This year’s International Open Access Week takes place October 25-31 and the theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.” International Open Access Week is “a time for the wider community to coordinate in taking action to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work.” All week long, the UW-Madison Libraries have been highlighting some ways you can take action to make your work open. You can learn more on the UW-Madison Libraries Open Access Week page, the Open Scholarship & Learning page or by following @uwopen on Twitter.
To round out the week, we put together this blog on open scholarship resources available through UW-Madison, how open access contributes to building structural equity, and how you can find out about some international initiatives to support open access.
UW-Madison Resources
The OVCRGE Publishing Subvention Fund has an ongoing open submission process and provides additional levels of support for open-access monograph publishing for tenure-track faculty of any rank. In addition to publishing your work in a variety of open access publications, you may also want to share your scholarly work as preprints or postprints in an open access repository or even on your website. But what do you need to know about your author’s rights in order to be able to do so? UW-Madison Libraries Director of Scholarly Communication Carrie Nelson can help you understand and navigate your author’s rights.
“In many cases, when you publish in a journal or sign a book contract, the publisher will ask you to sign away some of your copyrights. These agreements can take away your right to share your work, reuse the material in future work, or submit your work to a public repository,” Nelson said. “When working with a publisher, taking an active role in managing your copyright will allow you to retain the rights you need to do your work and provide others with the rights to reuse your work in ways you wish.” According to Nelson, being proactive about your copyright can advance structural equity because copyright law in the U.S. and most other countries “creates artificial scarcity of information resources that could otherwise be distributed widely at relatively low costs.” Nelson said that when authors better understand the rights they have in their own work, they can take steps to make access to their work more abundant and can advance structural equity by working with and supporting systems and entities that allow authors to choose abundance over scarcity.
Instructors at UW-Madison create a variety of content to support learners in their courses. Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources whose licensing allows them to be used freely and repurposed by others. These can include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks and other resources. Open Educational Resources Librarian Kristin Lansdown can help you discover OER to include in your courses or help you find out how to create your own. “One of the most immediate benefits of using Open Educational Resources is the cost savings to students. But OER can also be beneficial in its ability to provide up-to-the-minute knowledge, because it doesn’t have to wait for an update through a publisher like traditional textbooks,” said Lansdown. “Instructors can localize OER to fit within the context of their teaching, and increase diverse representation by using examples, case studies, and images reflective of their student population!”
“Structural equity asks us to consider making knowledge open for all, from the beginning,” Lansdown said. “Open Pedagogy is the use of OER to support learning and positions students as co-creators of knowledge. Students are able to contribute to openly licensed texts, create test banks and more knowledge outputs that can later be used by students in the course.” Lansdown stresses the importance of structural support for OER. “When I think about structural equity and OER, I think of the ways that our existing systems can provide support to both instructors and students. Course marking is one example that a number of institutions have adopted to mark in their course selection systems whether a course uses OER or other affordable options such as library licensed materials. Additionally, dedicated funds, reassigned time, and OER authorship valued in the tenure and promotion process would be structural supports that can incentivize faculty to author OER or revamp their courses using OER,” she said. “With these supports in place, students in programs like the university’s new Online Undergraduate degrees, may be able to complete ‘Z-Degrees’ or programs with Zero costs associated with their completion outside of textbooks.”
According to Open Definition, open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike. UW-Madison researchers can share open data in open repositories such as MINDS@UW, our institutional repository, or Dryad. Thanks to our new membership, pursued in collaboration between UW-Madison Libraries and DoIT, researchers at UW-Madison can deposit their data in Dryad for free. Digital Curation Coordinator and Chair of Research Data Services Cameron Cook can help you find out about how to make your data open.
When asked about what researchers might need to know about making their data open, Cook said that making data open requires a bit more planning and documentation than one might think. “Open data should also be reusable – which means it should be well-documented and use non-proprietary or widely available formats when possible,” said Cook. “This will allow others to understand your data and work with it easily and responsibly. It’s also best practice to license your open data for reuse.”
Cook said that sharing open data can contribute to structural equity because data is a valuable resource. “Some data come from one-time events and may not be reproducible, some data may use unique or expensive research resources, and some data can help speed critical research – like COVID-19 research. Sharing data helps maximize this resource and allows research all over the world to build on that work,” she said. “It’s also important to remember the impact outside of academia – that data you share could also benefit cities and communities solving local problems.”
Not all data can be shared openly so we recommend that for more information on data types and restrictions, you see UW-Madison’s Data Classification Policy.
International Perspectives
This year’s International Open Access Week theme of “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity” intentionally aligns with the release of the draft of UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science. These recommendations, which define shared values and principles for Open Science, and suggest concrete measures to take in support of Open Access, Open Data, bringing citizens closer to science, and facilitating dissemination of scientific knowledge, are intended to influence the development of national laws and practices in UNESCO’s 193 member countries.
Another international Open Access initiative to be aware of is Plan S, which is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research agencies and funders. This plan seeks to make it a requirement, beginning in 2021, that scientists and researchers funded by public grants publish their work in OA journals or repositories. You can read more about Plan S and some of its challenges here.
In terms of exciting diamond access OA models, which includes nonprofit publishing practices where both publishing and access are free of charge, there is Latin America’s AmeliCA. This platform, which won 2019’s SPARC Innovator Award, grew out of efforts by Eduardo Aguado-López and Arianna Becerril-García to create a communication system for Latin America and the Global South’s journals, which were facing the financial sustainability crisis, not being recognized in systems of science assessment, and as a region, facing exclusion from the international scientific community.
Are there any other open access resources or initiatives at UW-Madison or in the international community that you’d like to see highlighted?