Program for Open Scholarship and Education

open-research

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open-access

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open-research-small

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Research Module

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Undeclared Module

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Access Module

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Education Module

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head-674125_1280

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video-image-slider-940x626-e1454995301748

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/hckyso/1642543450/ Author Mitchell Joyce - https://www.flickr.com/photos/hckyso/ Licensing

POSE_Pathways

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POSE Banner

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Open Access Icon

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Open Education Icon

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Open Research Icon

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Undeclared Icon

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338px-Software

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Industrial_design

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Musical_Works

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Open Story Telling

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Image by Marco VerchFollow Bücherstapel und ein aufgeschlagenes Buch Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

POSE-Pathways-V

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POSE-Pathways-H

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arrow

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arrow-purple

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arrow-green

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arrow-blue

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arrow-yellow

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image

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image-1

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Person_6

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Image from Canva

Person_5

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Image from Canva

Person_4

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Image from Canva

Person_3

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Image from Canva

Person_2

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Image from Canva

Person_1

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Image from Canva

ideaicon-01

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think

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TK

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opennes in research

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outback

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australia

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Author-Rights

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Pathways-to-Open

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Publication-Ecosystem

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Creative-Commons

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OER

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Open-Pedagogy

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Open-Data

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Open-Tools

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OSF

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publish

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Bibliotheca_Buloviana_(Ausschnitt)

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bookworm-02

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dig-deepers

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FreeVector-Remington-Typewriter

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TK-NC

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TK S

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02_open_access_archives

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innovation

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Data Mining Vector

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opentextbooksgw

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2020-06-24_12-31-10

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bookcase

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copyright

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Author-Rights-940x440

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reflection

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Dig-Deeper-2

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webinar

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Publication-Ecosystem

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Pathways-to-Open-940x440

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OER

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Creative-Commons

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2985192607_b475ba4604_c

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Image Credit: Image used on featured image: Lawrence Lessig Remix Party by José Carlos Cortizo Pérez (CC by 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/josek/2985192607/in/photolist-5xMTL4-EBjtSY-DUMwAW-LeDXwK-LemtJ2-GEeYCF-L2k1jY-6h2YiL-83BJnc-4TBuP5-2BtWHn-H5z2n6-EVqmsh-Dppep9-LZgR-HRUzeG-DxwnDP-Dehc8V-Emhqdz-GucZJZ-6gXsyT-2D82uQ-8RzGKC-97UL1e-22Rdxrs-5T1Ufm-47Dau9-6RXT5g-KZEoiG-AXeim-5Qy2ik-HE7E6-JHCA7z-5LcFcg-4zYNvt-6P4WN6-5xNdnn-yPzupd-DFXwUA-EecbfS-2hHxiQv-DXtJuT-EF6VTU-2edtQpc-DSfzQT-EPK3hD-bMKMtx-aL4H6e-5587Pm-4Dm3hK

alabaster-co-LswtOSqn-jo-unsplash

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anastasiia-ostapovych-qwG3e0HEnLY-unsplash

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GNU

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1200px-ArXiv_web.svg_

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1200px-ArXiv_web.svg_-1

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OSF

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Open-Data

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Open-Tools

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292px-1665_journal_des_scavans_title

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256px-Peter_higgs_chalkboard

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307px-Open_Access_logo_PLoS_transparent.svg_

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ccby

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by-sa

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Create-OER-Decision-Treat

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Slide1

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umberto-lhJrm1BRVV0-unsplash

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Cc_logo_large

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Three_layers_cc_license

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Three layers of a Creative Commons license

oer

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consolidation-of-journal-publishing

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journal.pone_.0127502.g004

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1-IMTG-V2-Introduction_EN-copy

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thief

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metadata

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metrics

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metrics-1

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repo

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metadata-1

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Spectrum of Open Practice - Working Draft

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CC_License_Requirements

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Anatomy_of_Creative_Commons_License

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CC No Derivatives logo

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CC BY logo

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CC NC logo

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CC SA logo

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CC zero logo

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Creative Commons logo

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640px-Beech_forest_Mátra_in_winter

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Attributes-of-Open-Pedagogy

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Students-as-Producers

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retro-computer-5-320x240-1

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OP-Attributes

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wikipedia-examples

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WP-examples

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Engle

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Fields

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Grey

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Hendricks

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Namba

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Parker

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Savage

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Vis-Dunbar

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luke-chesser-JKUTrJ4vK00-unsplash

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Scholarly-Publishing-Models_EN

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Preprint_postprint_published

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open-data-by-Descrier-CC-BY-2.0

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DLC2015_sm_DataOne

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fair-data-principles

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noun_Key_2690350

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noun_Diamond_3457587

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noun_copy_2418628

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preprints

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journal.pbio_.3000151.g001

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APCs

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Brief_Guide_Data_Curation_AUGUST2019_EN

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data files dropdown

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cc-by-licenses

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4618997175_cda99ba345_k

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26833823499_480c5abf3a_h

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73761278_eb0e493dee_o

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michael-walter-iJMitgqRaZ8-unsplash

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chihiro048-1

lucaspractice — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:12:42 +0000

preprint

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postprint

efields — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 21:11:25 +0000

published

efields — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 21:11:33 +0000

POSE-OA

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POSE-OA-1

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POSE-OA-2

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PIXNIO-206565-5472x3648

rienamba — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:26:50 +0000

Screen-Shot-2020-10-19-at-3.55.18-PM

rienamba — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 22:55:41 +0000

Latex_example_math_referencing

rienamba — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 17:03:57 +0000

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latex_example_math_referencing.png Latex example math referencing by Alessio Damato (CC by SA 3.0)

Wikipedia_15_-_Twitter_wordcloud

rienamba — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 18:56:51 +0000

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_15_-_Twitter_wordcloud.png Twitter wordcloud by JSutherland (WMF) (CC by SA 4.0)

workflow

efields — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 19:05:11 +0000

innoscholcomm-logo-cc-by-1024x1024-1

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open-access-banner-image-4

ssavage — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 21:55:40 +0000

publishing-meme

ssavage — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 23:29:33 +0000

4k7wb9

ssavage — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 23:36:10 +0000

research_lifecycle.original

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sofa

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chat

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brainstorm

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lightbulb

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webinar

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512px-Welcome_in_21_languages.svg_

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capstone

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reproducibility

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brain

efields — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:57:17 +0000

Teaching Case Study - Replication

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voyant

efields — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 18:40:28 +0000

Lucas

lucaspractice — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 19:41:00 +0000

Lucas Wright (1)

lucaspractice — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 19:41:55 +0000

Social_Network_Analysis_Visualization

rienamba — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 23:02:13 +0000

Licensing_Open_Data_Table

lucaspractice — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 23:35:20 +0000

recipe

efields — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 17:05:19 +0000

software

efields — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 17:27:50 +0000

software-1

efields — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 17:30:38 +0000

1600px-Data

rienamba — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:54:55 +0000

JohnsonGoh, Data, CC0 1.0

BinaryData50

rienamba — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 20:10:24 +0000

exclamation

efields — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:34:26 +0000

exclamation-1

efields — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:38:40 +0000

exclamation by Matthew Weatherall from the Noun Project

BinaryData50

rienamba — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:48:30 +0000

Lucas-Wright-768x513-1

efields — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 18:47:35 +0000

Steps-in-Producing-Open-Data

lucaspractice — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 22:30:01 +0000

Steps-in-Producing-Open-Data-1

lucaspractice — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 22:31:30 +0000

Steps-in-Producing-Open-Data-2

lucaspractice — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 22:32:21 +0000

grguric

efields — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 20:45:39 +0000

Lucas-Wright-768x513

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pdf-1783009_1920

lucaspractice — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 22:28:09 +0000

Square

lucaspractice — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:37:43 +0000

1200px-Jupyter_logo.svg_

lucaspractice — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 19:41:46 +0000

prereg-badge.original

wikiadm — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 20:33:21 +0000

mtcars

vdunbar — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 19:56:30 +0000

Screenshot-2020-12-30-at-12.30.17-PM

egrguric — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 20:30:54 +0000

illuminated-1853924_1920

lucaspractice — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 23:46:56 +0000

mtcars

vdunbar — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 19:55:01 +0000

analogue-2974647_1920 (1)

lucaspractice — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 18:56:01 +0000

data files example

skparker — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 21:21:56 +0000

image

efields — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:06:03 +0000

image-1

efields — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:15:22 +0000

cIRcle

efields — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 18:43:49 +0000

step_2

efields — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 18:45:32 +0000

by-nc

clhendricks — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 06:16:37 +0000

by-nd

clhendricks — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 06:19:55 +0000

by-nc-sa

clhendricks — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 06:26:44 +0000

by-nc-nd

clhendricks — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 06:32:09 +0000

denis-tuksar-hsTwPUzFegQ-unsplash

clhendricks — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 07:25:11 +0000

Open-at-the-Margins

wikiadm — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 19:12:47 +0000

Open at the margins small

wikiadm — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 19:56:05 +0000

storybook

efields — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 17:47:12 +0000

laboratory-2815640_1920

lucaspractice — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 17:04:15 +0000

oeweek-21

efields — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 16:46:55 +0000

POSEsmall

wikiadm — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 23:29:32 +0000

Video License

wikiadm — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 23:48:59 +0000

illuminated-1853924_1920

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 17:16:54 +0000

Maha-Bali-2019

efields — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:25:55 +0000

tunnel-336693_1920

lucaspractice — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 18:36:00 +0000

OpenUBC-WG

efields — Fri, 07 May 2021 17:15:07 +0000

book-1283865_1920-1

efields — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 20:38:47 +0000

Home

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:30:18 +0000

test

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 23:46:07 +0000

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 21:14:49 +0000

Next Steps

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

Module Reflection

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 16:14:55 +0000

You have completed the module sections on open data. To complete the module write a module reflection in the Forum.

