Category Archives: oa.iplc

IPLC Launches the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement of Iran Web Archive – Ivy Plus Libraries

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“The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation is pleased to announce the launch of the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement of Iran web archive, curated by librarians at the IPLC. This web archive preserves material on, about, and from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of Iran, which emerged in the wake of the 2022 police killing of Mahsa Jîna Amini. Her arrest by the morality police, on alleged grounds of non-compliance with the compulsory Hijab Law, ignited a series of protests that began in Kurdistan, spread across all levels of Iranian society, and reached other marginalized regions like Sistan-Baluchistan. This movement garnered international solidarity, with the Iranian diaspora and global activists demanding accountability from the Iranian government. Despite the government’s attempts to violently suppress dissent, the movement persists into 2023. This archive curates a collection of videos, photographs, art, music, petitions, statements, and diverse forms of expression that have emerged from this movement, showcasing both government crackdowns and the resilience and determination of the Iranian people in their pursuit of meaningful change….

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program is a collaborative collection development effort to build curated, thematic collections of freely available, but at-risk, web content in order to support research….”

Letter to the Bipartisan Leaders of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee – Ivy Plus Libraries

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“Representing the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation comprised of 13 academic libraries, we write to express our strong opposition to Section 552 of the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations bill, which would block American taxpayers from immediately accessing the results of the more than $90 billion in scientific research that the US government funds each year. We urge you to remove this language from the final bill.

As representatives of libraries at institutions with high research output, we support our researchers in achieving the highest impact possible for their research results. There is a need for the United States to invest in the infrastructure that is the critical foundation for a more open system of research that will result in better, faster answers to the problems of our time.

Immediate access to this research will advance discovery, spur the economy, and accelerate innovation across the state and our nation, helping to address our shared priorities. The result will be faster progress toward curing diseases, preventing pandemics, mitigating the impacts of natural disasters, and improving public wellbeing.

The policy guidance outlined in the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s August 25, 2022, Memorandum is the culmination of many years of steady progress towards making research more openly available. It provides a much-needed update to strengthen U.S. policy that will bring our country to equal footing with governments across the world that have established strong open access policies to promote their national innovation agendas.

We hope you will remove any appropriations language that bars implementation of this important Office of Science & Technology Policy guidance that guarantees taxpayers immediate access to the results of research they fund….”

The Ivies (Plus) Have Concerns about the Nelson OSTP Memo – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“As I read this letter, I had a growing sense that the OA movement is starting to paint itself into a corner. For a couple of decades now, advocates have regularly protested that they understand fully that publishing costs money: they (or at least most – maybe not all) recognize that good editors have to be paid, that peer review has to be managed, that the maintenance of a complex website is expensive, that reliable and well-organized archiving is not free, etc. The problem, they have said, is not with publishers getting revenue to support their work, but with publishers getting revenue by charging for access to the scholarly products of research — especially publicly-funded research….

 

But it seems as though every time a publisher tries to get the necessary money from somewhere other than readers, there’s always a problem, and often one raised by the OA community itself. Toll access is of course completely unacceptable, but APCs (as the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation rightly points out) are just another kind of toll access; the toll gate is simply moved from its former spot between the reader and the content to a new spot between the author and the publishing service. Furthermore, when drawn from research grants, APCs divert money away from the support of new research towards the dissemination of research already performed — a worthy expenditure, perhaps, but one that entails a real and significant opportunity cost. Subscribe-to-Open, the popular model du jour, relies entirely on libraries continuing to pay subscription fees. And of course when an institution such as a scholarly society or a university underwrites a journal entirely, making it free both to read and to publish in, that money is taken away from other worthy organizational priorities as well. So from whom or from what program should the money be taken? …”

Ivy+ Text Data Mining Education for Advocacy (TEA) Task Force Phase One Report: Actions and Interventions to Address Concerns with Text Data Mining Platforms

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“The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) Digital Scholarship Affinity Group assembled the Text Data Mining Education for Advocacy (TEA) Task Force to develop shared, open, and accessible educational materials to improve researchers’ literacy on the current influx of third party vendor Text Data Mining (TDM) platforms. This task force was specifically entrusted to examine use and limitations related to the “closedness” of each platform and the direct and collateral effects of the monetization of data on these systems for transparency, collaboration, cross-platforming, and publishing. This report offers constructive criticism of the opaque box, all-or-nothing approach that vendors are taking in order to offer information to support researchers, openness, and equity. Over the course of six months, this task force produced a literature review to examine the current discourse on these emerging platforms, as well as prototype user profiles to clarify researcher needs and evaluate whether the platforms actually meet those needs. This report reflects the results of those efforts to identify exciting new opportunities for assessing emerging TDM platforms….”

An open letter from UK researchers to UK library directors regarding the UK’s reliance on read-and-publish deals with journal publishers

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“On 3rd March 2023, all thirteen “Ivy plus” library directors in the USA published an open letter in support of new ways of publishing journal articles, moving away from article processing charges (APCs)  and read-and-publish models.  These models are increasingly seen as outdated as they reinforce inequities in scholarly publishing.  In particular these models typically move the paywall from the reader to the author which excludes many authors in the global South.  

 
The UK is already unusual in its over-reliance on read-and-publish agreements to achieve open access.  We have a chance now to align with key partners internationally.  If we agree with the principles outlined by the Ivy Plus library directors then a natural next step is to stop negotiating with Springer Nature, and other legacy publishers.  This would allow us to spend time and money on collaborating internationally on more valuable activities like building and maintaining ethical approaches to scholarly publishing.  These new approaches include developing our own infrastructure, diamond open access journals and other promising models such as Subscribe to Open.  These approaches should ensure that our work is freely available for all to read and that authors do not need to pay to publish their work….”

Just Launched: Muftiships Web Archive – Libraries Spotlight BLOG

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“Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the launch of the Muftiships Web Archive. Developed by librarians within the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the archive preserves the websites of Muftis (Muslim legal experts) and leading jurists from the Islamic world. Included are websites that cover the responses of judicial authorities to current events in their respective countries and beyond, illustrate the manner in which these authorities engage with the public, and illuminate the ways in which Islamic law is administered in the digital age. And though included websites have gained greater visibility in light of the Coronavirus pandemic in the Middle East and Islamic world, the jurists and their institutions have been the focus of interest for decades. Curators of the Muftiships Web Archive are: Gayle Fisher (Harvard University), Roberta Dougherty (Yale University), Peter Magierski (Columbia University), Sean Swanick (Duke University), and Guy Burak (New York University), with additional help from Dr. Adnan Zulfiqar (Rutgers Law School), who supplied Fatwas related to the Coronavirus as part of the “Mapping COVID Fatwas“ project in conjunction with Harvard’s Program in Islamic Law. …”