year’s theme is “Open in Action,” which was chosen to “focus on the small steps everyone can take to make openness in research a reality,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “This year’s theme will help showcase these actions, the individuals who are leading by example, and the ways this openness advances science and scholarship.” The University of California Libraries have a planned a greater number and wider variety of events this year than ever before in order to explore and celebrate issues related to open access.
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CC BY and data: Not always a good fit.
Last week I wrote about data ownership, and how focusing on “ownership” might drive you nuts without actually answering important questions about what can be done with data. In that context, I mentioned a couple of times that you (or your funder) might want data to be shared under CC0, but I didn’t clarify what CC0 actually means. This week, I’m back to dig into the topic of Creative Commons (CC) licenses and public domain tools — and how they work with data.
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Who “owns” your data?
Which of these is true? “The PI owns the data.” “The university owns the data.” “Nobody can own it; data isn’t copyrightable.” You’ve probably heard somebody say at least one of these things — confidently. Maybe you’ve heard all of them. Maybe about the same dataset (but in that case, hopefully not from the same person). So who really owns research data? Well, the short answer is “it depends.” A longer answer is that determining ownership (and whether there’s even anything to own) can be frustratingly complicated — and, even when obvious, ownership only determines some of what can be […]
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UC Davis and CDL assess APC-funded open access business models
The Pay It Forward project was conducted during 2015 and the first half of 2016 under the leadership of UC Davis and the California Digital Library. This post by Mathew Willmott and Ivy Anderson, two of the CDL principals on the project, discusses the driving forces behind this effort, the research goals pursued, and the major results produced from the work. Open access to the journal literature is a long-cherished goal of many authors, academic institutions, and other stakeholders in the scholarly communication system; how to reach that goal in an economically sustainable way is a central question that continues to […]
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Questions about U.S. federal funder public access policies? We have a page for that.
In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo requiring many federal agencies to develop policies ensuring that the research that they fund would be freely publicly available. It took time for the agencies to develop their plans, get them approved by OSTP, and release them to the public, but most of them have done it now. They’re not all easy to find, and once you find them it’s not always easy to to tell whether you’re looking at the most current version, or to understand the basic requirements. To help UC scholars […]
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Getting found: Indexing and the independent OA journal
Running an independent journal is a lot of work, even if you’re just focused on managing the process of moving articles through submission, review, and publication. But publishing an article isn’t the end of the story. Even a great article won’t make an impact unless people read it. And without visibility, even a journal with a terrific editorial board won’t get the kind of submissions it’s looking for. WestJEM – the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health – gets ten times the submissions that it got a decade ago. In 2008 it averaged about 2,000 […]
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University of California Press and California Digital Library partner with Collaborative Knowledge Foundation to build open source monograph publishing platform
California Digital Library and University of California Press are excited to announce their partnership with Collaborative Knowledge Foundation to develop Editoria, a new open source, digital-first book production platform. Through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of California Press (UCP) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have embarked on a project to build an open source platform for content and workflow management of book-length works. The goal of the project is to create a shared resource for presses and library publishers to automate book production in multiple formats using a versatile, web-based production […]
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Celebrate Fair Use Week 2016
This week UC Libraries join other organizations around the world in celebrating Fair Use Week, which honors the important doctrines of fair use in the United States and fair dealing in Canada and other jurisdictions. It’s a great time to learn about all the ways in which this important exception to the rights of copyright holders enhances our lives both inside and outside the university.