Write a Module Reflection

Reflecting on the entire open data module, take a moment to write a reflection that answer some of the following questions:

What did you learn that was new to you about open data?
What questions does the module raise for you?
What would you like to learn more about data repositories, research data management, etc.?
How does open data relate to open scholarship?
What would you like to share about the topic with people?

Add Reflection to the Forum

Module Structure

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 16:26:55 +0000

The module is composed of textual and video content on topics related to open data. The module is structured to actively engage you in reflection and practice. Not all interactions are required for the completion of the module.

The following outlines the types of interactives and their status for module completion:

Reflections

Reflections are questions and ideas posed to participants to critically think about key issues related to the module. A final module reflection is assigned at the end of the module. Status: Optional Except Final Module Reflection

Scenarios / Test Your Knowledge

Scenarios are case studies or examples of the key issues in the module in practice through the perspective of a persona. The scenarios are designed to ask complex questions about topics within familiar examples. Test Your Knowledge provides participants with an opportunity to answer multiple-choice questions on key areas to ensure an understanding of core facts. Status: Mandatory

Dig deeper

Activity Bank

The Activity Bank are activities listed throughout the module. The activities will vary and make require analyzing content, engaging with a tool, or both. The completed activities are openly shared in the Learning Activities section of the site. Status: Mandatory

Back

Continue

Module Completion

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:06 +0000

[gravityform id="20" title="false" description="false"]

Module Completion

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 21:42:35 +0000

[gravityform id="19" title="false" description="false"]

Student Considerations

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

Open pedagogy assignments can involve students engaging with communities other than their peers in a classroom, opening their ideas up to public scrutiny, and creating and communicating in new way. When students openly publish their work through online platforms such blogs, wikis, open textbooks, social media, etc, they are not necessarily using the same format or skills that they would in writing a research paper or persuasive essay; instead they are applying new strategies to the information and knowledge they have to produce something people will use. When asking students to create content, there are a few considerations to keep in mind. Students own the copyright in their own work, and should be given the choice whether or not to share or publish it publicly and with an open license.

When sharing content outside of traditional classrooms, different people have different levels of comfort and risk. Students should never be required or compelled to give up any of their privacy in order to complete an assignment. It is always good to provide students with options on how they may complete or share their work.

If you are publishing students' work on a course site or planning to re-use it in future terms, ask for students' permission regarding how long they would like their work to be share. Some may not mind having it posted indefinitely, but some may wish to have their work taken down as soon as the class is finished. At the very least, let them know that if they later decide they would like it taken down, they can contact you.

It is useful to provide them with various choices, such as:

publishing with a pseudonym
publishing in a way that only other people in that class can see their work
submitting only to the instructor or T.A.
publishing publicly with or without an open license

When working with students as creators of content, it can be helpful to think of them as collaborators. You might not want your work or privacy shared without your consent and students are often the same.

Implement Open Data - Plan

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 00:17:05 +0000

Before even collecting your data, you need to plan. Each stage of the data life cycle should be considered when planning how you will manage your data and make it accessible.

A DMP will address questions about the type of data to be collected and how that data will be stored, shared and preserved for future access. There are templates such as Portage's DMP Assistant that aid in preparing a plan guiding through each step. There are institutional instances of Portage's DMP Assistant including one at UBC.

Like fulfilling open access and open data requirements, it is not uncommon for research funders to request a DMP to be submitted with the funding application demonstrating how the data will be handled at each stage of the data life cycle.

Dig Deeper into DMPs

Read and discover

Data Management Plan Exemplar: Digital Humanities
Data Management Plan Exemplar: Mixed Methods
Best practice: Plan
DMP Tool (You may have to create and account to access the template)
DMP Assistant
DMP Online

Metadata - Describe

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 02:53:05 +0000

Metadata is essential for data discovery, sharing and reuse. As it is “data about data” metadata provides a description of the study, files and variables answering the questions:

Who created the data?
What is the content of the data?
When were the data created?
Where is it geographically?
How were the data developed?
Why were the data developed?

There are three levels of metadata:

Descriptive: Provides information about the data that will help people understand what they will find in the dataset and the context. Project title, authors, keywords and collection methods are all types of descriptive metadata. Be sure to describe your variables giving them clear names. Name files with basic metadata file names.
Administrative: What software is required to use the data? What is the license attached to the data?
Structural: You can link between data files and link to the publication. Structural metadata demonstrates how the data files relate to one another.

An established metadata standard will provide common terms, definitions, and structure and may vary depending on the repository you select. Each repository will have their own standard, but will be consistent in common terminology, definitions, language and structure. Good metadata ensures that your files are human and machine readable. Different disciplines may have their own standards or have adopted a specific metadata standard.

When you deposit your data into a repository, metadata fields are required to be completed as part of your deposit. The amount of metadata provided will enhance discovery.

*Content adopted from UBC Library Research Commons' Research Data Management Workshop 2020.

Case Study

Read this data story from DataONE and consider the discussion point questions at the end of the story.

Metadata? I thought you were in charge of that.

Activity

Review the metadata from one or all the examples in the links below. Click on the metadata tab to see the metadata fields included for the dataset. Notice if the metadata includes geospatial metadata as well.

File Naming and Structure

File naming and structure are important pieces of managing your data to make it easier for others to use. In keeping with the FAIR principles data formats should be in an open format, unencrypted and uncompressed.

An open format is non-proprietary so that the file can be opened using open software that is not owned by a specific company. For example, instead of saving to an Excel file save as a CSV or XML.

Unencrypted data is easily accessible for anyone whereas encrypted data is secure and locked and would require a pass code or key to unlock the data.

An uncompressed file is one that is stored in the original format and hasn’t been compressed into another format. The UK Data Archive provides a list of recommended formats.

File Naming

Add Reflection to the Forum

Activity Bank - OSF Part 1

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 21:44:26 +0000

Learn about OSF by attending an upcoming Library workshop.

After the workshop,

Try creating an OSF account and manage a project through OSF.
Reflect on how you've organized module content within the OSF - for discovery, for reproducibility, other?
Write a 5 minute reflective essay on why or why not OSF is useful to your workflow.

Module Structure

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 16:42:22 +0000

This module is constructed around readings, tutorials, workshops and your own exploring of open source tools that might support your research.

It is not expected that you’ll read every article linked out to, or that you’ll watch every video, or attend every suggested workshop. Choose those that interest you the most, and have the greatest potential for your personal research.

In thinking about this pathway on open research, the goal is to consider how a open data might enhance either transparency, reproducibility or access, while considering the data life cycle.

Requirements for Completion

After completing the various readings and tutorials, and exploring open source alternatives to your current suite of tools, you are asked to integrate a dataset into your OSF project page created in the Open Workflows module.

How you do this is up to you. OSF offers an add-on for some data repositories that you can use. You may opt to use OSF as a temporary repository that includes a data component with its own wiki and readme .txt file.

The goal is to map your dataset with your larger project in a way that increases the visibility of connections between the various components.

Module Activities

Throughout the module you will have opportunities to reflect, test your knowledge, dig deeper, and explore activities related to open data. These are all optional, but will help in allowing you to produce the final deliverable.

The following outlines the types of activities:

Reflections

Dig deeper

Activity Bank

The Activity Bank is the required activities needed to complete the module. The activities will vary and require analyzing content, engaging with a tool, or both. The completed activities are openly shared in the Learning Activities section of the site. Status: Required

Back

Continue

lucaspractice — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:00:11 +0000

efields — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 20:08:07 +0000

efields — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 23:46:52 +0000

rienamba — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 20:44:20 +0000

Home Page

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:30:17 +0000

The Program for Open Scholarship and Education (POSE) is intended for faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students with an interest in open research, open access, open data, and open education. We also invite non-UBC faculty, staff, and students at the post-secondary level to join the conversation. By completing this program you will gain the tools and strategies to become proficient in supporting and advocating for open practices.

Program Delivery

The POSE program uses both this WordPress site and a Canvas course space. On the POSE WordPress site you will find content modules, short interactive activities developed using H5P and an activity bank. The Canvas course space is primarily for tracking your progress through the POSE program and as a space for course discussions. The Canvas course space is openly available, however; in order to participate in discussions and track your progress in the course, you will need to enroll. We have described how to enroll in the course in the POSE Welcome Announcement. Please email the course team if you are having difficulties enrolling OR are enrolling late in the program.

For in-person interactions, the program will use Zoom. We will share the Zoom link with you for the synchronous sessions two-weeks before the session. If you do not have a Zoom account you will be prompted to download the software. Remember you do NOT need a Zoom account in order to access a session. If you do not want to download Zoom, you may want to access the session using a web browser. We will share recordings of synchronous sessions after the session for those of you who are unable to attend.

