“An in-depth study among 50 Harvard lawyers shows that downloading and streaming pirated content is widely tolerated and even supported by some. It is certainly not seen as a form of theft by these legal experts. Based on these findings, the researchers call for a paradigm shift where entertainment providers focus more on convenience, accessibility and affordability….”
Abstract: Contrary to a popular belief of lawyers having the most strict perception of law, law professionals actually strongly skew toward more favorable views of digital sharing. According to our qualitative study, relying on in-depth interviews with 50 Harvard lawyers, digital piracy is quite acceptable. It is considered fair, especially among friends and for noncommercial purposes. We argue that this not only can indicate that the existing law is becoming outdated because of its inability to be enforced, but also that ethically it is not corresponding to what is considered fair, good service, or being societally beneficial. The common perception of relying on a fixed price for digital content is eroding. We show that on the verges of business, society, and law, there is a potential for the new paradigm of digital commons to emerge.
“Our study reveals that law professionals, with raised professional ethics standards and expectations toward lawabiding behavior, highly above average understanding of law, and higher than average socio-economic status, do not equate digital piracy with physical theft, and are generally very tolerant or even supportive of it….
There is the shared sense that digital goods differ from physical goods, and that this constitutes a basis for new societal norms to emerge: while they ‘would never do anything illegal elsewhere’ [Interview 36], pirating digital content is treated morally differently and morally acceptable….”
“The annual Dataverse Community Meeting is an opportunity to build, grow, and enrich the global community. Like the open-source Dataverse product itself, the activities of the Dataverse Community Meetings are community-driven. Over three days of presentations, workshops, and working group meetings we aim to promote and learn about behavioral and technical solutions and standards for curating, sharing, and preserving data that can be discovered and reused across disciplines to reproduce and advance research.
The Dataverse Community Meeting is hosted by Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Learn more about The Dataverse Project at our dataverse.org site. …”
“The vision of the Harvard Data Commons is to improve the researcher experience by automating the flow of research data from research computing environments to management, publication, discovery and preservation environments.
This will result in an increased ability to meeting sponsor requirements for:
Data integrity
Data provenance
Reproducibility of research….”
“In 2021, the Iowa State University Library passed a new Open Access Commitment, overturning an outdated document that had been adopted in 2018. I want to share how we accomplished this work and why our new Commitment is uniquely tailored to support the diverse range of work done by the library staff at Iowa State University….”
Together, the MIT Press and Harvard Law School Library announce the launch of the Open Casebook series. Leveraging free and open texts created and updated by distinguished legal scholars, the series offers high-quality yet affordable printed textbooks for use in law teaching across the country, tied to online access to the works and legal opinions under open licenses.
“Harvard Library is pleased to be among the first university libraries to endorse the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access published last week.
Some open access (OA) journals cover their expenses through author-side fees called article processing charges (APCs), which function as barriers to authors who cannot find funding. Diamond OA journals do not charge APCs, and are as open on the author side as they are the reader side. Because they exclude no authors on economic grounds, they are an essential part of a more inclusive and equitable system of scholarly communication….
According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, the majority of peer-reviewed OA journals are diamond. Nevertheless, universities and libraries still support OA journals primarily by paying APCs.
Harvard Library supports diamond OA journals and the strategies to advance them outlined in this action plan from Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency. We encourage universities and libraries to give new priority to diamond OA journals, foster their wider use and recognition, and ensure their economic sustainability.”
“Harvard Library’s Advancing Open Knowledge Grants Program is pleased to announce its second cohort of award recipients. From 3D printing in Cabot to amplifying the stories of women and BIPOC in Mass Eye & Ear’s history, the selected projects seek to advance open knowledge and foster innovation to further diversity, inclusion, belonging and antiracism….
Adopting Open Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Quetzalli Barrientos, Carol Kentner, Te-Yi Lee, Rebecca Martin, Lindsay Whitacre…
HBS Working Knowledge Multimedia Series on Inclusive Leadership
Danielle Kost, Dina Gerdeman, Dimitri Siavelis…
A Semi-Automated 3D Printing Service in Cabot Library
Amy Van Epps, Matt Cook, Paul Worster…
Accessing Anatomage
Len Levin, Julie Joyal, Livia Rizzo, Obi Onochie, Erin Martin, Jonathan Chen, Scott Lapinski, Luciana Witowski, Yasmina Kamal…
Uncovering the Diversity of Massachusetts Eye and Ear
Louise Collins, Vanessa Formato…”
“February 21–25, 2022 is the ninth annual International Fair Use Week — celebrated at libraries, archives, museums and other institutions around the world in recognition of an element of copyright law critical to research, education and scholarship.
Without fair use, scholars would be unable to quote from sources; journalism would be unable to produce articles; thesis and dissertation writers would be unable to offer criticism or analysis of other works; professors would be unable to use music or film in classrooms; libraries would be unable to digitize their print materials — the list of necessary actions that would be affected goes on and on….
Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) founded the first week-long celebration of fair use in 2014. As it was my first year as Copyright Advisor, in a new position, I was looking for something big to accomplish. The idea for a celebration was posted on the Fair Use Allies listserv by Prof. Pia Hunter, now Teaching Associate Professor at University of Illinois College of Law. That very year, Prof. Hunter bought the website fairuseweek.org ahead of the annual celebration. In the second year of Fair Use Week the site went live, and, now run by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), it continues to serve as the central spot for covering all things Fair Use Week….”
