Recently the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office released its 2018/2019 Impact and Activity Report, showcasing some of the year’s highlights and accomplishments.
For more information, or to share feedback please contact scholarly.communications@ubc.ca
The new Open UBC site has launched today on Aug 26, Monday morning.
There were three goals for the site relaunch. We wanted to:
Poster of Open UBC Website Review (by Rie Namba, CC by SA 3.0)
On May 22, 2018, we hosted a small usability test event for the Open UBC site. During the usability testing, we asked participants to bring their own device (for ex: laptop, tablet, mobile) and go through the user testing survey provided. Two faculty members, one undergraduate student, one graduate student and one staff participated the usability testing event.
Overall, we found out from the usability testing that:
Many users accessed the “Project” (now it is called “Examples”) page to see what their colleagues were creating. Learning from the feedback we received during the usability testing, we aimed to create a new website that is more simple and improves user experience.
photograph from the Card Sorting Activity (by Rie Namba -CC by SA 3.0)
On Oct 2018, with a small group from the Library and CTLT (Erin Fields, Cindy Underhill, Will Engle, Lucas Wright and Rie Namba), we designed the new architecture for the new Open UBC site, and did a “card sorting activity” to map out existing pages in the Open UBC site to the new architecture. As a result, we had gaps with resources in Research, Data, and Access sections.
On March 2019, we organized a sprint and invited a group of expertise (Erin Fields, Stephanie Savage, Rie Namba, Will Engle, Leonora Crema, Matthew Vis-Dumbar, Sarah Parker, Alex Kuskowski, Eirian Vining) to create a “Get Started” page for “Research” “Data” and “Access”. The summary of the sprint can be found in the wiki page below:
Open UBC Website Sprint March 2019
During this period of time, we worked on an iteration of the new Open UBC site. We asked feedbacks for the new Open UBC site from the Open UBC Working Group , which is a working group that supports emerging and ongoing open projects at UBC and beyond. We then edited the new Open UBC site according to the feedback.
If you are excited about contributing to the Open UBC site, there are various ways that you can contribute to the site:
The Public Knowledge Project at 21: Activism, Scholarship, Security Patches
A Conversation with Professor John Willinsky
Co-hosted by the UBC Library and the UBC iSchool (Library, Archival and Information Studies)
Date/location: July 11, 2019, 2:00-3:30pm (a one-hour talk followed by thirty minutes for informal conversation and refreshments)
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Lillooet Room | UBC Vancouver Campus
Light refreshments will be served.
Register in advance at: http://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/8066
On or around December 1998, a UBC professor of education inadvertently stepped out of his field of study and into the realm of scholarly communication, having been thrown off course by a glaring contradiction between teaching the young to read – on the promise that it would open worlds for them – and working in an academic system that needlessly cut such readers off from the world of learning in which he worked. His response was to create a Public Knowledge Project that soon attracted the attention, support, and, at one point, the censure of The University of British Columbia Library. Although this talk begins on a personal note, it soon leaps ahead to the current state of scholarly communication. Here, it sets out PKP’s continuing efforts to open that world of learning take the form of building out open infrastructure in the face of corporate lock-in, initiating economic models for universal open access, and proposing copyright reform as an advance over the legal workarounds of open access policies.
BIOGRAPHY:
John Willinsky is Professor in Publishing Studies at SFU, where he directs the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software; he is also Khosla Family Professor of Education and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. A member of the Royal Society of Canada, his books include the “Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED” (Princeton, 1994); “Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End” (Minnesota, 1998); “Technologies of Knowing” (Beacon 2000); and “The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship” (MIT Press, 2006).
Part-time position, in partnership with Public Knowledge Project.
In 2016, John Willinsky was honoured with a SSHRC Impact Award for his work with the Public Knowledge Project.
CARL, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries recently released an updated version of the Canadian Author Addendum along with an Authors Guide that supports the use of the addendum. Author addenda help authors insert legal language into their publishing contracts that allow them to retain rights in their work. This may be particularly useful in cases where grants require authors to make their work open access.
For more information and links to the resources, refer to the CARL news release.
Recording of Balancing the scales: The role of fair dealing in Canada now live in UBC’s institutional repository.
The planning committee for the joint SFU, UBC, Langara, KPU, Douglas, VCC and JIBC Fair Dealing Week event is happy to announce that an archived copy of the talk is now available for viewing in UBC’s institutional repository, cIRcle. Both the panel discussion and Meera Nair’s keynote address are available at the following link:
http://hdl.handle.net/2429/69041
The planning committee would like to thank all who participated virtually and in-person as well as the event sponsors CAUT, UBC, Langara, SFU, Kwantlen, and Douglas for making the event such a success.
The week of March 4th is Open Education Week, an annual celebration of the global Open Education Movement. This year we invite the UBC community to join us and our colleagues from other higher ed institutions from the Lower Mainland at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Richmond campus for a one day “Open in Action” event on March 6th from 8:30-3:15.
More information about the schedule and registration are available on BCcampus’s website.
We hope to see you there.
In response to a growing concern about the increasing concentration of control of research communication functions by a small number of players, SPARC and COAR have developed a list of seven Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication. The List is meant to “provide a framework to ensure that services are transparent, open, and support the aims and values of the scholarly community” (SPARC).
To learn more about the principles and download a copy, refer to the SPARC website.
Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week is an annual celebration of the doctrines of fair use and fair dealing — a perfect opportunity to reflect on what is quickly becoming a pivotal period in the history of copyright in Canada. York University has appealed the decision in its case with Access Copyright, the statutory review of the Copyright Act is still underway, and the USMCA free trade agreement promises to extend the term of copyright protection by twenty years. In this climate, building increased awareness about user rights such as fair dealing is more important than ever before.
This Fair Dealing Week, SFU, UBC, Langara, KPU, Douglas, VCC and JIBC invite you to an afternoon of presentations and discussion aimed at demonstrating the value of fair dealing in a modern Canadian context and highlighting the perspectives of diverse copyright stakeholders.
You are also invited to join us for a pub night hosted by the BCLA Academic Libraries Section, to unwind and play Copyright the Card Game.
Details and registration for both events are available here.
November 7th featured an event celebrating the launch of Under Creative Construction: A More Just World, an instructional video and the second Open Educational Resource (OER) created with the support of a Library Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) grant. This grant has allowed the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office to work closely with UBC faculty and partner in the creation of open educational resources.
The video explores the importance of creativity in social and environmental justice movements around the globe. Dr. Farah Shroff talks with prominent local activists Morgane Oger and Dale Edwards about the roles that creativity and art have played in their activism, and the potential they hold in supporting justice movements. The launch was attended by students and members of the community and was simultaneously made open, allowing the work to be shared with the public.
Zachary Foote, a Graduate Academic Assistant with the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office, worked closely with Dr. Farah Shroff in making this project a reality. This has been a great opportunity for library and faculty to explore different kinds of open educational resources, and the creativity that can be brought to their creation. One of the most surprising results of this has been the abundance of media-based projects that faculty are developing for the classroom, along with open textbooks. The creation of the instructional video with Dr. Shroff shows the breadth of paths that OERs can take, and ways that the library can support those efforts.
