Month: October 2014

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Open Access Week @ GC: Authors’ Rights Workshop, 10/21

OAWeekEdit 580
Graphic is adapted from this image, © Dimitar Poposki, used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Next week (October 20-26, 2014) is Open Access Week, an annual global event promoting open access as a new norm in scholarship and research. At the Graduate Center, we’re celebrating Open Access Week with a workshop about understanding and preserving your rights as an author:

You Know What You Write, But Do You Know Your Rights?
Understanding and Protecting Your Rights As an Author
Tuesday, October 21st, 1-2pm
Graduate Center Library, Room C196.05 (concourse level inside library)

When you publish a journal article, you sign a copyright agreement. Do you know what you’re agreeing to when you sign it? Different journals have different policies:

  • Some journals require you to relinquish your copyright. (You then have to ask permission or even pay to share your article with students and colleagues!)
  • Some journals allow you to retain some rights (e.g., the right to post online).
  • Some journals leave copyright in your hands. (You simply give the journal a non-exclusive license to publish the article.)

How can you find out a journal’s policy? How can you negotiate your contract to make the most of your rights as a scholar, researcher, and author? Come learn how to preserve your rights to reproduce, distribute, and display the work you create.

Led by Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication at the Graduate Center. Open to students, faculty, staff, and anyone from the CUNY community who has questions about their rights as authors, open access publishing, or scholarly communication.

Eventbrite - Introduction to Author's Rights

Can’t make it? Want a preview of what’s covered? See the materials from the previous authors’ rights event.

 

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Open Access Week 2014 Screening of “The Internet’s Own Boy”

In honor of Open Access Week, the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable and JustPublics@365 invites you to a screening and discussion of The Internet’s Own Boy.

Friday, October 24, 2014
3-5pm
Borough of Manhattan Community College, Rm N780
Snacks will be served. RSVP not required. Open to all.

This documentary examines the life and contribution of internet and information activist Aaron Swartz. Swartz penned the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in 2008, two years after he freed the Library of Congress’s bibliographic data by posting it on OpenLibrary (LoC charges for access to this data) and the same year he liberated public court documents from expensive fee-based access through PACER (there are now Chrome and Firefox plugins called RECAP that provide a means for free downloading from the database). Come honor the life of Swartz and discuss ways that his work might be built upon and continued by those of us in the library and higher education communities.

For more information, please contact the co-chairs of the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable: Jean Amaral (jamaral@bmcc.cuny.edu) and Karen Okamoto (kokamoto@jjay.cuny.edu).

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Archive-It: Graduate Work in Digital Amber

(Déjà vu? This post by Stephen Klein and Polly Thistlethwaite originally appeared on the Graduate Center Library blog.)

Photo is © James St. John, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. http://bit.ly/1vHsc8K
Photo is © James St. John, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

An increasing number of dissertations and theses at the Graduate Center include born-digital components framing evidence, commentary, and analysis. How do we document and preserve these components, and, maybe someday, even entire graduate works, in digital format?

The Graduate Center Library, the department in charge of CUNY’s dissertation preservation and distribution, has a special contract with Archive-It, a part of the Internet Archive, and cousin to the Wayback Machine. With Archive-It, we take a snapshot of the digital components – websites, files, data, source code – that accompany a thesis published with the GC Library, preserving all elements of the work in digital amber at that meaningful point in time. Eventually, the Internet Archive’s crawlers might get around to capturing the work, if it is not buried too deeply. But the Archive-It subscription allows library staff to direct crawlers’ in-depth attention to capture the work, at a point we determine, and to preserve this record in perpetuity.

Archive-It Amber @ CUNY

Jonathan Maxwell’s MALS project, a visually vibrant web site, was nicely captured by Archive-It. Jonathan’s site functions exactly as  like the ‘live’ site, with the exception of the banner indicating that “you are viewing an archived web page.”

Jonathan Maxwell’s captured and preserved website.
Jonathan Maxwell’s captured and preserved website.

The library also captured David Smey’s supporting files at the day of his dissertation submission. David, a Music graduate,  “illustrated” his dissertation with audio and video examples.

Gregory Donovan, a 2013 Psychology graduate, built a participatory social network to collect and analyze data collected for his dissertation. Internet Archive is not (yet) able to capture Gregory’s site’s full functionality — links to the timeline and the Soundcloud recording don’t work. But now that we can be in conversation with the Internet Archive folks, they are investigating these limitations. We believe web archiving capabilities will improve in the near future.

Prof. Steve Brier, the Graduate Center’s Senior Academic Technology Officer and co-founder of the New Media Lab, supports GC students in combining digital work with academic research. He works with students employing a range of technologies — data visualization, digital audio and video, software development, web-based curating and display, and data mining. Contact Prof. Brier to discuss ideas for digital dissertation components. We all look forward to supporting more file varieties and combinations!

If you have a digital component to your thesis or dissertation, and your deposit date is approaching, the GC Library’s  Dissertations & Theses deposit guide will direct you to this new form to start the Digital Amber flowing.

Photo is © Chris Monk, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. http://bit.ly/ZqdmcD
Photo is © Chris Monk, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.