“And thanks to the Music Modernization Act (technically, one of its components, Title II, the Classic Protection and Access Act), sound recordings published prior to 1923 enter the public domain in the United States. This is a really big deal! Since pre-1972 sound recordings didn’t have federal copyright protection until the passage of the MMA, they’ve been languishing in copyright limbo for decades – in some cases, for well over a century – and there are a lot of them: by some estimates, over 400,000 early sound recordings are now part of the public domain. This change to the law dramatically expands our ability to share early 20th-century sound recordings from our collections for listening, research, and reuse.
To celebrate, we’re releasing a small subset of our early 20th century Arabic 78 collection on our new Aviary site. Acquired over many years, the Arabic 78 Collection currently contains nearly 600 cataloged recordings of Arab and Arab-American music spanning the first half of the 20th century, from roughly 1903 through the 1950s, valuable not only for their musical content, but also as artifacts of the early sound recording industry. We’ve been working to digitize this collection over the past several years, and we’re excited to begin sharing it!….”
“Are you a Harvard student working on your thesis or dissertation? Do you want to reuse your prior publications as chapters? In this virtual January@GSAS workshop led by the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication, you will learn how to read your publishing agreements for comprehension so that you can feel confident about your ability to reuse your work and understand the conditions under which you may also share it publicly in DASH, Harvard’s open-access institutional repository. Get tips for exploring publisher policies and asking permission for reuse. Open to all graduate students. Contact the Office for Scholarly Communication with questions about the event and accessibility.”
“I’m writing to provide an update on a key aspect of adapting our organization to meet our directional goals of Advancing Open Knowledge: our support for open research and scholarship.
As you know from earlier updates on our strategic organizational review, one of our aims is to strengthen the Library’s response to growing expectations for open science, which encompasses not only publications but also data, code and other research outputs. Last fall, we brought the Research Data Management Program (RDMP) into the portfolio of the Assistant University Librarian for Content Strategies, where the Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) was already placed. The goal in bringing these groups together under the same umbrella was to support the development of common services and infrastructure designed to disseminate all research outputs as openly as possible. Now, we are taking the further step of merging the OSC and RDMP to create a new department with a broader reach….
The new department will focus on shifting the information landscape towards a more equitable, diverse ecosystem of trustworthy resources, where impactful research is freely available to all who need it. More specifically, its staff will offer and support other units in offering custom support to researchers across the lifecycle of their research outputs; implement the open-access policies adopted by faculty at every Harvard school; advise on the orderly deposit and archiving of research outputs in the most appropriate repository or repositories; promote standards in metadata schema and description practices to enhance discovery; investigate and implement a variety of aspects of new models for scholarly publishing, including services and infrastructure leveraging current repository work; and design forward-looking repository models in collaboration with peers to provide open access to scholarship.
As part of this change, I am delighted to announce that Peter Suber has agreed to serve in a new role as Senior Advisor on Open Access, reporting to the Assistant University Librarian for Content Strategies. Our strategic organizational review coincided with a request from Peter to move to a half-time appointment and step down from his role as Director of the OSC. In his new role, he will use his expertise to advise the Vice President for Harvard Library on issues in open access as well as continuing to affect the external context through external advising. I would like to thank Peter sincerely for his exceptional leadership in advancing open access as Director of the OSC since 2013, and for agreeing to continue to offer his expertise in his new role….”
“The pandemic that shuttered campuses worldwide last year also created a rare opportunity for online higher education. And a company based in Maryland just placed an $800 million bet that it can seize the moment.
For that sum, 2U Inc. bought an online course platform called edX that was created nine years ago as a nonprofit and joint venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The platform has a brand with prestigious origins and more than 40 million registered users around the world….
The company’s track record is not without controversy. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that an online master’s program in social work at the University of Southern California — for which 2U recruits students — had left many graduates with high student loan debt compared to their earnings. The degree had been priced at $115,000….
Some in academia believe Harvard and MIT should have held on to edX as a high-profile nonprofit venture in the growing online world. “Their decision to fold is a major, and potentially fateful, act of betrayal,” Jefferson Pooley, a professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College, wrote in July in the Chronicle of Higher Education….
Net proceeds from the sale have gone to a new nonprofit organization under MIT and Harvard that will explore education innovation….
Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor who was chief executive of edX, has joined 2U as chief open education officer. He said edX’s university partners support the merger. “Not a single partner has opted out because of the deal,” he said….”
“In this interview, Francesco Maggi (Professor of Mathematics, UT Austin) and Enrico Valdinoci (Professor of Mathematics, University of Western Australia) talk with Colleen Cressman about their new fee-free, open-access journal in Mathematics, Ars Inveniendi Analytica, for which they are the founding Editors-in-Chief. Established in 2020, Ars Inveniendi Analytica leverages the open-access repository arXiv as infrastructure: An author posts a manuscript to arXiv and then links to it in the submission form to the journal. Upon undergoing peer review, and if accepted for publication, the final version of the article is made available on arXiv. Francesco and Enrico discuss the merits and challenges of this model of publishing.”