Library:CommitmentOpenScholarshipWG Examples

The following provides examples of how each aspiration is reflected in current practice at the library. Librarians and archivists are invited to suggest additional examples that reflect UBC Library’s strengths in supporting open scholarship to help identify gaps and opportunities:

Research, Scholarships and Professional Outputs

The following examples highlight the practices of librarians and library staff in sharing the outputs of their scholarship openly.

• UBC Library and Archives Collection showcases events and projects supported by the library, and scholarly and professional output of UBC’s librarians, archivists, and staff. Librarians and archivists are strongly encouraged to submit their works to cIRcle.

Teaching Resources

The following examples highlight teaching resources developed with openness as a core value.

• Sharing slide decks openly, including Creative Commons licenses and creating versions of slide decks that have considered the copyright implications of open sharing.
• Including Creative Commons licenses on library-made videos uploaded to Youtube.
• Creating workshop materials in GitHub for skill development in Digital Scholarship, Data Management and Analysis and GIS.

Web Environments

The following examples highlight the development of web environments and practices that promote open access and reuse of content.

• Including Creative Commons licenses on library websites including scholcomm.ubc.ca and copyright.ubc.ca
• cIRcle and Open Collections provide Creative Commons license options.

Collection Development and Discovery

The following examples highlight processes of building equitable and sustainable collections of library materials while meeting the needs of our users.

• The Scholarly Communications team, in partnership with subject librarians, evaluates proposals for support from open access publishers and service providers and invests when possible.  
• Technical services provides access to open access collections, including: Providing access to open access collections in the search and discovery layer (i.e. Summon); Supporting the inclusion of filtering functionality for open materials in the Books & Media, Indexes & Databases, and Journal Title search; and providing metadata quality control for cIRcle content.

Research Process

The following examples highlight the practices of librarians and library staff in supporting and contributing to open research practices.

• The Living Data Project is a collaboratively developed training program for graduate students to help them  develop best practices in data management in ecology and evolution research.
• The Open Metrics Project, in collaboration with the Neuroscience Research Group, Brain Circuits Research Cluster, and the library has developed and openly shared tools to mine Google Scholar metrics to support research assessment and impact.

Communicate Transparently

The following examples highlight past practices of committee-level transparency through the selection of open options as a communication strategy.

• The Open Scholarship Sub-Committee of DAL and RESC provided all of their administrative documents (e.g. terms of reference, agendas, meeting minutes, etc.) openly through the UBC Wiki under a CC-BY license
• Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office, the Digitization Centre, and cIRcle publicly release yearly Impact and Activity Reports showcasing some of the year’s highlights and accomplishments within Digital Initiatives.

Data

The following examples highlight the practices of librarians and library staff in openly sharing data both generated by UBC Library and acquired through collection development practices.

• Abacus is a repository of open and licensed data hosted by UBC Library. The Abacus collection includes both open and licensed data.
• The UBC Research Data Collection is a free research data repository for our faculty, students and staff. The data can be made publicly available on this site and currently hosts a number of open data sets by librarians and library staff.

Open Source Software

The following examples highlight open-source software (i.e. computer software in which source code is released under a license for which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change and distribute the software) practices.

• UBC Library GitHub provides access to openly licensed code created for a number of projects in the library, including LOCR (course reserves), Geodisy, and more.
• Open Collections provides an xAPI, allowing researchers to freely query, store and retrieve records across platforms
• cIRcle and UBC Dataverse@Scholars Portal use open-source repository software
• UBC Library is a major contributor to and host of the Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Software