Category: OA Week 2013

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Curl Up with a Good (Open Access) Book

Don’t just look inside on Amazon — get Twelve Years a Slave for free from archive.org!

This just in from LaGuardia Community College, in honor of Open Access Week 2013:

LaGuardia’s library has 28 older model e-book readers (Sony Reader Touch PRS-600) that have been used with specific classes in past semesters. The library is now making these e-book readers available to the college community. The readers are old devices (no wireless, no extra features, b&w screen) but work fine for just reading e-books. They can be checked out for 3 weeks just like a print book.

The Sony Readers are pre-loaded with 25 open access and public domain books ranging from recent novels by Cory Doctorow to Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (read it before/after seeing the movie!) to the Works of Edgar Allan Poe (great for Halloween!) — here is the complete list of titles.

If you’re not at LaGuardia Community College, that doesn’t mean you can’t read these books. They’re open access, so of course you can read them (see the list of titles for links to the full text) — you’ll just have to read them on your own device.

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Happy Open Access Week!

Open Access Week is here! There are lots of great events across the university this week, check out our Open Access Week 2013 page to see them all.

And of course there’s a dizzying array of blog posts, news, tweets, and other information about OA activities around the globe this week. Here are two that caught our eyes:

Open Access guru Peter Suber wrote a terrific article in The Guardian this week called Open Access: Six Myths to Put To Rest, a must-read for any open access fan who advocates for OA in their department, college, university, or profession.

Sarah Werner, a digital humanist who works at the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote a great post on her blog about negotiating her contributor’s contract for a book chapter she authored. As Barbara Fister’s Library Babel Fish column in today’s Inside Higher Ed reminds us, book chapters often fall through the cracks when we talk about OA, and it’s great to see folks trying to free their work in books as well as journals.

Happy Open Access Week to all! Please share your thoughts, strategies, and observations in the comments.

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Two Open Access Week Programs @ City Tech

The Ursula C. Schwerin Library @ City Tech is delighted to offer two events during Open Access Week this year.

Textbooks: Why is there a problem? What are some solutions?

What are the problems with textbooks? Why do students sometimes resist buying and reading them? How is the landscape of textbook publishing changing, and how can we take advantage of new strategies and platforms to ensure that our students have access to high quality curricular materials? Come to this Open Access Week workshop to learn more about open educational resources! You’ll hear from faculty across the college who use these materials in their courses, and learn more about library resources and support for open educational materials.

Wednesday, October 23, 1-2pm
Faculty Commons, Namm Building, Rm N227

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Open Access Happy Hour: Open Access for the Arts

Using or producing creative works in online environments requires artists and scholars to work with a set of nuanced (and complicated) copyright, license, and use guidelines. Find out ways to use public domain and open access resources in your creative work, how open access advocates are working to protect the rights of artists in online environments, and how artists, technologists, and policy makers are working together to create avenues for sharing and collaboration in the information age. We’ll also discuss how content creators can license and share their own work.

Thursday, October 24, 4:00-5:30pm
Faculty Lounge, Atrium Building, Rm A632

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