Standards in academic publishing are shifting. Peer reviewed articles and monographs published by commercial and academic presses are still the primary modes scholars use to communicate their research, but they’re certainly not the only ones.
More and more, researchers are taking advantage of new technologies and evolving ideas about impact and audience. They are experimenting with new approaches to collaboration, format, funding, and more. Read about a few recent innovations at UC below, and see more in our OA Innovations @ UC archive.
If you know about other projects we should highlight, send us an email.
How the COPIM Project and the UCSB Library are “Scaling Small” toward an open monograph future
The UCSB Library is strongly committed to supporting Open Access initiatives promoting an open, inclusive, diverse, and sustainable publishing ecosystem in which all knowledge producers are equally empowered to publish and disseminate their research without barriers. Given the importance of the monograph to the creation and dissemination of research in the Humanities and Social Science, a shift to Open Access for academic monographs is not only possible but necessary. The UCSB Library’s participation in the COPIM project—including the Opening the Future initiative based on the principle of ‘Scaling Small’—is an important example of UCSB’s institutional commitment to Open Access transformation.
Read the rest of the COPIM open access monographs article
Podcasts and Publishing: Recentering Historical Research on the Voices of the Past
More and more scholars are discovering the possibilities of podcasting. My recent work on the documentary podcast project Stories from the Epicenter has helped me understand some of the benefits, and challenges, of this medium, including the ways that working in audio can transform a scholar’s relationship with their sources and subject matter as well as the potential of podcasting to engage audiences in new and important ways.
Stories from the Epicenter is a ten-part documentary podcast that explores the experience and memory of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake in Santa Cruz County among the communities nearest the earthquake’s epicenter. In making it, my team and I drew both from oral history interviews archived here in the UCSC Library’s Special Collections and from more than thirty new interviews that we conducted with community members who experienced the earthquake.
Read the rest of the academic podcasts article
Glossa Psycholinguistics launches on UC’s eScholarship publishing platform
The eScholarship publishing program of the University of California is pleased to announce the launch of Glossa Psycholinguistics, a new journal publishing original research and theoretical reviews in psycholinguistics, broadly defined. The journal is committed to open access and open science. Published articles will bring together empirical and theoretical perspectives, illuminate our understanding of the nature of language, and make use of a broad range of behavioral, experimental, computational, and neuroscience approaches.
In accordance with principles of Fair Open Access, submission and publication are not conditional on the payment of any fees. Authors are asked upon submission to check whether they have access to funds earmarked for Author Processing Charges (via a research grant or through their institution), and to use those funds to cover the $500 APC for their publication in Glossa Psycholinguistics. Authors who do not have access to such funds merely affirm this at the time of submission. To ensure sustainability, Glossa also solicits contributions from university libraries, consortia, foundations, departments, and other prospective scholarly publishing funders who wish to support open access publishing.
Read the rest of the Glossa Psycholinguistics article
Doing it Right: A Better Approach for Software & Data
Researchers at UC and around the world now have access to streamlined workflows for publishing their research data and software – and linking the two – through Dryad and Zenodo.
The Dryad and Zenodo teams are proud to announce the launch of our first formal integration. Researchers submitting data for curation and publication at Dryad will now have the option to upload code, scripts, and software packages on a new tab “Upload Software”. Anything uploaded here will be sent directly to Zenodo. Researchers will also have the opportunity to select the proper license for their software, as opposed to Dryad’s CC0 license.
Those familiar with Dryad may know that Dryad has a feature to keep datasets private during the peer review period, with a double blind download URL that allows for journal offices and collaborators to access the data prior to manuscript acceptance. Zenodo hosted software will be included in this private URL and will be held from the public until the dataset is ready to be published.
Read the rest of the Dryad and Zenodo article
Combinatorial Theory Journal Launches on UC’s eScholarship Publishing Platform with Innovative Open Access Funding Model
The eScholarship Publishing program of the University of California is pleased to announce the launch of Combinatorial Theory, a new mathematics journal expecting its first issue in Spring 2021. This journal will publish papers in Combinatorics, an active area of mathematical research with applications throughout the mathematical, computational and natural sciences. Combinatorial Theory is owned by mathematicians who believe in the importance of unfettered access to research as a means of engaging the global combinatorial community. As such, it is an open access publication, with no fees for authors or readers.
Combinatorial Theory was founded in September 2020, when most of the editorial board for one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in Combinatorics, the Elsevier-owned Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Ser. A (JCTA), announced their intention to resign to start a new, open access journal. The new journal will deepen and broaden the impact of its predecessor, as well as embark on an inclusive vision that is international in scope, with a diverse editorial team seeking top research papers from combinatorial mathematicians worldwide. The journal is committed to fairness and mitigation of implicit biases in its selection processes, including double-blind refereeing, where the identities of authors and referees are not revealed to each other. This makes it a pioneer among mathematics research journals.
Read the rest of the Combinatorial Theory article
EarthArXiv finds a sustainable model for preprint hosting with California Digital Library and Janeway
On October 1, 2020, California Digital Library (CDL) was excited to announce the official re-launch of the EarthArXiv preprint server, now hosted by CDL on the Janeway platform. The site provides access to nearly 1,500 recent preprint publications covering a wide range of topics in Earth Science — and researchers who wish to make their findings immediately and openly available can submit papers now.
“EarthArXiv’s partnership with the CDL expands our capacity to grow sustainable open publishing for the Earth sciences,” said Bruce Caron, one of the founders of EarthArXiv. “CDL and the entire University of California system have demonstrated global leadership for open access to scholarly research. UC campuses house major Earth science research and teaching efforts. EarthArXiv looks forward to a promising future in its new home.”
Read the rest of the EarthArXiv article
UC Davis faculty launch living text for diagnostic imaging in limited resource healthcare settings using Manifold platform and animated GIFs
Faculty at UC Davis Health in collaboration with the California Digital Library (CDL) and Blaisdell Medical Library are pleased to announce the release of Ultrasound in Resource-Limited Settings: A Case Based, Open Access Text. This new online resource aims to provide an open access clinical resource for radiologists and clinicians who practice ultrasound in low and limited resourced healthcare settings. In these regions, most people have no access to diagnostic imaging. Ultrasound is particularly positioned to help fill this gap as the most portable, inexpensive, and versatile form of diagnostic imaging.
The project is a collaborative effort by health care practitioners worldwide who use point-of-care and comprehensive ultrasound. Each chapter is authored by experts with case-based knowledge of both ultrasound and the highlighted disease. The chapters are 100% case based and provide important insight into how experts practice medicine and apply ultrasound in the limited resourced healthcare setting. As you scroll through chapters, high quality videos (in bandwidth-efficient GIF format) play automatically, and full-resolution video files are available for download and sharing.
Read the rest of the ultrasound article