Program Format

The POSE program will run from January - April 2021. All content in the POSE program will be available under a Creative Commons license for re-use upon completion of the program.

The program has a total of 4 units that will be released monthly to support the cohort model. The Open Access, Open Research, and Open Education unit will contain the following:

3 Modules (Required)
3 activities from the open Activity Bank (Required)
1 Shared Reflection activity (Required)
1 Discussion Forum activity (Required)
1 Open Chat Session with guest speaker (Optional)

The final Capstone unit will guide participants through putting what they have learned in the previous units into practice through a project. The Capstone unit will offer optional Learning Lounges for participants to drop-in and discuss their projects.

Each unit will have a unit completion quiz to assist you in tracking your progress.

Program Completion

To complete the POSE program and earn the POSE certificate of completion, complete the following steps.

1. Review Getting Started

2. Attend the Kick-Off Session on January 13, 2021.

3. Complete all of the units. Units are released monthly.

Open Access

The Open Access Unit covers issues related to the economics of publishing and its impacts on academia.

The unit contains the following modules:

Publication Ecosystem
Author Rights
Pathways to Open

Unit Release: January

Open Research

The Open Research Unit covers issues related to transparency, reproducibility, open science, and open data.

The unit contains the following modules:

Open Workflows
Open Data
Open Tools

Unit Release: February

Open Education

The Open Education Unit covers practices in open education resources and open pedagogy in the classroom.

The unit contains the following modules:

Open Pedagogy
OE Resources
Creative Commons

Unit Release: March

Capstone

The Capstone Unit will guide you through putting what you have learned in the previous POSE units into practice.

The unit contains the following modules:

Capstone Project Outline
Project Examples
Support and Sharing

Unit Release: April

4. Attend the Wrap-Up Session on April 29, 2021.

Learning Activities

The POSE program has developed 5 types of engagement points:

Discussion Forum activities are required in each unit. The discussion forum is a chance for you to further explore the material and reflect on what you have read or learned on this topic.

Shared Reflections activities are required in each unit. The shared reflection activity will provide examples of the different ways you can apply what you have learned in practice. This activity will directly support the Capstone Project unit.

Activity Bank assignments are required assignments in each unit. The activities will vary and may require analyzing content, engaging with a tool, or both. The completed activities are openly shared in the Activity Bank section of the site.

Open Chats are optional for you to attend, The sessions are meant to provide you with a space to explore the unit of the month with an expert in the area. These sessions will be held monthly and will be recorded and shared.

Learning Lounges are optional for you to attend. They are drop-in sessions to provide you with an unstructured space to ask questions and work on further developing your capstone project. The sessions will be held weekly in April 2021.

Your participation is key to making the POSE program a success. We encourage you to use these opportunities to engage with each other in meaningful dialogue and practice.

Key Dates and Sessions

Pose Kick-off Session

Pose Kick-off Session
Date: January 13, 2021
Time: 10-11:30 (PST)

Session Recording and resources

Open Access Unit

Unit Release Date
Date: January 1, 2021 (PST)

Open Chat - Challenges in Open Access
Date: Wednesday, January 20th, 2021
Time: 12:00-1:00 pm (PST)
Speaker: Mark Turin, Associate Professor, UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies & Department of Anthropology.

Open Research Unit

Unit Release Date
Date: February 1, 2021 (PST)

Open Chat - Open Research
Time: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Date: 11-12 pm (PST)
Speaker: Aled Edwards, Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium, Professor of Medical Genetics and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Visiting Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at McGill University

Open Education Unit

Unit Release Date
Date: March 1, 2021 (PST)

Open Chat - Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices
Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Time: 10:00-11:00 (PST)
Speaker: Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo

Capstone Unit

Unit Release Date
Date: April 1, 2021 (PST)

Learning Lounges
Date: Thursday, April 8, 15, and 22
Time: 11:00 am - 1:00 pm (PST)

Program Wrap-up

Program Wrap-Up Session
Date: April 29, 2021
Time: 10-11:30am (PST)

Time Commitment

This program is designed to take no more than 5-6 hours per month, not including optional sessions and materials. The program should take approximately 20-24 hours to complete.

Communication

We would like to keep communication open between the program facilitators and you. We are always available if you reach out. We will also be sharing announcements twice monthly on Monday mornings. We will share these announcements as program updates on the POSE WordPress site. The announcements will be also be shared in Canvas using the magic of RSS. Follow course announcements on the WordPress course site OR if you are enrolled in the Canvas course set your Canvas notifications to receive announcements in your email immediately, daily or weekly.

Your Facilitators

Will Engle
Strategist, Open Education Initiatives;
Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology at UBC Vancouver

Erin Fields, Liaison Librarian & Flexible Learning Coordinator, UBC Library Vancouver

Amanda Grey, Open Education Student Librarian, UBC Library Vancouver

Eka Grguric, Digital Scholarship Librarian, UBC Library Vancouver

Christina Hendricks, Professor of Teaching (Philosophy) and Academic Director, Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology at UBC Vancouver

Rie Namba, Educational Resource Developer - Open Resources, UBC Vancouver

Sarah Parker, Liaison Librarian, UBC Library Vancouver

Lucas Wright, Senior Educational Consultant, Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology at UBC Vancouver

Stephanie Savage
Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian, UBC Vancouver

Mathew Vis-Dunbar, Southern Medical Program Librarian, UBC Library Okanagan

Open Access

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 18:30:57 +0000

In this unit, participants will examine the current economics of publishing and its impacts on academia; authors' rights and intellectual property and the connection to publisher agreements and negotiations; and models for open access, including the challenges and opportunities it affords.

Big Ideas

As you work your way through the modules on Open Access, reflect on the following questions:

How does the academy contribute to inequalities within the publishing ecosystem?
What is the value of my intellectual property?
Are there unintended consequences to engaging in open access?

For this unit, you will complete:

3 modules with a mixture of content types (2 hours)
3 activities from the Activity Bank (30-45 minutes)
A Discussion Forum (30-45 minutes)
A Shared Reflection (20 minutes)

Continue

Open Research

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 18:31:32 +0000

In this unit, participants will examine issues related to transparency, reproducibility, open research, and open data. Topics covered include open workflows, descriptive standards, and open software to support the research life cycle.

Big Ideas

As you work your way through the modules on Open Research, reflect on the following questions:

How can increasing transparency of research project processes - the methodologies and workflows - improve the research and help to advance knowledge?
How can open collaborative methods increase efficiency and widen participation in research?
Beyond putting it in the cloud, what is involved in making data open?

For this unit, you will complete:

3 modules with a mixture of content types (2 hours)
3 activities from the Activity Bank (30-45 minutes)
A Discussion Forum (30-45 minutes)
A Shared Reflection (20 minutes)

Get Started

Open Education

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 18:31:23 +0000

In this unit, participants will examine issues related to open educational resources (OER), open licensing, and open pedagogy. Topics covered include finding and creating OER, understanding the variety of Creative Commons licenses, and engaging students as open knowledge creators.

Big Ideas

As you work your way through the modules on Open Education, reflect on the following questions:

Are there any consequences to licensing my work with a Creative Commons License? What are the benefits and drawbacks? For example, what might happen if I were to license all of my work as CC BY?
What are some challenges and barriers that arise when creating or using open educational resources in the course of your work?
What possibilities does the affordances of the Internet, particularly around connection, sharing, and collaboration, have for teaching and learning?

For this unit, you will complete:

3 modules with a mixture of content types (2 hours)
3 activities from the Activity Bank (30-45 minutes)
A Discussion Forum (30-45 minutes)
A Shared Reflection (20 minutes)

Continue

Publication Ecosystem

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 19:12:39 +0000

The modern publishing ecosystem is a complex multi-stakeholder environment. As an individual operating within this system it is valuable to understand the motivations driving this industry and to consider how your decisions contribute to larger systemic issues. This module will introduce you to the complexities of the modern publishing environment and ask you to consider how your publishing decisions align with your values.

Learning Outcomes

Understand the history of academic publishing and the impact of the transition to digital publishing
Understand the basic economics of publishing
Identify the role of the academic library within the publishing ecosystem
Identify predatory publishing practices and their relationship to open access
Evaluate the degree to which publishers confer value and prestige within the academy
Consider the future of academic publishing

Continue

Image Credit: Stadsbiblioteket, Stockholm, Sweden by Susan Yin. Public Domain.

Pathways to Open

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 19:20:03 +0000

As granting agencies begin to require open access and institutions become more focused on knowledge mobilization and impact, researchers need to develop strategies to make their work openly accessible. This module will explore ways to make your work openly available and investigate the benefits and impact of open access on your academic engagement.

Learning Outcomes

An understanding of the basic rationale for open access
A breakdown of the benefits and challenges that open access presents
A description of the various types of open access
How you can make your work open access under both a gold and green approach

Continue

Image Credit: Stadsbiblioteket, Stockholm, Sweden by Susan Yin. Public Domain.

Pathway

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:29:51 +0000

Select the pathway..

Attend Face to Face Session
Select a Learning Pathway from below
Attend Face to Face Session
Complete one online module from a different pathway or attend one face-to-face workshop or event
Attend Face to Face Session
Receive your Certificate of Completion

Getting Started

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 19:06:00 +0000

Register for POSE

Attend the Introductory Session

Select a Learning Pathway & Complete the Online Modules

Open Education

The Open Education Pathway would be appropriate for participants interested in engaging in open education resources and open pedagogy in the classroom.

