Category Archives: oa.harvard.u

Harvard, MIT edX windfall funds bold vision, few specifics

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“Almost two years ago, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sold edX, their pioneering massive open online course provider, to 2U, an online program management company. At the time, many in higher ed argued that edX’s sale to a for-profit company undermined its nonprofit mission to expand access to learning. Also, some of edX’s original investors and dues-paying university partners were concerned about not getting a cut of the $800 million that 2U paid Harvard and MIT.

But Harvard and MIT celebrated the windfall at the time as a way to fund a nonprofit “reimagining the future of learning for people at all stages of life, addressing educational inequalities, and continuing to advance next generation learning experiences and platforms.” (EdX’s sale garnered the two institutions a tenfold return on their combined $80 million investment.) Now, the universities have followed through on that promise with their recent announcement of the Axim Collaborative. The new nonprofit was funded from edX’s sale and aims to improve educational outcomes and employment pathways for underserved students….”

Harvard and MIT Launch Education Nonprofit Using Proceeds From edX Sale, Tap Stephanie Khurana as CEO | News | The Harvard Crimson

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“Stephanie R. Khurana will serve as chief executive officer of Axim Collaborative, a new nonprofit launched by Harvard University and MIT, the organization announced in a press release Thursday morning.

Axim Collaborative, previously known as the Center for Reimagining Learning, is a nonprofit created by the two universities using proceeds from their sale of the jointly owned education platform edX. An online learning initiative started by Harvard and MIT in 2012, edX was sold to Maryland-based tech startup 2U, Inc. for $800 million in 2021.

Axim aims to make learning more accessible, effective, and engaging by building on edX’s “commitment to educational equity,” according to the press release. The nonprofit will focus initial efforts on supporting post-secondary education for underserved groups….”

HBCU Library Alliance Partners with Harvard Library to Expand Access to African American History Collections | Harvard Library

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“The HBCU Library Alliance and Harvard Library are embarking on this project with the shared goal of advancing open, public access to archives and special collections pertaining to African American history. Funds are provided by the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative, which has designated $6 million for this project….”

Love Data Week 2023 at Harvard Library | Harvard Library Research Data Services

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“Policy change, environmental change, social change… we can move mountains with the right data guiding our decisions. This year, we are focused on helping new and seasoned data users find data training and other resources that can help move the needle on the issues they care about. Data: Agent of Change.

If you haven’t participated before, International Love Data Week is the celebration of data. Love Data Week is dedicated to spreading awareness of the importance of research data management, sharing, preservation, and reuse. Research data are the foundation of the scholarly record and crucial for changing the world around us.

Join the Harvard Library community for a week of events focused on how we can share and use data to bring about changes that matter.”

Harvard Library Responds to the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy | STAFF PORTAL

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“Beginning with the first funding deadlines in January, all NIH grant proposals will be required to include a formal, two-page Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP), which must include the following elements….

Crucially, in addition to adding a required DMSP, the data management strategies stated in the plan will be audited and monitored externally, and compliance with stated plans may affect the funding status of grants.

 

Fortunately, here at Harvard affiliates have access to a variety of computing infrastructure and systems to effectively manage and steward a wide range of research outputs associated with modern, data-driven, computational research.

Harvard’s libraries, Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT), Research Computing, and Sponsored Programs offices have all been adding services and building capacity to support researchers complying with this new policy next year.

In the resources section below, we’ve included links to an executive summary of the policy and a collection of FAQs that we created specifically for Harvard users. We’ve also included resources from the NIH designed to support researchers writing and implementing a DMSP for the 2023 funding cycles.

Along with the requirement to make research data publicly available, in its new policy the NIH strongly encourages the use of established data repositories. When selecting an appropriate repository, researchers should plan to utilize subject- or domain-specific repositories for their data types if possible. When a disciplinary repository does not exist, researchers should use generalist repositories that accept all data types. We’ve included information on Harvard Dataverse and other generalist repositories in the resources section below….”

Surprise machines | John Benjamins

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“Although “the humanities so far has focused on literary texts, historical text records, and spatial data,” as stated by Lev Manovich in Cultural Analytics (Manovich, 2020, p.?10), the recent advancements in artificial intelligence are driving more attention to other media. For example, disciplines such as digital humanities now embrace more diverse types of corpora (Champion, 2016). Yet this shift of attention is also visible in museums, which recently took a step forward by establishing the field of experimental museology (Kenderdine et al., 2021).

