“Harvard Law School’s Nuremberg Trials Project” by Judith A. Haran

Abstract:  This article is primarily a case study of the Nuremberg Trials Project at the Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It begins with an historical note about the war crimes trials and their documentary record, including the fate of the several tons of trial documents that were distributed in 1949. The second part of the article is a description of the Harvard Law School Nuremberg project, including its history, goals, logistical considerations, digitization process and challenges, and resulting impact. The structure and function of the project website is described, followed by a description of a typical user experience, the project’s current status, comparison to related projects, and plans for the future. Appendices provide information on the current distribution of Nuremberg trial documents within the United States, a bibliography on this topic, and a list of U.S. repositories holding related collections (primarily collections of personal papers of participants).

RNLI launches an Open Data site! — Esri UK

Open Data and the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World were hot topics at our Esri UK conference last month. We showcased the power of using The Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s Open Data and The Living Atlas to perform real-world analysis in our opening plenary

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) provides a 24-hour service in the UK and Ireland and have saved over 142,200 lives since 1824.

The RNLI uses ArcGIS to analyse risk which enables them to save more lives through innovation, data analysis, and new technology. The next step to share knowledge is to make their data public, which is why the RNLI have released Open Data.

Stockholm University gives researchers more support to get published in full Open Access journals

“The money that Stockholm University saves at the cancelled agreement with large science publisher Elsevier will be used to publish research in full Open Access journals.

Sweden’s research libraries have, through the national consortium Bibsam, terminated its agreement with Elsevier as of 1st of July. The reason why is that the parties could not agree on a reasonable price model and a sustainable solution for a transition towards open science.

According to Stockholm University, the transition to open science is slow and the publishing in hybrid journals, where you publish separate articles Open Access in an otherwise subscription-based journal, does not urge the development quickly enough.

Stockholm University will therefore use the money deposited on the terminated agreement to support those of the university’s researchers who want to get published in full Open Access journals. According to the university, publishing in full Open Access journals with all publishers help to urge the development towards a sustainable transition to open science….”

OATP introduction – Harvard Open Access Project

“The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) is a crowd-sourced project running on free and open-source software to capture news and comment on open access (OA) to research. It has two missions: (1) create real-time alerts for OA-related developments, and (2) organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing….”

European Open Education Librarian Network launches – SPARC Europe

“On 28 June 2018, the first meeting of the European Open Education Librarian Network convened. Participants from Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK met to discuss a number of key goals, primary among them, how libraries can partner with educators to open up more education for all in Europe.

The network will apply the policy, action and lessons learned from Open Access and Open Science to Open Education while also working on OE policy, advocacy and implementation.”

Hypothesis Awarded $2M of New Funding From The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – Hypothesis

“Hypothesis is pleased to announce that it has recently been awarded $2 million in new funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This is our sixth grant from the Mellon Foundation, and we are grateful for their continued endorsement of our mission and work to scale the use of open, standards-based web annotation and the Hypothesis annotation tool suite in scholarship and research. Specifically, the focus of this multi-year grant, Scaling Annotation in Scholarship and the Humanities, will be to support feature enhancements and program development for Hypothesis’ annotation software and services, with an emphasis on the arts and humanities. With the support of the Mellon Foundation, Hypothesis has made substantial progress in adding important features such as group functions and moderation, realizing a W3C standard for web annotation, building the Annotating All Knowledge Coalition to bring together major publishers and scholarly platforms around open annotation, and growing our user base in the arts and humanities through outreach in publishing and education. This new round of funding will enable us to capitalize on our previous work and current trends in scholarship, publishing and education to accelerate growth in annotation and execute our business strategy for long term sustainability….”

The ‘Care-full’ Commons: Open Access and the Care of Commoning | scholarly skywritings

“Talk given to the Radical Open Access 2 Conference in Coventry, 27 June 2018 as part of a panel on the commons and care. The talk was published as part of a pamphlet alongside pieces by Joe Deville and Tahani Nadim: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:19817/

Introduction ‘

The commons’ is a term routinely employed by advocates of open access publishing to describe the ideal scholarly publishing ecosystem, one comprised entirely of freely available journal articles, books, data and code. Usually undefined, advocates invoke the commons as a good-in-itself, governed by the scholarly community and publicly accessible to all. The term itself is not associated with an identifiable politico-economic ideology, nor does it entail any particular form of organisation or practice. Without further justification, the term ‘commons’ has little meaning beyond referring to the various degrees of community control and/or accessibility associated with certain resources. This paper will illustrate some of the uses (and abuses) of the commons in scholarly publishing, aiming to highlight both the ambiguity of the term and some of the drawbacks of treating the commons as fixed and static entity focused on the production and management of shared resources, as many do. While it certainly relates to resources and their governance, I want to reposition the commons – or ‘commoning’ specifically – as a practice of cultivating and caring for the relationships that exist around the production of shared resources. In reorienting the commons in this way, I will show how an attitude of commoning extends beyond the commons site itself and into the relationships present in other forms of organisation also. This allows us to reposition the commons towards a shared, emancipatory horizon while maintaining the need for a plurality of commons-based practices in publishing and beyond. A progressive and emancipatory commons, I argue, is therefore a space of ‘care-full commoning’….”

The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) all-volunteer phase will start later this summer

“To insure that OATP serves the OA community in the future as it has in the past, we invite you to participate as a tagger, and help us recruit other taggers. OATP aims to cover OA comprehensively, and can only do that if it has taggers in every in every ecological niche — by topic, academic field, country, region, and language.”

Looking for commitment: Finnish open access journals, infrastructure and funding

Most of the 100+ Finnish scholarly journals are published by small learned societies. Since 2015, the National Library of Finland and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies have been working on a joint project which aims to provide the journals with the support they need for making a transition to open access. The project has launched an OJS-based shared publication platform (Journal.fi), which is already used by 50 journals. It has also been developing a new funding model for the journals. Since the subscription and licensing costs paid by the research libraries for these journals have been very small, it is not possible to simply use these funds to pay for open access. Instead, the project has been working on a consortium-based model, under which the Finnish research organizations and funders would commit themselves to providing long-term funding to the journals. In return, the journals would pledge to follow strict standards in openness, licensing, peer review and infrastructure.

YERUN Statement on Open Science | Young European Research Universities Network

“The Young European Research Universities Network (YERUN) is committed to actively support the transition towards Open Science. The YERUN members agree that this transition requires not only investments in infrastructures and skills-building, but also a cultural shift in the way research is performed and rewarded. As an active member of the EU Open Science Policy platform, YERUN develops alternatives and provides recommendations to making Open Science a reality. However, active leadership and determination are needed to overcome existing challenges and promote a coherent implementation of this transition. In the coming years, the YERUN members will share experiences and resources, pilot (joint) actions and encourage best-practice exchange across the network and beyond. In doing so, YERUN aims to be a pioneer in the transition process.”

YERUN Statement on Open Science | investigación + biblioteca [I+B]

Google English: “The network of young European research universities YERUN (Young European Research Universities Network) has just published YERUN Statement on Open Science

The YERUN network is constituted by the following universities: Bremen, Konstanz and Ulm (Germany); Antwerpen (Belgium); Southern Denmark (Denmark); Autonomous University of Barcelona, Autonomous University of Madrid, Carlos III of Madrid and Pompeu Fabra (Spain); Eastern Finland (Finland); Paris Dauphine (France); Dublin City University (Ireland); University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy); Maastricht (The Netherlands); New Lisbon (Portugal); Brunel and Essex (United Kingdom); Linköping (Sweden)….”