Open Access

The Open Access Pathway would be appropriate for participants interested in publishing their research openly and/or have grant requirements for open access.

Open Research

The Open Research Pathway would be appropriate for participants interested in open workflows and tools for the research practices, open science, and data.

Undeclared

The Undeclared Pathway would be appropriate for participants interested in developing their own path through the content by selecting modules to complete.

Open Education Modules

Open Pedagogy
Open Educational Resources
Creative Commons

Open Access Modules

Publication Ecosystem
Author Rights
Pathways to Open

Open Research Modules

Open Science Framework
Open Data
Open Tools

Undeclared Modules

Select any 3 modules from the Open Education, Open Access, and Open Research pathways

Attend Check-in Session

Complete 1 Module from a Different Learning Pathway OR Attend 1 Synchronous Workshop or Event

Attend a Final Wrap-up Session

Receive a Certificate of Completion

Activity Bank

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 23:36:17 +0000

The activity bank has activities that you will complete as part the POSE modules but we also welcome anyone who is not in the course and interested to complete the activities. Roll up your sleeves and make some stuff! The concept behind the activity bank is to learn by doing. This bank is adapted from the D106 Assignment Bank and the Agora Challenge Bank.

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Open Educational Resources

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:06:09 +0000

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any teaching and learning materials that are made available to others to use without cost, and with an open license that allows them to reuse, revise and redistribute them. This module will outline the advantages of using OERs, qualities that make a resource "open", and provide you with some key concepts that will prepare you to use, adapt, and create your own open educational resource

Learning Outcomes

Explain what makes an educational resource open
Give examples of why learners and instructors value and use open educational resources
Define each of the 5Rs, of OER and describe the associated permissions
Identify workflows for adopting, adapting and creating OER
Identify and evaluate sources of open educational resources
Describe a set of steps for sharing OER
Develop and share an open educational resource

Image Credit: Person About to Write by Anastasiia Ostapovych on Unsplash, in the Public Domain.

Continue

Open Pedagogy

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:09:54 +0000

Open pedagogy is the application of the concepts of open to the practices of teaching and learning. It can involve a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities to empower students to have control and agency over their own learning. This module will explore teaching and learning methods that build on principles of openness and learner participation.

Learning Outcomes

Consider different definitions of open pedagogy
Understand pedagogical benefits and impacts to integrating an open approaches into teaching & learning
Explore different examples of open assignments and projects
Reflect on student right, privacy, and agency when working and learning in the open.

Image Credit: Person About to Write by Anastasiia Ostapovych on Unsplash, in the Public Domain.

Continue

Open Workflows

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:10:13 +0000

Research reproducibility is increasingly challenging in a digital ecosystem where project artifacts may live in many different tools and be owned by many different collaborators. This can be mediated by the use of workflow tools. This module introduces core concepts around what it means to conduct research openly, why open workflows are important, and introduces the OSF as a multi-disciplinary workflow tool that supports better collaboration and file management across the research life-cycle.

Learning Outcomes

Understand what it means to engage with an open workflow.
Articulate core concepts around reproducibility and replicability.
Explain the relationship between open workflows and reproducible research
Understand the overall setup of reproducible research (including open workflow process and best practices for organizing research materials and data)
Identify the benefits and risks of using tools such as the OSF.

Get Started

Open Software

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:10:29 +0000

Ultimately a bunch of 0s and 1s, software risks being a black box holding one's research in the dark: from data collection, storage, and processing, to progress tracking, analyses and manuscripts. It is critical that we select tools and formats that allow for a clear window into what we're doing and that enable access into the future. Free, open software can help realize these goals.

Learning Outcomes

Understand the various concepts and degrees of open in open software and open platforms.
Identify the linkages between open software and reproducible research.
Recognize how software choice impacts the longevity and transparency of your research.

Image Credit: image by Markus Spiske https://pixnio.com/miscellaneous/programming-monitor-screen-script-software-open-source-program# (cc0)

Get Started

Open Data

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:10:45 +0000

Learning Outcomes

Identify the 3 key attributes that make data open as described in the Open Definition
Identify the FAIR principles and the difference between FAIR and open data
Value the importance of open data for transparency, reproducibility, and innovation
Describe the steps involved in implementing open data in research
Distinguish between descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata
Appreciate the use of open research data in teaching and learning and in government

Image Credit: Open Data by Descrier CC BY 2.0

Get Started

Copyright and Licensing

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:13:14 +0000

Big Ideas/Big Questions

This section is where each module includes big ideas and questions, why does it matter
Example: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/2-1-copyright-basics/

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

These are short reflective questions that are used to connect the module focus with the students experience.

Outcomes

These are the learning outcomes.

Content

This section does not need to be titled, but includes the content separated by headings

Practice

This section is where you link to learning challenges to apply what you have learned

In Practice: This means how to apply to your work

This is the section where you ask reflective questions to help learners apply their learning to a project that they are working on

Key Points

These are key points to be taken from the module

Additional Resources

Additional resources

Inclusive and Accessible Design

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:14:58 +0000

Big Ideas/Big Questions

This section is where each module includes big ideas and questions, why does it matter
Example: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/2-1-copyright-basics/

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

These are short reflective questions that are used to connect the module focus with the students experience.

Outcomes

These are the learning outcomes.

Content

This section does not need to be titled, but includes the content separated by headings

Practice

This section is where you link to learning challenges to apply what you have learned

In Practice: This means how to apply to your work

This is the section where you ask reflective questions to help learners apply their learning to a project that they are working on

Key Points

These are key points to be taken from the module

Additional Resources

Additional resources

Students as Partners / Contributors

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:15:14 +0000

Big Ideas/Big Questions

This section is where each module includes big ideas and questions, why does it matter
Example: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/2-1-copyright-basics/

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

These are short reflective questions that are used to connect the module focus with the students experience.

Outcomes

These are the learning outcomes.

Content

This section does not need to be titled, but includes the content separated by headings

Practice

This section is where you link to learning challenges to apply what you have learned

In Practice: This means how to apply to your work

This is the section where you ask reflective questions to help learners apply their learning to a project that they are working on

Key Points

These are key points to be taken from the module

Additional Resources

Additional resources

Open Tools and Platforms

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:15:34 +0000

Big Ideas/Big Questions

This section is where each module includes big ideas and questions, why does it matter
Example: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/2-1-copyright-basics/

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

These are short reflective questions that are used to connect the module focus with the students experience.

Outcomes

These are the learning outcomes.

Content

This section does not need to be titled, but includes the content separated by headings

Practice

This section is where you link to learning challenges to apply what you have learned

In Practice: This means how to apply to your work

This is the section where you ask reflective questions to help learners apply their learning to a project that they are working on

Key Points

These are key points to be taken from the module

Additional Resources

Additional resources

Open Processes

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:16:09 +0000

Big Ideas/Big Questions

This section is where each module includes big ideas and questions, why does it matter
Example: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/2-1-copyright-basics/

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

These are short reflective questions that are used to connect the module focus with the students experience.

Outcomes

These are the learning outcomes.

Content

This section does not need to be titled, but includes the content separated by headings

Practice

This section is where you link to learning challenges to apply what you have learned

In Practice: This means how to apply to your work

This is the section where you ask reflective questions to help learners apply their learning to a project that they are working on

Key Points

These are key points to be taken from the module

Additional Resources

Additional resources

Promoting and Documenting your Open Practice

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 20:16:22 +0000

Big Ideas/Big Questions

This section is where each module includes big ideas and questions, why does it matter
Example: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/2-1-copyright-basics/

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

These are short reflective questions that are used to connect the module focus with the students experience.

Outcomes

These are the learning outcomes.

Content

This section does not need to be titled, but includes the content separated by headings

Practice

This section is where you link to learning challenges to apply what you have learned

In Practice: This means how to apply to your work

This is the section where you ask reflective questions to help learners apply their learning to a project that they are working on

Key Points

These are key points to be taken from the module

Additional Resources

Additional resources

Creative Commons

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 21:18:04 +0000

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are types of open licenses that can be applied to Open Educational Resources. These licenses make it easier to share and reuse the work you create. This module will explore the basic concept of Creative Commons licenses and how they relate to copyright.

Learning Outcomes

Explain the basic concept of Creative Commons licenses and how they relate to copyright
Explain the difference between using a work under "fair dealing" rules and using one with a CC license
Give examples of what one can/cannot do with resources that have different CC licenses (BY, NC, SA, ND)
Point to ways to find CC licensed content of various types
Apply a CC license to their own work, and share that work in a format that is easily re-usable by others

Image Credit: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND by Umberto Unsplash (Unsplash license).

Continue

Traditional Knowledge

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:04 +0000

https://youtu.be/14YInJGNwZc

Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property by the Centre for International Governance Innovation

Traditional knowledge (TK) is knowledge, know-how, skills and practices that are developed, sustained and passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity.

While there is not yet an accepted definition of TK at the international level, it can be said that:

TK in a general sense embraces the content of knowledge itself as well as traditional cultural expressions, including distinctive signs and symbols associated with TK.
TK in the narrow sense refers to knowledge as such, in particular the knowledge resulting from intellectual activity in a traditional context, and includes know-how, practices, skills, and innovations.

