Event! Scholarship for the Public Good: Paths to Open Access Online, 2/9, 4 PM
Scholarship for the Public Good: Paths to Open Access Online
Thursday, February 9, 2023
4:00pm – 5:00pm
Register
Open access scholarly literature—roughly, scholarly works that are online and free of charge for all—has developed over the past 20 years from wild idea to widespread reality. Open access journals, books, and repositories are now established parts of the scholarly ecosystem, and many consider near-universal open access to be inevitable.
But publishing itself is not cost-free, so how can open access be achieved? There are many possible paths, some now common, some more experimental. Which of these paths align with our values as researchers, and with the mission of the Graduate Center and CUNY as a whole? Which empower the research community? Which should we pursue, and which should we eschew?
The first event in the “Scholarship for the Public Good” series (learn more below) will explore various paths to open access. The event will feature three experts:
• Peter Suber (Harvard University) will describe the institutional open access policies passed by the faculties of Harvard and many other universities.
• Heather Paxson (MIT) will discuss the transition of society journal Cultural Anthropology from subscription-based to open access, and its ongoing quest to fund publication without article processing charges (APCs).
• Leslie Chan (University of Toronto) will examine high-profit publishers’ problematic approaches to open access (high APCs, vertical integration, and more).
Scholarship for the Public Good Event Series
“We believe that knowledge is a public good.” This statement of institutional values is emblazoned on the Graduate Center website. But there are many ways to interpret the statement, and many ways to enact the belief. How can we move from words to action—or to greater action—in the context of our scholarship?
• How can we ensure that the public, as a matter of course, has cost-free access to scholarly works authored by Graduate Center researchers?
• What changes could we collectively bring about if we centered our values in decisions about where we publish, peer review, and serve in editorial roles?
• How can the library and institution as a whole support these efforts and resist high-profit publishers’ exploitative practices?
• How might we reimagine “impact” and rework systems of evaluation and reward?
• How does considering these questions and contributing to these changes benefit our students, our colleagues, our fields, and the public?
Hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center’s Mina Rees Library and the Provost’s Office, the “Scholarship for the Public Good” event series will examine these questions and more, and explore possible ways that everyone in the Graduate Center community—faculty, students, staff, and administrators—can foster a positive, public-minded ecosystem of scholarship.
Huzzah! 1000th Item Added To Academic Works Today
I recently noticed that the automated numbering of records for new items in Academic Works was approaching the 1000 threshold. On a whim, this afternoon I checked to see how many works were posted and today is the day we hit 1000! A mathematics article helped us achieve this goal.
With her permission, I added Generalization of bi-canonical degrees, co-authored by Dr. Laura Ghezzi (Mathematics), earlier today. Before adding Dr. Ghezzi’s article, we met and had a great conversation about the value of Academic Works as a means to increase the discoverability of one’s publications.
Although Dr. Ghezzi shares her publications on arXiv, a widely used subject repository for physics, computer science, astronomy, and mathematics, we decided that adding this article to Academic Works could potentially bring her new readers and potential citations. We discussed how the version in arXiv is very, very close to the version published formally by Springer so there would be no issue with the version of record (the article formally published by Springer) being meaningfully better than the preprint in arXiv.
City Tech added the most items to the Publications and Research series in Academic Works for 2021-22 of all CUNY campuses. THANK YOU to all the faculty and undergraduate researchers who contributed their scholarship to Academic Works!
Open Access Week 2022, “Open for Climate Justice”
Open Access Week, October 24-30, is here and this year’s theme is Open for Climate Justice. Follow Open Access Week on Twitter with the hashtag #OpenForClimateJustice. Below is a repost from International Open Access Week:
Climate Justice is an explicit acknowledgement that the climate crisis has far-reaching effects, and the impacts are “not be[ing] borne equally or fairly, between rich and poor, women and men, and older and younger generations,” as the UN notes. These power imbalances also affect communities’ abilities to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.
This year’s focus on Climate Justice seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.
International Open Access Week is a time to coordinate across communities to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work. Selected by the Open Access Week Advisory Committee, this year’s theme is an opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around how open enables climate justice. Open Access Week 2022 will be held from October 24th through the 30th; however, anyone is encouraged to host discussions and take action around “Open for Climate Justice” whenever is most suitable during the year and to adapt the theme and activities to their local context.
For more information about International Open Access Week, please visit openaccessweek.org. The official twitter hashtag for the week is #OAWeek.
Open Access Week Events on Climate Justice, Oct. 24-30
Open for Climate Justice is the theme for International Open Access Week 2022 which starts next Monday and runs from October 24-30.