This article illustrates the visualization of an extensive image collection through digital means. Following a growing interest in the digital mapping of images – proved by the various scientific articles published on the subject (Bludau et al., 2021; Crockett, 2019; Seguin, 2018), Ph.D. theses (Kräutli, 2016; Vane, 2019), software (American Museum of Natural History, 2020/2022; Diagne et al., 2018; Pietsch, 2018/2022), and presentations (Benedetti, 2022; Klinke, 2021) – this text describes an interdisciplinary experiment at the intersection of information design, experimental museology, and cultural analytics.

Surprise Machines is a data visualization that maps more than 200,000 digital images of the Harvard Art Museums (HAM) and a digital installation for museum visitors to understand the collection’s vastness. Part of a temporary exhibition organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard and entitled Curatorial A(i)gents, Surprise Machines is enriched by a choreographic interface that allows visitors to interact with the visualization through a camera capturing body gestures. The project is unique for its interdisciplinarity, looking at the prestigious collection of Harvard University through cutting-edge techniques of AI….”

Giving students everywhere up-close access to a world of art – Harvard Gazette

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“Since its inception, the database of cultural heritage images available for free online with IIIF capability has continued to grow. In 2022, the IIIF community estimated that between all their participating cultural heritage institutions, they’ve made available more than 1 billion items available.

“With IIIF, we’re investing in the cultural heritage image community,” Snydman said. “Our goal is global, universal, as open as possible. It’s not just about Harvard’s images; it’s about enabling students and faculty to interact in the very same way with images at Oxford, the Library of Congress, or the Vatican that they do with images held at Harvard. The code word for this is interoperability.”

Of the 1 billion IIIF-compatible items, about 6 million are held in Harvard’s library collections. Everything from 500-year-old maps to modern photographs are viewable in high resolution by anyone with an internet connection. Emily Dickinson’s pencil strokes can be magnified and examined, and Persian manuscripts like the one studied by Kim’s class can be compared with illustrations from the same region and period held at the Library of Congress….

“The fact that IIIF has been able to become a universal standard, and that it’s all open-source — that has exciting implications for democratized learning,” said Snydman. “Students and scholars of all ages have the opportunity to learn with images — not just in a physical classroom or library, not just during certain hours, and not just on Harvard’s campus. This is a great example of how technology can be used to minimize inequalities in education and give open access to knowledge.” …”

University Scholarly Communication Officer and Director of Open Scholarship and Research Data Services, Harvard Library | Harvard University

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“Harvard Library seeks a dynamic and visionary leader to advance equitable, high impact models of scholarly communication across the University. The incumbent provides appreciative leadership for the newly formed department, Open Scholarship and Research Data Services. This new department merges two high-performing units, the Office for Scholarly Communication and the Research Data Management Program, to support Harvard Library’s aspirations, on behalf of researchers, to be global leaders in expanding world knowledge and intellectual exploration through the creation, promotion, and support of new and existing models of sharing research outputs.

Open Scholarship and Research Data Services focuses 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. Its staff 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.”

 

 

 

A brief history of open access at Harvard · Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication

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“This is the first of two related posts. The second will describe our current thinking about open access. (Watch for it around Open Access Week, 2020.) We’re looking forward and want to start by showing where we’ve come from. 

For now, this brief history focuses mostly on Harvard’s thinking about subscription journal prices and Harvard’s open access (OA) policies. There are many other OA initiatives at Harvard we might add later, for example on courseware, data, digitization, open-source software, and publishing, as well as our partnerships with larger, multi-institutional initiatives. …”

Statement from Martha Whitehead Celebrating Open Access Week 2022 | Harvard Library

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“Harvard Library is proud to celebrate International Open Access Week. Established by SPARC and partners in the student community in 2008, International Open Access Week is an opportunity for academic and research communities around the globe to “inspire wider participation in helping to make open access the new norm in scholarship and research.”

Our collective commitment to open is central to Harvard Library’s mission to advance the learning, research, and pursuit of the truth that are at the heart of Harvard, and our aspiration to be global leaders in expanding world knowledge and intellectual exploration. This commitment is embedded in our values as we endeavor to lead with curiosity, seek collaboration, embrace diverse perspectives, champion access, and aim for the extraordinary. We do not pursue open as an end in itself—open is only the beginning.