Traditional knowledge can be found in a wide variety of contexts, including: agricultural, scientific, technical, ecological and medicinal knowledge as well as biodiversity-related knowledge. (World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Traditional Knowledge)

Australian Dreaming Stories

Through song, dance, painting, and storytelling which express the Dreaming stories, the Aboriginal communities of Australia have maintained a link with the Dreaming – the mythological time when the natural world was created – from ancient times to today, creating a rich cultural heritage. Dreaming stories have been reproduced in paintings and artworks. The right to reproduce in paintings and artwork will not be with only one person, but with a group of people who together have the authority to determine whether the story and images may be used in an artwork, by whom the artwork may be created, to whom it may be published, and the terms, if any, on which the artwork may be reproduced.

Image Australia Outback by Artsoceans licensed under CC By-SA 4.0

Australia Dreaming Stories - A Case Study

In 1994, a carpet factory reproduced a well-known painting by Banduk Marika entitled Djanda and the Sacred Waterhole on a carpet. The underlying image of this work belongs to the Rirratjingu clan and is part of the mythology of the Djangkawu creation story.

Reflections

In the case study of the Australian Dreaming Stories, reflect on the following question:

What impact does the use of the painting have on the intellectual property rights of Banduk Marika, as outlined above?
Is the painting Djanda and the Sacred Waterhole considered traditional knowledge?
What impact does the use of the painting have on the cultural and spiritual health of the Rirratinjgu clan?

Adapted from "Protect and Promote Your Culture: A Practical Guide to Intellectual Property for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities" by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Traditional Knowledge Division under a CC BY 3.0 IGO

Traditional Knowledge and Canadian Indigenous Peoples

While copyright serves the purpose to protect the rights of creators of literary and artistic works, there are several ways in which copyright fails Indigenous peoples and TK.

Indigenous cultural heritage and identity is expressed through creative works like storytelling, song, dance, rituals, and practices and is connected to land and community across time. The Canadian Copyright Act, as it is currently structured, cannot protect Indigenous knowledge due to the complex and community-based notions of ownership.

In recognizing the difference in ideas of ownership, copyright is increasingly harmful to Indigenous peoples in the following ways:

Copyright focuses on economic benefits of knowledge and fails to recognize the cultural, spiritual and communal importance of Indigenous creative works.
Copyright focuses on individual creators and fails to recognize the communal nature of producing and caring for the creative works.
Copyright provides limits to the length of time in which an object can be protected which fails to recognize the intangible spiritual nature of the object that is situated in Indigenous identity across time.

Further issues around copyright for Indigenous creative works relate to the idea of ownership of heritage materials in the traditional publishing process. From the Canadian Federation of Library Associations(website) Position Statement on Indigenous Knowledge in Canada's Copyright Act (PDF):

Who holds "legal" copyright to that knowledge or cultural expression under Canada’s current Copyright Act is often contrary to Indigenous notions of copyright ownership. Indigenous knowledge may be found in published works as a result of research or appropriation, and in these cases, the author of the published work holds the "legal" copyright to that knowledge or cultural expression, while Indigenous peoples would see the owners as the people from where the knowledge originated.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about traditional knowledge in the Canadian context, review: Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural Expressions, Conference Report — Toronto, Canada, March 2019.

Traditional Knowledge Licenses & Labels

As illustrated through this module, IP rights related to traditional knowledge fail to consider the full expression of cultural heritage, traditions, and notions of ownership. From this understanding came the development of Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels that address the protocols and concerns of Indigenous peoples around traditional knowledge objects.

Traditional Knowledge (TK) Licenses are developed in conversation with Indigenous communities to provide a set of licenses, similar to the Creative Commons license structure, that identifies the needs of Indigenous peoples when addressing intellectual property.

The TK Labels are a tool for Indigenous communities to add existing local protocols for access and use to recorded cultural heritage that is digitally circulating outside community contexts. The TK Labels help non-community users of this cultural heritage understand its importance and significance to the communities from where it derives and continues to have meaning (TK Labels by Local Contexts licensed under CC NC-ND 4.0).

Example of TK Labels in Use - SQ'ÉWLETS - Research and Resource Management Centre

Traditional Knowledge Licenses
Traditional Knowledge License Non Commercial
Traditional Knowledge Label Seasonal

Dig Deeper

To learn more about Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels, review: Anderson, Jane and Kimberly Christen. (2013). ‘Chuck a Copyright on it’: Dilemmas of Digital Return and the Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels. Museum Anthropology Review 7, (1-2) Spring-Fall 2013; 105-126.

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Publisher Negotiations

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:02 +0000

Why does negotiating a publisher contract matter?

Often authors think of publishers as neutral entities when it comes to questions of ownership and intellectual property. The process of signing contracts that assign publishers ownership of intellectual work is seen as just a part of the process of publishing. However, in reality, considerable control over academic knowledge is exercised by publishers that are not necessarily visible to authors. Instead of directly addressing copyright violations by authors openly sharing their work, publishers are approaching the open sharing of content at a higher level.

The Coalition of Responsible Sharing is a group of publishers who have signed a statement on the formal steps they are taking to stop platforms like Academia.edu and ResearchGate from allowing authors to share their publications. Additionally, the coalition released an open letter to the Trump administration actively discouraging the consideration of putting a zero embargo which would allow for the open publication of federally funded research immediately upon completion. These kinds of actions by publishers make it extremely important for authors to consider how to maintain their rights over their work so decisions on where they can share and to who is not impeded by the contract they have signed.

Watch the following video on protecting your rights as an academic author:

https://youtu.be/CREcpYl1YjQ

Protecting Your Rights as an Academic Author by UBC Library's Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office

Preparing to Negotiate

The key to any successful negotiation is preparation. Before you begin to negotiate, consider what you hope to gain. While authors, in general, share a common goal of wanting their work to be widely read, what they hope to get out of a publishing deal may vary significantly. For example, consider the following rights you may want to retain:

Make reproductions for use in teaching, scholarship, and research;
Borrow portions of the work for use in other works;
Create derivative works;
Alter the work, add to the work, or update the content of the work;
Maintain identity as the author of the work;
Be informed of any uses, reproductions, or distributions of the work;
Perform or display the work;
Include all or part of the work in a future thesis, dissertation, or other scholarly publication;
Develop an oral presentation of the material in any forum;
Make materials available to underdeveloped nations for humanitarian purposes;
Archive and preserve the work as part of either a personal or institutional initiative, for example, on your own web site or in an institutional repository; and
Claim ownership in every draft and pre-print version of the work.

Whether it is retaining certain rights to your work or making your work openly accessible, your publishing goals are personal and not necessarily reflected in a template contract.

Negotiation

Author Addendums

An author addendum is a legal instrument that you can use to modify your copyright transfer agreements with non-open access journal publishers. It allows you to select which individual rights out of the bundle of copyrights you want to keep, such as distributing copies in the course of teaching and research, posting the article on a personal or institutional Web site, or creating derivative works.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has created template author addendums to use during your negotations.

Rights Reversion

For book authors, re-evaluating your author agreements when the book has fallen out of print or isn't selling well is an opportunity to consider opening your work up to the public. To learn more about rights reversion in book publishing, review Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available by the Authors Alliance.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about researcher understanding of copyright and transfer agreements, read the following:

Lange, J. (2018). Confused about copyright? Assessing Researchers’ Comprehension of Copyright Transfer Agreements. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 6(1), eP2253. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2253

Adapted from Author Rights: Using the SPARC Author Addendum (Website)from SPARC, licensed under CC By 4.0

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Intellectual Property and Open

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers. The main focus of the open access movement is peer reviewed research literature. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs. Importantly, "true" open access requires that the content be both freely available online and that barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or minimized by employing a Creative Commons or other open license to the work. (Open Access Module, Pathways to Open)

There are a number of challenges and benefits associated to OA publishing. The Pathways to Open section of the unit will cover many of these in detail.

For this part of the module, we will focus briefly on open sharing and the spectrum of openness, outside of the final publication, as it relates to your intellectual property.

Spectrum of Open Sharing

Publishing openly can be considered a part of a spectrum of openness. The spectrum of openness involves all the ways researchers can share their work through the entire research cycle. With the introduction of social networked technologies, network research tools, and open processes, the research cycle has the potential to be more open and participatory. Each form of social network engagement provides different opportunities to communicate but also different levels of engagement with social media technologies and networks that disperse the information.

For example, in Table 1: Degree of Openness at Different Research Cycle Stages, examples of open research sharing by audiences is described from the Social Media for Citizens and Public Sector Collaboration (Somus) and the NMR Lipids Project (NMRLP).

Table 1: Degree of Openness at Different Research Cycle Stages from the article Afraid of Scooping – Case Study on Researcher Strategies against Fear of Scooping in the Context of Open Science

The table identifies a variety of outputs for sharing during the research cycle and the tools used to share (e.g. Jaiku, wikis, Etherpad, ArXiv, GitHub, etc.). The table also identifies the audience when deciding on a research output as the choices made on where and how to share may differ depending on the audience the researchers were interested in engaging.

Decision Making for Open Sharing

Dr. Iwamoto is working with a research team that is interested in sharing their grant applications and research design, updates of lab findings during the research process, sharing their data and first report drafts, and engaging in knowledge translation to share the findings with the broader public. What should he and his team consider when deciding to share openly?

