Author: Jill Cirasella

Jill Cirasella is the Scholarly Communication Librarian and University Liaison at the CUNY Graduate Center.
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CopyrightX for Copyright A-Z

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You probably know your copyright ABCs already. But what about your UVWs and XYZs? If you want to read and learn a lot (and I mean a lot) about US copyright history, theory, statutes, case law, and open questions — as well as just enough about international copyright law to begin to understand how complex things can get — then I highly recommend CopyrightX, a 12-week course offered through Harvard Law School, HarvardX, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. I took it last spring and found it hugely intellectually stimulating. It’s also very demanding (at least for those who embrace the opportunity and fully engage), but not on your wallet: the course and course materials are completely free of charge. If this sounds like an appealing challenge to you, then you might want to apply for a spot in the Spring 2019 course.

Here’s the official announcement:

Join CopyrightX 2019: Applications due December 7

CopyrightX is a twelve-week networked course, offered from January to May each year under the auspices of Harvard Law School, the HarvardX distance-learning initiative, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. The course explores the current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed.

Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures, assigned readings, weekly seminars, live webcasts, and online discussions, participants in the course examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression.

Hundreds of students from all over the world, ages 13 and up, have taken part in this remote course since 2013!

Learn more and submit your application

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Open Access Hulk: Best Interview Subject Ever!

The Open Access Hulk smashes paywalls the world over!

I’ve been thinking for a while (years, actually) about how complex open access outreach is — what sells one audience (say, faculty) on open access sometimes leaves another audience (say, students, or administrators) completely cold. I realized early that I needed to adjust my messaging for different audiences, and I’ve made many adjustments — some hits, some misses — over the years.

I recently wrote a column about the challenges of open access outreach, featuring snippets of an interview with the greatest (or at least most SMASHING) open access advocate of all time: the Open Access Hulk (@openaccesshulk on Twitter). The column hasn’t appeared yet (fingers crossed the editors don’t decide it’s too goofy, too CAPS LOCK’d to publish!), but the full Twitter interview is now archived on Storify. (On Twitter too, of course, but it can be difficult to follow a long exchange on Twitter itself.)

The Open Access Hulk is not our most syntactically sophisticated colleague, but he’s very informed, very perceptive, and very wise, and he had incisive, Continue reading “Open Access Hulk: Best Interview Subject Ever!”

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Why You Should Ditch Academia.edu and Use CUNY Academic Works

As most readers of this blog know, CUNY recently launched Academic Works, an open access repository that is the ideal way for CUNY scholars to make articles, book chapters, data, etc. available to their research communities and the broader public.

Why should you care about Academic Works?  Let’s start with three key reasons:

1) Academic Works is the perfect place to satisfy grant funders’ open access and open data requirements. If you want more grants in the future, you need to learn how to comply with funders’ requirements for openness!

2) Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net are seriously suboptimal. First, they’re commercial sites. (Yep, despite its URL, which it never should have gotten, Academia.edu is not connected to any educational institution.) And commercial ventures might disappear at any time (taking your papers offline too), whereas Academic Works is designed to last for the long term, longer than commercial sites and longer than personal websites. They’re also much more likely to be smacked with (and blindly comply with) take-down notices from publishers. And, as commercial entities, they exist to make money. How do they do that? By forcing users to log in to see documents, tracking their actions, and selling that data. If you’re uncomfortable with how Facebook commodifies your information, you should be uncomfortable with Academia.edu and ResearchGate too!

3) Academic Works significantly boosts your visibility and impact. If your work is in Academic Works, it’s much more likely to be found and read. (Academic Works is designed to play well with Google and Google Scholar.) And, as a result, it’s much more likely to be linked to on Twitter, blogs, and news sites, and also more likely to be cited in future research. Yes: study after study has shown that journal articles that are freely available online are cited more by other journal articles. Academic Works also sends authors monthly download reports with detailed information about how much your work has been downloaded, in what countries, and by which institutions.

Curious whether you’re allowed to upload an article you published in a journal? Search SHERPA/RoMEO to find out what that journal allows.

Couldn’t make any of our workshops on Academic Works? Flip through the slideshow, read the handout, or visit our guide with step-by-step upload instructions. Or contact the Academic Works administrator at your campus for more information!.

CUNY Academic Works has an Author Dashboard that shows you how much your works have been downloaded and from where!
CUNY Academic Works has an Author Dashboard that shows you how much your works have been downloaded and from where!