As I hold the position of lecturer, a non-tenure track faculty position, I found myself dispassionately engaged with this week’s readings. My work is to teach and advise, and I do not share the same publication pressure of my colleagues. At the same time, coming from a laboratory and field research background, publishing (once upon a time) in ‘sexy’ journals …
I am posting a link here to the short article I posted to LSE Impact in August, “Scholarly Communications Shouldn’t Just be Open, but Non-Profit Too” The article seeks to highlight the dangers that profit incentives—especially when venture capital is involved—pose for the open knowledge movement.
On Thu Oct 26 I attended a panel discussion at Lehigh University titled: Sci-Hub the Disruptor: Piracy and Publishing in Academia as part of Open Access Week. According to the Wikipedia on Sci-Hub: Sci-Hub is a website with over 62 million academic papers and articles available for direct download.[2] It bypasses publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies. …
The distinction being made here is between “useful articles” and design files of those articles. The blueprint design files or patterns are considered “expression” and thus protected by copyright. The objects that are designed from them–the hardware–cannot be protected by copyright. So, again, I can seek protection from copyright for the design files, but not for the useful objects (the …
I can speak from personal experience when I talk about open source. The library now employs an open source system called WMS or Encompass Search. When the library made the switch from Innovative Interfaces (a proprietary closed system) to Encompass Search (an open system), the college reaped a savings of many thousands of dollars. The system is far more robust …
I entered into this Faculty Learning Community with a goal to collect and share geospatially linked data transformed using open GIS software. I found “The Open Data Handbook” to be both liberating and overwhelming. The why and the what have been defined and clarified further here – specifically, that open data must be convenient and modifiable, that it must have …
Note: This is just the first part of a longer post that I may work into a short article. The word “open” coats any noun that it modifies with a sheen of virtue. This is probably a good thing, most of the time, but all that conferred luster might have some bad consequences. Since “open” can be paired with almost …
The readings for this week gave me an opportunity to reflect on the concept of an open culture and the realization that the technical realm may differ from the social, political and economic realms. Perhaps one of the challenges that we face when we attempt to create an open ecosystem is that the cultures/norms of these realms have different origins …
As a part of the Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship, participants are required to submit short responses for each session (for details see here). The goal behind these responses is to encourage open communication by to sharing issues important to individual members of the group. This opens up avenues of discussion others may not have considered. How is openness …
My first thought about this reading is one that echoes what others in the group have said, that open scholarship is seldom free. It may be a “free price” to the end user, but much of the time, institutional support in the form of grant funding, or ongoing funding is behind the scenes. Wikipedia is frequently posting a request for …