Before engaging in open sharing during the research life cycle, researchers need to think through the workflows of openly sharing their material. Openly sharing is complementary to traditional publishing processes and will add another layer of decision making, process, and activity to releasing research.

These questions will help guide you in making choices about how you engage and with what tools:

What type of engagement are you interested in developing?

One of the challenges when deciding to share openly is deciding what you will share, when you will share during the research cycle, and the tool(s) to use. When making this decision, you should consider what is the purpose of your engagement. This could include: connecting to other scholars; sharing with the public; and gaining feedback or insight into your work.

What do I want to communicate?

Thinking carefully about what you want to say and not say about your research is important when making a decision about the open sharing workflows. Perhaps you want to share information about your research design but would like to keep private the findings of your research until the final publication. Thinking through these elements of open sharing will help you develop a plan of action.

How much time and effort do you want to put into updating and maintaining your content?

When openly sharing about your research the last thing you want to do is leave a partially developed or unfinished public space with your content. Making decisions around how much time you have for developing and maintaining your open sharing practices will help you decide what to engage in and what tools you will use.

Tools for Sharing

For more information about the kinds of tools to use for openly sharing, review the Open Research Module on Open Software.

Research Scooping

While there are several benefits to engaging in open sharing, a major concern specifically related to intellectual property rights is the fear of research scooping. Research scooping is a term used to describe when another person publishes an idea or results of research prior to you. This is concerning to researchers who fear that the lack of novelty of their research will negatively impact the publishing prospects, particularly in high-impact journals. With open sharing, the fear of research scooping is even more pronounced for researchers as there is a sense that their intellectual property is potentially in more danger of being plagiarized or taken when it is posted online without the "protections" of a publisher.

While the fear of research scooping is a real concern for researchers, a recent paper by Hill and Stein (2019) indicates that the price for those who are scooped is not as large as perceived. Hill and Stein tracked and analyzed 150,000 structures from the Protein Data Bank, a repository that houses identified protein structures under embargo. Between 1999 and 2017, 1,630 scientists worked on the PDB structures to publish in journals once the embargoes were lifted. The research findings showed protein structures that were published second were 2.5% less likely to be published, published in journals with a lower measured impact factor that the first publication, and out of an estimated 100 citations the first paper would receive 58 and the second paper 42 (Hill and Stein, 2019).

While there are many factors that may play into the fear of research scooping, including the priorities of promotion and tenure processes, academic conventions in your field and considerations related to the potential financial benefits to your findings (e.g. patents), ownership of your intellectual property should not be one of them. If you engage in open sharing practices, the principles of scholarly integrity apply. Acknowledgement through attribution is an agreed-upon moral commitment in academia. It is the cornerstone of building upon the knowledge and contributions of others. While research misconduct, including misappropriation and plagiarism, can occur, it can occur regardless of open or traditional publishing practices. Engaging in knowledge sharing is a combination of knowing your rights as it relates to your intellectual property and entering into the practice with trust in your colleagues' scholarly integrity.

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Author Rights

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 20:36:38 +0000

Ownership of intellectual property is fundamental to the research enterprise, yet few scholars fully understand their rights or feel comfortable negotiating with publishers to retain them. This module will introduce you to intellectual property ownership in the academy and better prepare you to enter into publishing agreements.

Learning Outcomes

Understand the types of intellectual property in Canada and how they are legally protected
Identify the gaps in Canadian copyright as it relates to traditional knowledge
Explain the value of intellectual property to academics and publishers
Identify common terminology found in journal publisher contracts
Understand how to negotiate journal publishing contracts
Explain the benefits and barriers to openly sharing your intellectual property

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Image Credit: Stadsbiblioteket, Stockholm, Sweden by Susan Yin licensed under Public Domain.

Contribute to Open Forum

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 21:31:45 +0000

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Academic Publishing Today

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:07 +0000

The contemporary academic publishing ecosystem is a juggernaut upheld by centuries of tradition and relied upon by academics, institutions, funders and communities to vet and confer quality upon research and scientific discovery. In the academy, publishing plays a particularly central role by functioning as a seemingly impartial and objective measure through which scholarly outputs can be judged and circulated.

For those who have decided to pursue a career in academia, they are likely already aware of the importance that their publishing decisions can have on their ability to secure research funding, obtain promotion and elevate their profile within their discipline.

Although research assessment and scholarly communication are not the same thing, they are often conflated. One potential result of this is an over-reliance on quantitative metrics that prioritizes measures and rankings over science and can lead to the "gaming" of the publishing system.

Publish or Perish?

As the quantification of research impact and a "publish or perish" mentality become more prevalent it becomes increasingly important for scholars to understand the complexities of the current academic publishing landscape and, in particular, to recognize the forces at play that make it difficult to affect changes that would serve to create a more equitable publishing environment and academic rewards system.

Scenario – Publish or Perish

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, wrote a total of 10 papers over the course of his academic career. He is quoted in the Guardian as stating that he believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

How is productivity measured in your discipline?
What pressure do you feel to quantify your research output in order to advance your career?
How do you understand the relationship between quantity and quality when it comes to assessment of your academic career?

Tradition vs. Innovation

If we begin by looking at the history of the academic publishing system as a way to understand the power it wields, it is interesting to note that relatively little has changed in the centuries since the first academic journals were established. Aside from a shift to digital publishing and the formalization of peer review, the systems and formats established by early journals persist to this day.

There are of course many benefits to this system. It has proven to be a reliable model of disseminating science and established peer review practices, backed by well-know publishers, continue to be the benchmark of credible science.

However, this system has also proven inflexible and resistant to change, even in the face of new technology and dissemination methods that make greater and faster communication possible. Established publisher "brands" have come to dominate science and growing consolidation has granted the publishers left standing with increased influence and control over science. As this influence has grown over time particular journals and publishers have become increasingly synonymous with quality and prestige. At the same time, other stakeholders operating within academia including universities and funders have begun to look to these publishers to confer quality and value. Due to an increased focus on the importance of metrics including the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and author H-Indexes in tenure and review processes, for example, many scholars are strongly encouraged, if not required, to publish in specific high quality or prestigious journals in their field. This makes it increasingly difficult for individuals to make independent decisions about where and how they publish and may discourage many from choosing to publish in non-traditional venues.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the modern academic publishing ecosystem, review: Fyfe, A., et al. (2017), Untangling Academic Publishing: a history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Image Credit: 1665 journal des scavans title by Unknown. Public Domain.

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Publishing and the Academy

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Academic publishing holds an important place within the larger academy. Alongside the professionalization of research and the development of the tenure and review system, publishing has come to play an increasingly significant role in the assessment of an individual scholar's career.

While "most agree RPT [Review, Promotion and Tenure] requirements should encourage peer-reviewed works of high quality, in practice, the value of publications is often assessed using shortcuts such as the prestige of the publication venue, rather than on the quality and rigor of peer review of each individual item."
Leslie Schimanski and Juan Pablo Alperin. (2018). The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes: Past, present, and future. Licensed under CC-BY.

A growing focus on the publication venue over the research itself as a marker of quality is highlighted by the increased interest in bibliometrics as a means to evaluate scholarship. Measures including the H Index, citation counts, the Journal Impact Factor and others are used to produce seemingly impartial evaluations. Funders have also taken to looking at publication venue and Journal Impact Factor as a marker of quality in grant application processes, further reinforcing the need for researchers to publish in prestige journals with high impact factors.

Because the integration of bibliometric measures in research assessment operates at several levels within the academy - disciplinary, institutional, funder - it systematically reinforces these measures as markers of quality. As a result, scholars have little ability to make publication decisions outside of this framework without worrying about the potential impact on their careers.

In recent years, open access advocates and scholars from across the academy have begun to push back on this narrow and prescriptive approach to research assessment. DORA - the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment - is one such scholar-led initiative that is asking institutions and funders to "not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions."

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the complexities of research metrics, review: Werner, Reinhard. (2015). The focus on bibliometrics makes papers less useful. Available to read on Nature.com.

Shimanski, Leslie and Juan Pablo Alperin. (2018). The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes: Past, present, and future. Licensed under CC-BY.

Advocacy and the Academy

In recent years there has been a growing grassroots backlash against for-profit publishers from within the academy. Increasingly researchers are beginning to question the free labor they contribute to academic publishing and reconsidering their contributions in light of the commercial interests that publishers represent.

Perhaps the most well known of such efforts, The Cost of Knowledge project started as a post on mathematician Timothy Gower's blog urging his colleagues to consider a boycott of Elsevier by refusing to publish, serve on editorial boards, or conduct peer review for their fleet of journals. After garnering significant support, the blog post has grown into what it is today, a list of over 17,000 academics who have made a public declaration that they will not support Elsevier journals.

Case Study - Journal of Informetrics

In early 2019 the entire editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics resigned in an open letter to Elsevier, the journal's publisher. According to the letter, the board resigned after discovering that their "position on ownership, open access, and open citations is fundamentally irreconcilable with the position of Elsevier". In the days following their resignation, the same team launching a new fully open access journal called Quantitative Science Studies.

What responsibility does a publisher have to the community of scholars that supports their publications?
Where does a journal derive its value? - is it in the journal name or in the editorial and peer review practices behind it?
If a journal editorial board in your field left to create a new OA journal, what factors would you consider before choosing which journal to publish in?

