UC OSC Blog
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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.
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UC linguistics faculty pledge support for Glossa, call for cancellation of Lingua
In November 2015, the editorial board of Lingua, a linguistics journal published by Elsevier, resigned en masse to begin a new open access journal, Glossa. The decision followed a series of disagreements with the publisher which are discussed in this post on Language Log. Several UC linguistics faculty have now issued a statement declaring their support for the new journal and urging their colleagues and the UC libraries to no longer support Lingua. In response, the UC libraries have informed Elsevier that they wish to cancel their subscription to Lingua. “The UC Linguistics faculty statement of support for Glossa reflects […]
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A social networking site is not an open access repository
“What’s the difference between ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and the institutional repository?” “I put my papers in ResearchGate, is that enough for the open access policy? These and similar questions have been been common at open access events over the past couple of years. Authors want to better understand the differences between these platforms and when they should use one, the other, or some combination. First, a brief primer on what each service has to offer:
