Category Archives: oa.harvard.u

USRN Discovery Pilot Project – SPARC

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“An interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories is an essential component of US national research infrastructure and will play a crucial role in creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communications system. With the advent of the recent OSTP Memorandum requiring Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, there is a need to help repositories identify tools and practices to ensure that they can become an effective compliance option for this policy.

In November 2023, the US Repository Network (USRN) launched a pilot project aimed at improving the discoverability of articles in repositories. This pilot project involves the use of services from CORE, a not-for-profit aggregator based at Open University in the UK, to evaluate and improve local repository practices. Additional technical support will be provided by Antleaf Ltd.

As part of the project, CORE will aggregate the metadata and full text of articles from a subset of US repositories, allowing them to be findable through a centralized discovery service with prominent links back to the original full text of the repository. At the same time, the project will assess current practices related to metadata quality, the tracking of Open Access deposits, the use of PIDs, technical support for OAI-PMH, and the adoption of more recent protocols, such as FAIR Signposting. At the level of the centralized aggregation, CORE will enrich the existing US metadata with information from its larger international aggregation. A Dashboard service for participating institutions will be provided, enabling them to assess, validate and monitor their practices.

The one-year project involves 20 repositories representing a variety of institutions, software types and repository models and will result in concrete recommendations and best practice guidelines for machine and human discoverability of research articles in US repositories.”

Transition to Open Access – Sebenius – Negotiation Journal – Wiley Online Library

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“Looking to the future, I am delighted to announce that Negotiation Journal will be published as a diamond open-access journal beginning with our winter 2024 issue. Published exclusively online, the journal will impose no fees on readers or authors. Together with a sharpened editorial focus, this should enable a far wider reach for the ideas in Negotiation Journal than is possible behind a paywall. This transition is made possible through the investment of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and its commitment to expanding access to scholarship on the practice, theory, and pedagogy of negotiation and conflict resolution. We are grateful for their support. Stay tuned for further information on this exciting development.”

Statement from Martha Whitehead Celebrating Open Access Week 2023 | Harvard Library

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“This year’s International Open Access Week theme, “Community Over Commercialization,” provides a welcome focus on a version of open access we advocate for at Harvard Library: collaborative scholarly publishing models with no article processing charges (APCs).

Commercialization itself isn’t the issue — in academia we routinely pay fees for commercial services, and commercialization is often a desirable outcome of research and innovation. Our objection is the extractive model of scholarly publishing in which huge APCs of up to $10,000 per article are levied by commercial publishers, while researchers contribute the articles and peer review for free. This model has advanced profit-driven open access, but not equitable open access. Essentially it works against the original ethos of open access, which was to reduce barriers and enable the free flow of ideas and knowledge across the research ecosystem and to the public at large.

This is why rights retention is one of the foundational elements of the equitable open access models we support at Harvard Library. This year we’re celebrating the 15th anniversary of unanimous votes by faculty in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Harvard Law School to give Harvard a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. Other Harvard schools and research centers subsequently voted to establish similar open access policies, and “the Harvard model” has been adopted by nearly 100 institutions and policymakers around the world. As well, we’re delighted to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Copyright First Responders program, which helps advance teaching, learning, and scholarship through community engagement with copyright questions, not just at Harvard but in many regions of the country….”

Harvard Library Open Access Week 2023

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“This year’s theme “Community over Commercialization” encourages a candid conversation about which open scholarship approaches prioritize the interests of the public and the academic community, over commercial interests.

We welcome you to participate in campus wide discussions on how Harvard can shift the information landscape towards a more equitable, diverse ecosystem of trustworthy resources, where impactful research is freely available to all who need it….”

Yuan Li appointed University Scholarly Communication Officer | Harvard Library

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“Harvard Library is pleased to announce Yuan Li’s appointment as University Scholarly Communication Officer and Director of Open Scholarship and Research Data Services in Harvard Library. Yuan brings to this position a unique combination of experience in both scholarly communication and research data services, as well as a passion for advancing open data, open access, and open education. She began her role on September 11, 2023.

 
Harvard is an established leader in open access. The department of Open Scholarship and Research Data Services supports 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. Its focus is 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….”

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. …”