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Open Access Basics

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:02 +0000

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.

Watch the below video to get a brief primer on the basic mechanics of open access:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9Jh_GffRPU

Open Access by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries

While open access can be applied to all forms of published research outputs, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers, theses, book chapters, and monographs, the primary focus of the OA movement has traditionally been academic journals. Whereas conventional (non-open access) journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterized by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to access the journal's contents.

Free to read and share

Importantly, "true" open access requires that the content be both freely available online and that barriers to copying or reuse are minimized by employing a Creative Commons or other open license to the work (learn more about Creative Commons in the Creative Commons module). This is usually facilitated by allowing the original authors to retain copyright over their work and assign an open license at the time of publication. As we will see later, alternative models of open access exist under which the publisher makes academic works available online for free but retains copyright and prohibits further redistribution. While this method of open access meets the baseline requirements of open distribution, it does not guarantee that the works can be reused and as a result is a limit on the utility of the research. The desire of publishers to retain ownership over academic knowledge, while also promoting open access to research is just one example of the complex ways in which different stakeholders have interpreted open access and shaped it to meet their needs and preferences.

Facilitating access through new economic models

Providing free and unfettered access to academic literature that would otherwise be paid for begs an obvious question, how is open access financially sustainable? Open access advocates acknowledge that knowledge production is not free and there are costs - both financial and otherwise - associated with high-quality academic publishing. Instead of relying on libraries, governments, industry and citizens to pay for access to scientific literature, open access publishing operates under the premise that there are viable funding models available that can ensure traditional peer review standards of quality while also making the following changes:

Rather than making journal articles accessible through a subscription business model, all academic publications could be made free to read and published with some other cost-recovery model, such as publication charges, subsidies, or charging subscriptions only for the print edition, with the online edition gratis or "free to read".
Rather than relying on traditional notions of "all rights reserved" copyright models, authors and publishers could instead offer up academic content under a "some rights reserved" model, which would make it free to be built upon by others.

In the contemporary publishing landscape the "true" cost of publishing is hotly debated and if anything open access has only intensified the conversation. For perhaps the first time, publishers have attempted to quantify the cost of publishing an article through the adoption of article processing charges, fees passed along to authors to cover the cost of open access publishing. What these fees have made it difficult to ignore is that the cost of publishing is often far more than just the labor that goes into the production of the journal. Prestigious journals with fees in the thousands make it clear that publishing with them will cost a premium.

The prevalence of open access

Despite the complexities around the implementation of and transition to open access, the share of published research that is being made openly available continues to grow over time. While firm data on the prevalence of open access is difficult to obtain, a 2018 article by Piwowar et al. suggests that at least 28% of all published research is currently available under some form of open access. Additionally, their research shows that this percentage is much higher for recently published works. Of the academic papers published in 2015 (the most recent year analyzed in the study) 45% is open access.

Aside from looking at the total volume of open access publications, the success of open access can also be measured by support that open approaches have garnered from publishers, funders and institutions. The tenor of the conversation around open access has largely shifted from one about the if and why of open access to the how.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the prevalence of open access publishing, review:

Piwowar et al. (2018). The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

What motivates the open access movement

The open access movement means different things to different groups. For the individual researcher it may be about ensuring that their research impact is optimized, for the funder it may be about their desire to facilitate innovation and international collaboration, for others it may be about transforming the publishing landscape and upsetting the prestige publishing economy. Each of these stakeholders will bring a different perspective and approach, attempting to mold open access in their image. Perhaps more than anything else, this module reflects the complex interplay of all of these motivations as they have come shape the open access movement.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the history of open access, review: Chan et al. (2002). Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration. Licensed under CC-BY.

Sections of this page were adapted from Open Access on Wikipedia. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

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Opportunities and Challenges

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

While most actors who have a stake in the research enterprise support open access and embrace its principles, it is still true that publishers as well as the funders and institutions that support scholarship have yet to institute policies and reward structures that encourage and support researchers who would like to publish open access. As a result the social good of open access often has to be weighed against the practicalities of efficiency, career incentives, and research funding.

Open Access Opportunities

The greatest benefit of open access is that it enables the results of scholarly research to be disseminated more rapidly and widely:

More people can read the results of scholarly research, including those who would otherwise not be able to access that information because they cannot afford the subscription to an expensive journal.
New ideas can be dispersed more rapidly and widely, which in turn triggers new research studies; it serves as an impetus for knowledge.
Scientific research shows that publishing in open access, because of the worldwide visibility without barriers, demonstrably leads to more citations and more impact.
Businesses also have broad access to the most recent scientific ideas, which they can then build upon. Open access contributes to the knowledge economy and provides an economic boost.
Since open access also implies wider reuse, recent knowledge can be put to immediate use in teaching as open educational resources.

Open Access Challenges

Researchers experience a number of disadvantages, most of which relate to the transition to the open access publication model. It is only in the longer term that the extra effort required brings concrete benefits to researchers themselves. This may affect the priority they attach to switching to this new publication model.

The disadvantages they experience:

In many disciplines, researchers are rated by their ability to publish in journals with a high impact factor. However, it takes some time before new journals, both traditional and open access, can acquire an impact factor. Related to this, the value of the impact factor as a valid and accurate measure of a journal's quality has become a topic of debate. Increasingly, researchers are asking research evaluators (institutions and funders) to judge research on its individual merits, and not where it has been published.
The number of high-quality, fully open access journals varies enormously across the different disciplines. Some disciplines, including law and the humanities do not have a large pool of suitable venues in which to publish.
Publishing in open access journals sometimes involves additional administration, whereas delivering articles to traditional journals can usually be done easily online.
In this transition period most research institutes have not yet made provisions for the payment of Author Processing Charges (APCs). This therefore entails additional, often substantial, costs for researchers. However, many universities nowadays have funds for open access to publish and it is good to inquire about this.
Researchers can be spammed by open access publishers of often dubious quality ("predatory journals"), which colours their perception of the open access publication model.
Supplying publication data and the full text of publications to repositories (to satisfy "green open access") means extra work for researchers.

Scenario – Setting Priorities

Let's consider this scenario: Siobhan is a PhD student under your supervision and is preparing a manuscript for submission to journals. Her research has a strong public health aspect and she would like to publish open access. All of the prestigious journals in her discipline allow authors to submit articles for consideration as either open access, with an accompanying $2,500 fee, or not. Siobhan does have some research funding available to her (~ $10,000) and is struggling with whether or not she should submit her article as an open access article and pay the fee, or not. What advice would you give to Siobhan?

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the benefits and challenges of open access, review: Adema, Janneke and Eelco Ferwerda. (2014). Publication Practices in Motion: The Benefits of Open Access Publishing for the Humanities. In New Publication Cultures in the Humanities: Exploring the Paradigm Shift. (pg 131-147). Licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND.

May, Christopher. (2018). Academic Publishing and Open Access: Costs, benefits and options for publishing research. Licensed under CC-BY-NC.

Portions of this section has been adapted from information found on the Open Access Netherlands website.

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Open Access Models

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

While a basic mandate to provide scholarly research for free unites all approaches to open access, that does not mean that different communities have not adapted open access principles to suit their needs and values. In the contemporary publishing landscape one can identify several different manifestations of OA that range from those that do as little as possible to disrupt the traditional publishing ecosystem to those that eschew traditional publishing altogether. Starting with green open access, we will dissect the most common approaches to OA and explain the differences between them.

Green Open Access

Green OA refers to the self-archiving of an article (it is still fairly rare for monographs to be published OA at all, and even more rare that they are done so via a green approach) in a publicly-accessible institutional or subject repository (usually after an embargo period).

The central feature of green open access is that authors are still able to participate in the "traditional" publishing system. In this way, green open access does not supplant current academic publishing practices, instead it complements them, allowing researchers who are often incentivized to publish in prestigious closed access journals to continue to meet these obligations while also make a version of their work available to a wider public audience that cannot access the version of record.

For green open access to work, it needs to be supported by the traditional publishers, as it relies on their permission to make a version of the article available in another venue outside of the journal. A publisher's support for green open access is spelled out in the publication agreement that authors sign with journals upon acceptance of their manuscript. To learn more about publisher agreements, review the Author Rights unit.

Publishing Green Open Access

Green OA relies on the research first being published in a traditional subscription-based journal. This does not necessarily mean any or all journals will allow their authors to re-publish their work under a green OA model. This being the case, an author who would like to publish under the green model must first select a journal that permits self-archiving as outlined in their publisher agreement or must be willing to request such permission from the publisher if such permission is not initially offered. Once an author has confirmed that they have permission to self-archive their work, they will then need to confirm that they have an appropriate version of the work to make available (See: Publisher Agreements and Publisher Negotiations)
Having secured an acceptable version of the work, authors are free to then make that work available in an online repository. While some publishers permit the posting of the work on a personal or departmental website, more commonly they require that the research is posted in either an institutional or disciplinary repository (e.g. cIRcle - University of British Columbia's digital repository). OpenDOAR is a directory of open access repositories that can help you identify an appropriate place to archive your work.