There are many events this year of strong interest to City Tech faculty including talks on specific platforms and software for open science and open data. Other events are discipline specific; for example, I noticed several devoted to chemistry.
Climate justice is an interdisciplinary topic and non-STEM faculty will find programs of interest that integrate humanities and social sciences perspectives, for example Pratt and Punctum: A Program on Open Access and Climate Justice — International Open Access Week.
New and Improved! Library’s Site Supporting Scholarly Publishing
Our newly redesigned scholarly publishing page is a portal to services, tools, and expertise for every phase of faculty scholarship and publishing. We welcome your feedback about the usefulness of this page. Is anything missing or confusing? Send us a message.
 Before Publishing |
 After Publishing |
 Your Scholarly Profile |
 Workshops and Events |
 Open Access, Fair Use, and Copyright |
 Other Resources |
A Celebration of Faculty Scholarship on Teaching and Learning in Academic Works
For Open Access Week 2021, we celebrated scholarship about teaching and learning at City Tech in Academic Works this month.
Here are some highlights:
- Viviana Acquaviva (Physics) Teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences: A summary of lessons learned and challenges
- Patrick Corbett and Jody Rosen (English) Supporting Twenty-First-Century Students with an Across-the-Curriculum Approach to Undergraduate Research
- Lili Ma, Jose Reyes Alamo, Yu Wang (Computer Engineering Technology) Assessment of Creative Thinking in an Introductory Robotics Course Using Final Project
- Mery Diaz, Sandra Cheng, Karen Goodlad, Jennifer Sears, Phil Kreniske, Ashwin Satyanarayana Turning Collective Digital Stories of the First-year Transition to College into a Web of Belonging
- Jason Montgomery Learning Places: Place-Based Learning in an Interdisciplinary Approach to Undergraduate Research
- Juanita But, Pamela Brown, Davida Smyth Reading Effectively Across the Disciplines (READ): A Strategy to Improve Student Success
- Effie Paptzikou Cochran (John Jay) and Lubie Alatriste Taking Stock of CUNY ESL: What a Survey of ESL Faculty and Adminstrators Says about the Past, the Present, and the Future
- Tatiana Voza Finding Connections: Making an Existing Biology Course Interdisciplinary and Using the Experience for the Traditional Course and OERs
All NYCCT publications related to teaching in Academic Works
Science is Shaped by Wikipedia
Researchers from MIT found that “incorporating ideas into a Wikipedia article leads to those ideas being used more in the scientific literature.” Isn’t that fascinating? Because Wikipedia is open, any researcher can use it to easily find an overview on a scientific topic. Find a summary of the article on the always excellent Open Culture or read the original study which is a freely available preprint (a research article before it has been peer reviewed).
April 8: Preprint Repositories: Taking Control of Our Work
This event is April 8 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm
The LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable and Junior Faculty Research Roundtable would like to welcome all CUNY faculty, staff, and students to our joint event on community-owned preprint repositories!
Preprint Repositories: Taking Control of Our Work
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2021
Time: 3:30-5:00pm
Public demand for scholarly research skyrocketed in 2020, as people sought reliable and readily available information on COVID-19. Much of this need was met by preprints, scholarly papers that are released publicly prior to peer review and publication in a scholarly journal.
Many major preprint services have been bought by large corporations and are no longer run by members of the scholarly community. In response to this trend, our speakers describe what it means to run a community-owned repository for preprints.
Juan Pablo Alperin is the Associate Faculty Director of Research for the Public Knowledge Project, an initiative developing open source software for scholarly publishing. He will discuss PKP’s new Open Preprint Systems software, which helps localized repository managers share preprints.
Vicky Rampin is a co-founder of LISSA, the LIS Scholarship Archive, a disciplinary repository for library and information science scholarship. She will discuss the archive’s recent departure from the Center for Open Science in favor of a platform supporting community-owned infrastructure.
New preprint service from IEEE, TechRxiv
Did you know that there’s a preprint repository just for engineering? IEEE has launched TechRxiv, a preprint service for engineering. Authors in many disciplines uses preprint repositories to share early, pre-submission versions of their articles in order to 1) get feedback from other researchers in the same area and/or 2) stake their claim on their research publicly.
Physicists routinely put their work in their preprint repository, arXiv. They also avidly follow new content in arXiv in their specialities as well. arXiv includes computer science, electrical engineering, and other engineering areas. engrXiv is another major preprint service for engineering. Accordingly, you might find these sites current awareness since they allow browsing by engineering speciality.
If you would like to learn more about TechRxiv, IEEE has created a video on their author tutorials page.
If you have any questions about preprints, please contact Monica Berger at mberger@citytech.cuny.edu.