As we come together to celebrate this week, I am reflecting on the varieties of open we create, support, and maintain at Harvard Library. We create and invest in collections, content, and resources that carry open licenses, not only to provide unfettered access to these rich and illuminating materials, but to inspire new and transformative uses among those who seek and discover them. We support our communities of researchers as they leverage open-access policies and data management plans to share their scholarship as openly as possible, as a public good. We support our scholars, too, as they launch their own open-access journals, working together as partners who share a vision for knowledge equity.

Critically, we maintain these services, collections, and infrastructure as a collaborative, global endeavor.  We envision a robust network of open repositories that enables the sharing of research outputs by communities around the world. Indeed, our public commitment to open aligns with recent national initiatives to disseminate federally funded research outputs and data through open repositories so that all may benefit from free and immediate access to breakthroughs in science, technology, medicine, and more. …”

The Future of Online Lending: A Discussion of Controlled Digital Lending and Hachette with the Internet Archive | Berkman Klein Center

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“The Internet Archive offers Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), where it lends digital copies of books to patrons — but ensures that the number of books owned is equal to the number loaned. Through the Open Library, the Internet Archive aims to “make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world.”

In June 2020, four major publishers sued the Archive for copyright infringement, alleging that CDL threatens their business model. 

Join us for a discussion with Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, about the pending Hachette v. Internet Archive case and the future of digital libraries. Kahle will be joined by Rebecca Tushnet and Kyle Courtney, amici in the case, and Jonathan Zittrain.

The panel will explore the background of the case and the National Emergency Library, the value of CDL for online libraries and public access, CDL’s fair use implications, and the future of online libraries and large publishers….”

Democratizing Open Knowledge | Library Innovation Lab

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Democratizing Open Knowledge is a three-year program at the Library Innovation Lab to explore the goals articulated in Harvard Library’s Advancing Open Knowledge strategy from a decentralized and generative perspective. If you like what you see here and want to collaborate, get in touch!

In “Advancing Open Knowledge,” Harvard Library outlines three strategic goals for libraries:

Diversify and Expand Access to Knowledge

The information globe is still dominated by the wealthiest nations and by inequitable systems of producing and sharing knowledge that are not representative of all voices.

Enhance Discovery and Engagement

We are witnessing a rise in disinformation, coupled with distrust of sources established as trustworthy. Information discovery mechanisms are also far from ideal.

Preserve for the Future

Preservation of information, particularly digital information, is an unsolved problem: information can be here today and gone tomorrow….”

Open and Shut?: Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity: Mistaking intent for action?

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“The recent launch of the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) has attracted both plaudits (e.g. here and here) and criticism (e. g. here and here).

What is COPE? It is a call to universities and research funding agencies to “recognise the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access [OA] to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents.”

Signatories to COPE are asked to commit to, “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”

Specifically, signatories are invited to create Gold OA Funds to assist researchers to pay to publish their papers in OA journals — which instead of charging readers to read (via a subscription), impose an author-side article processing fee (APC). The deal is that by paying a fee an author can ensure that the publisher will make his or her paper freely available on the Web for anyone to read, and thereby increase its impact.

COPE is the brain child of Harvard’s Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science, and director of the university’s Office for Scholarly Communication. Shieber outlined the thinking behind COPE in an article published in August in PLoS Biology. COPE is necessary, he explained, because OA journal publishing is currently “at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional [subscription, or Toll Access (TA)] model”.

The implication is that authors would be willing to publish their papers in an OA journal, if someone else was prepared to pay the associated publishing fee.

Universities need to support OA publishing, concluded Shieber, in order for it to become “a sustainable, efficient system”. Only then, he added, can the two journal publishing systems (OA and TA) “compete on a more level playing field.”

To date five universities have signed up to COPE, including Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, University of California at Berkeley, and Dartmouth University. …”

Analysis of Harvard Medical School Countway Library’s MOOC Course, Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management: Learner Demographics and Motivations

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Abstract:  The Harvard Medical School Countway Library’s Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Best Practices for Biomedical Research Data Management launched on Canvas in January 2018. This report analyzes learner reported data and course generated analytics from March 2020 through June 2021 for the course. This analysis focuses on three subsets of participant data during the pandemic to understand global learner demographics and interest in biomedical research data management. 

Harvard Lawyers Don’t Think That Piracy is Theft, Research Finds * TorrentFreak

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“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….”