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Making the Internet a Better Place – an invite to the Wikipedia Day conference on Sunday 14 Jan 2018

This post was contributed by Ann Matsuuchi, Instructional Technology/Systems Librarian, LaGuardia Community  College.

2017, Ace Hotel, New York
There will be cake!

On Sunday, January 14, the NYC Wikipedia+free culture community will celebrate its annual mini conference and celebration. At this event last January, Tim Wu spoke with Noam Cohen, from the New York Times, and Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, on a thought provoking panel about the state of the internet and journalism. This year, confirmed speakers so far include Jessie Daniels, who will take part in a discussion on online harassment, and Jason Scott, from the Internet Archive.

There will be a number of students, librarians, and faculty from the CUNY universe participating and presenting on classroom and archival Wikipedia projects, including those from LaGuardia Community College, Baruch, and Macauley Honors College.

Please stop by for some or all of this year’s Wikipedia Day! It is free and open to all. There will be cake.

Wikipedia Day NYC 2018:

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The Road to OA

Happy New Year

from the Open @ CUNY Team!

 

If you’re looking to add more open access (OA) to your publishing endeavors in 2018, you can probably accomplish that in more than one way. While it’s great to publish your scholarship in an OA journal, don’t think that’s the only road to OA. If you have to take another road, I think that’s ok too. I took the secondary road to OA myself.

 

For my very first attempt at publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, I wanted to respond to a call for papers that perfectly matched an article I just started writing. But before I submitted my proposal—being the OA advocate that I am—I looked at how I could squeeze some OA from a journal that not only required a subscription to access its print or electronic version, it was embargoed in our online databases. I didn’t have access to any articles online for that journal until a year-and-a-half after they were published (and we didn’t have a print subscription). OA roadblock!

 

I did find a detour where the publisher gave authors the option of paying a few thousand dollars to make their articles freely available online (the hybrid OA road). So far, I was not feeling optimistic about the possibility of OA for me from this journal. Would I pass up this otherwise stellar opportunity if there were no OA options open to me?

 

Before I had to cross that bridge, I turned to the other main route to OA. If the journal itself wasn’t open access (the gold OA road), there was still the possibility of self-archiving in a repository (the green OA road) to investigate. Here road conditions turned favorable. The publisher allowed authors in my discipline to post the accepted manuscript (aka postprint) to an institutional repository—like CUNY Academic Works—without the embargo. Therefore, if I were to publish with this journal, I could submit the version of my article that had been through peer review (but not yet formatted for the issue) immediately upon publication. I could work with that.

 

I went on to submit my proposal and was accepted for the special issue (I told you it was a perfect fit). When my article is published, you can bet my postprint will be up in Academic Works and free for anyone to read not long after. My road to OA wasn’t the one I preferred, but I didn’t hesitate to take an alternate route. I will arrive at my destination in the end.

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Editor’s Choice: What We Know and What They Know: Scholarly Communication, Usability, and Unusability

This excerpt, from an article by Dylan Burns, originally appeared on the ACRLog

Over the past handful of years, a lot of digital ink has been spilled on library responses to #icanhazpdf, SciHub, and, most recently, the #Twitterlibraryloan movement. This hit home in my life because  in recent discussion with students at my University, we found that students told us outright that they used SciHub because of its ability to “get most things.”

[…]

Faculty are not cynical monsters who actively search for ways to be “anti-library,” but make rational choices that fit what they need. They aren’t very often knowledgeable about the inner working of collection development or the serials crisis but they are knowledgeable about what they need right now in their academic careers.

This brings me back to the issues surrounding SciHub and #Icanhazpdf. The important thing to remember about our users is that they spend much less time than we do worrying about these things. For them, the ease of use of a for-profit profile or a pirated pdf warehouse is an issue of access and not a preference towards profits or not-profits. While each choice we make as actors is political, I do not believe that our faculty who use these platforms are willfully ignorant or disloyal to their institutions, libraries, or librarians. They just want what they want, when they want it.

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