Category: CUNY Academic Works

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Event Announcement: “Publish Don’t Perish: Authors’ Rights When Authors Write”

Your research is central to your career and the advancement of knowledge in your field, but do you know your rights to what you write? Join librarians Liz Jardine (LaGuardia) and Megan Wacha (CUNY OLS) as they discuss how faculty can publish in the journals they want to publish in and still keep their rights. Topics will include: how to find and evaluate a journal to publish your work, reading and negotiating contracts, and how to distribute your work so it can have maximum impact.

When: 10 – 11:30AM on Thursday, May 12th
Where: Library Classroom, E101-B (campus map)

This event is open to all CUNY Faculty. To RSVP (or for more information), please contact Catherine Stern castern@lagcc.cuny.edu or Liz Jardine ejardine@lagcc.cuny.edu

Sponsors: LaGuardia Library Workshop Planning Committee & CUNY Office of Library Services

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Public scholarship for the public good – but who is the Public?

Open access advocates, myself included, often talk about public scholarship for the public good. Open access advances the pace of scientific progress, promotes interdisciplinary research and collaborations, and allows researchers to share their work with those who don’t otherwise have access to it. We’ve all had the experience of hitting a paywall, and it’s not hard to believe that members of our local and global communities do too.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative, regarded as one of three declarations that defined and shaped the movement, establishes the public good as the foundation for open access:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will . . . lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.

But who is the Public? How do open access repositories like CUNY Academic Works benefit them? We want to know!

The Office of Library Services at the CUNY Central Office recently set-up a new feature in Academic Works: a feedback form. PDF cover pages in select series now include a question: “How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!” Readers that click the hyperlink are directed to a feedback form that asks for some basic information as well as permission to publicly share their comments.

Before rolling it out across the repository, this feature was tested on a collection of dissertations at the Graduate Center. Monthly usage reports let us know this content gets a lot of attention, but who is downloading and reading it? How does it contribute to the public good? I can’t tell you about each download, but I can now tell you how open, public access to “The Contributions of Earl “Bud” Powell to the Modern Jazz Style” benefit one person:

I am a 52 year old engineer who has been playing jazz piano since the age of 10. I am delighted to find this thesis about one of the most important jazz pianists of the 20th century. It includes the *incredible* transcription of “Strictly Confidential,” an amazing piano piece by legendary jazz pianist Bud Powell. I have been looking for a transcription for this piece my entire life, as it is far too complicated for me to hear with my basic ears…

This is the first of what I expect to be many stories that demonstrate the benefits of open access to the public. Future feedback will be posted to this blog when permissions allow.

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Open Access @ CUNY IT Conference 2015

The City University of New York’s 14th Annual IT Conference is happening tomorrow and Friday, and I couldn’t be more excited to attend and participate. While many of the sessions are of interest to open access advocates, I thought it’d be helpful to identify those sessions that specifically focus on open access here at CUNY — and there are a lot of them! (Did I miss one? Add it in the comments!) Check out the conference website for descriptions of all the great sessions happening over the next two days.

Thursday, December 3rd, 2:15P

Digital Preservation: You Built It, But Can We Preserve It?
Despite the ease of creation, the web is ephemeral. The fleeting nature of websites present a challenge to repositories when a record needs to be preserved. The Graduate Center Library was recently presented with this challenge with the increase of submissions of online components to dissertations. This session will focus on the need to capture a snapshot, the limitations of current normative practices and some alternative approaches.

Friday, December 4th, 9:30A

Technical and Conceptual Challenges of Developing the CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA)
This roundtable explores the process of creating a democratically produced digital archive on CUNY’s rich history. Presenters will describe the CDHA’s evolution and the decision to customize the Omeka web tool for the archive’s backend and online display. The presenters, which includes historical contributors, the Omeka programmer, lead scholar, archivist and project director, will demonstrate CDHA online collections and discuss the technical and conceptual challenges involved in archiving CUNY’s history.

From Blog Posts to a Peer-Reviewed Journal: Art History Pedagogy and Practice
Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), a peer-supported CUNY faculty initiative, is developing Art History Pedagogy and Practice (AHPP), an e-journal devoted to scholarship of teaching and learning in art history that responds to the lack of pedagogical research in the discipline. This session will outline the process of building an open-access platform to advance, collect, disseminate and foster academic consideration of pedagogical practice and its scholarly value.

Friday, December 4th, 1:00P

Merging the Digital and the Experiential in Science Forward
In Science Forward, a CUNY-built scientific literacy course, students experience projects and digital materials that build community and contextualize the place of science in their lives. Presenters will highlight both field work and digital tools that make Science Forward a unique, accessible and necessary innovation. Presenters will give hands-on demonstrations of tools, examples of projects and discuss how other disciplines can develop opportunities that meld experiential learning and digital platforms.

Lowering Costs, Increasing Engagement: Open Source Online Readers in History
The History Department at Bronx Community College developed an in-house, open-access online primary source reader for its World History course. We edited nearly 100 sources and created an ePortfolio website for them. The website improves student learning by reducing barriers of access to documents and making documents portable. It continues to evolve to suit faculty who use it to increase student participation and to develop new metacognitive strategies.

Building and Crowdsourcing Faculty Resources with Open Educational Resources (OERs)
It can be difficult to efficiently convey expectations for a course to new teachers – especially adjuncts who often only have a few weeks (or days) to get acquainted with a syllabus before their first class. This session will discuss the benefits of using a simple, well-organized website to provide course material, how to strike a balance between standardization and academic freedom and opportunities for collaboration and crowdsourcing.

Friday, December 4th, 2:15P

Opening CUNY: Academic Works at Work
Academic Works, CUNY’s new open access institutional repository, collects and provides public access to the scholarly and creative works produced by CUNY faculty, students and staff. This program will show how opening content to the world impacts CUNY, as each speaker addresses collections at their institution: dissertations at The Graduate Center, Open Educational Resources at Brooklyn College, the “Save Hostos” archival collection at Hostos Community College and faculty research from across CUNY.

City Tech’s OpenLab: Community Innovation and Integration
This panel showcases recent OpenLab community-building innovations: faculty-generated repositories for General Education assignments and Open Educational Resources; First-Year Learning Communities’ shared spaces for interaction among faculty, students and peer mentors; The Buzz student blog for discussion and community building among students; and a usability study that surveys faculty engagement and recommends best practices. Presenters will highlight the OpenLab’s new mobile-friendly design and future initiatives, including cohort-based projects and collaborations across CUNY.