Green Open Access Embargos

For green OA, publishers often request that authors respect an embargo period (See: Publisher Agreements) before the item is released openly. Because of embargo periods, self-archiving as a method of OA does not allow for the public dissemination of research as quickly as gold OA. As a result, it may be more difficult for authors to comply with OA mandates (imposed by funders or their institutions), which usually include timeline requirements.

Gold Open Access

In its simplest form, gold open access refers to making research freely available immediately upon publication in an open access journal. Unlike with the green model of open access, there is no waiting period during which the work is only available in a toll access journal before being posted online for broad public dissemination. Authors may prefer gold open access as it presents only one workflow and produces only one version of the article. Unfortunately, many authors are deterred from gold open access publishing because prestigious open access journals charge article processing charges (APCs).

Publishing Gold Open Access

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

APCs are fees that authors are expected to pay to cover the cost of publication of their articles. The standard rationale for APCs is that if publishers cannot charge for access to the journal, they need to cover the cost of production somehow and make up these funds by asking the author to cover costs. APCs range in price from a few hundred dollars to thousands, with many prestigious journals charging upwards of $3000. The transfer of payment for the cost of academic publishing from libraries to individual researchers introduces many new complications into an already complex and somewhat dysfunctional publishing system. The range of fees presented by different open access journals leads to another important question about open access; is there an obligation to produce and publish research on a cost-recovery model, or should publishers be free to commercially exploit it? As discussed in the Publication Ecosystem, early open access advocates expected that the internet would result in a marked decrease in the cost of publication based on easier dissemination and a democratization of publishing.

Image Credit: from How Much Do Top Publishers Charge for Open Access? by Beata Socha. Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.

Today, given that well known journals with impressive Journal Impact Factors are often charging the highest APCs, it appears that the significance of the prestige economy was greatly underestimated by these early visionaries.

Paying for Gold Open Access

The introduction of APCs has altered the relationship between publishers and authors because for the first time authors are directly involved in the economic calculus of publishing. Understandably, authors often resent being asked to contribute to the cost of publishing their own research and many simply cannot afford to. In response to the introduction of APC costs various stakeholder groups have come up with strategies to support researchers and cover these new costs. Funders are now allowing researchers to write APC costs into grants, academic institutions are creating APC funds to support their faculty and academic libraries are negotiating new types of access agreements (often referred to as "transformative agreements") that cover the cost of open access publishing in a specific publishers' journals.

Unsurprisingly, the transfer of publication costs from subscribers to authors has not solved many of the inequalities built into the academic publishing system. In a discussion on roadblocks to better open access models, David Crotty wrote the following about shifting inequity within the system:

The flaws in the author-pays business model for journals have been evident for more than a decade. The APC model represents a lateral move in terms of access, greatly improving access for readers but shifting the inequity in the system onto authors. It allows everyone to read the work of others, but limits the ability to publish one’s own work to those with sufficient funds to cover the costs of doing so. This greatly disadvantages authors from less-wealthy regions of the world, along with unfunded researchers, and entire fields without the significant funding structures found in some of the sciences that are largely driving the move to APC models. Waiver programs are already under strain, and there seems little willingness among wealthy nations or authors to overpay in order to support their less-well-off colleagues.
Roadblocks to Better Open Access Models, David Crotty, 2019.

Learn more about the economics of publishing.

Selecting an Open Access Journal

While gold open access may be as simple as publishing in an open access journal, for many researchers selecting an appropriate open journal is a daunting proposition as it may require them to consider publication venues outside of those they are familiar with. As mentioned in the Publication Ecosystem module, fear of predatory publishers is another consideration. Luckily many tools have been developed to help researchers identify relevant and high-quality open access journals in their field. Examples include:

Directory of Open Access Journals: Large database of vetted open access journals across publishers and disciplines. Search by title or field.
Enago Open Access Journal Finder: Enter your manuscript abstract to help you shortlist trusted OA journals that are the most compatible with your research. Relies on DOAJ to vet legitimate journals.
IEEE Publication Recommender: Helps you choose a journal from electrical engineering, computing, biotechnology, telecommunications, power and energy and other technologies, in which to publish your research. Open access filters are available.
Open Journal Matcher: Recommends open journal options based on the abstract for your paper.

Test Your Knowledge

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Open for Whom?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

"Something has gone wrong along the road to achieving complete open access in scholarly publishing, and the stakes have changed. Thirty years ago, there was a problem with access to information. Today, we have a problem with who controls publishing and moreover, with the control and governance of the whole range of scientific process and output. Former inequalities remain. New inequalities are emerging. Is open access the beginning of a new and more egalitarian episode of scientific communication? Or is it just another Trojan horse, allowing private companies to extend their control of the Big Data now generated by science?"
Herb, Ulrich and Joachim Schöpfel (2018). Open Divide Emerges as Open Access Unfolds in Open Divide? Critical Studies on Open Access. Licensed under CC-BY-NC

It would be misguided to end this module without addressing some of the limitations of open access. In recent years, critical responses to open access have increased and many supporters have grown disillusioned with the co-opting of OA by commercial publishers and the movement's inability to address and correct larger inequities that exist within the academic publishing ecosystem.

Decolonizing open

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBN8_IGuuw&feature=emb_logo

Open Dialogues: Daniel Heath Justice, Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia.

With the rise of gold pay to play open access models, global north countries with robust funding models have a greater ability to contribute to the open dissemination of literature. On the flip side, researchers from the global south are not be able to participate in open access to the same degree resulting in the inability of their research to have the same global impact.

There has also been growing awareness around the complexities of imposing open access on the knowledge of indigenous peoples and marginalized groups. Colonizer cultures have a well established history of appropriating the cultural artifacts, practices and information of colonized peoples and it is imperative that open access principles recognize this practice of extraction and avoid recreating it the discourse of open.

In a recent report on open science prepared for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the authors highlight the imperative to decolonize open access, not only as a moral imperative, but for the betterment of science:

"Debates and policy recommendations from Global North institutions on Open Science and open access usually deal with access to and dissemination of research outputs (still largely in journals and books). Promotion of these policies has tended to focus on the benefits, such as increased visibility and citations, paying little attention to the burden and the risks—particularly for knowledge-holding communities on the margins or scholars from the Global South...In this context, open access tends to reinforce the hegemony of science done and published in the Global North at the expense of local knowledge, seldom in open access. This reduces intellectual diversity and contributes to the homogenization of science and creativity."
Leslie Chan et al. (2020) Open Science Beyond Open Access: For and with Communities, Licensed under CC-BY-NC.

Case Study – Digitizing African Cultural Heritage

A 2018 study commissioned by the French Government outlined a possible path towards restitution of African Cultural Heritage obtained by the French state during its colonial expansion. One recommendation put forward by the study was to digitize and make available as open access resources all cultural works that would be returning to their respective African home nations. Critics of the report challenged this recommendation, arguing that digitizing the artifacts would:

risk placing the French Government in a position of returning Africa’s Material Cultural Heritage while retaining control over the generation, presentation, and stewardship of Africa’s Digital Cultural Heritage for decades to come.
create a double standard by requiring African Cultural Heritage to be digitized and made available when the same demands are not made of its own national institutions.
and prevent African communities from enjoying full autonomy in devising any access strategies for restituted material and digital cultural heritage

In your opinion, what obligations should holders of appropriated Cultural Heritage have to the cultures and peoples that the works belong to? Is the responsibility to make culture and history widely available greater than that of restitution?

Learn more

Because the modules in this program are meant to serve as brief introductions to the topics presented, there isn't space to discuss the critiques of open access in sufficient depth. Although not required, participants are encouraged to do additional reading before moving on to other sections. Those listed below may serve as a starting point.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about critical responses to open access, review:

Chan, Leslie. (2017). Confessions of an Open Access Advocate. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

Ulrich, Herb. (2018). Open Access and Symbolic Gift Giving. Licensed under CC-BY-NC.

Turin, Mark. (2019). Ownership, Control, Access & Possession in Open Access Humanities Publishing. Licensed under CC-BY.

Pavis, Mathilde and Andrea Wallace. (2019). Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access Relevant to the Digitization and Restitution of African Cultural Heritage and Associated Materials Licensed under CC-BY

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Types of Open Educational Resources

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 23:53:16 +0000

There is a huge variety of different types of open educational resources, ranging from images and multimedia to open textbooks.

What is Open Scholarship?

efields — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:04:55 +0000

In POSE, we'll be exploring how open copyright licenses, collaborative practices, and networked technologies have the potential to lower barriers to knowledge by making the processes and products of scholarship more distributed, transparent, and accessible. With roots in democracy, equality, and social justice, open scholarship operates under the assumption that knowledge creation and dissemination should be understood as social practices. In this sense, as Tom Woodward has stated, "Open is a purposeful path towards connection and community,” and the values of inclusion, social impact, and participation are integral to the practice of open". In recent years, there has also been increased emphasis on open methods to advance the speed, sharing, and integrity of scientific discovery.

Open scholarship is the application of open practices throughout the teaching, learning, research and scholarly environment. Examples of open practices include:

The use of open copyright licenses that grant permission for others to freely access, reuse, redistribute, or build upon your scholarly work.
Using networks, web-based tools, and the Internet to facilitate collaboration.
Making research processes, data, and code transparent in order to increase the reproducibility and accessibility of researc.
Creating and using educational resources that are free of costs and copyright restrictions in order to lower student costs and access barriers for learning materials such as textbooks.
Integrating principles of social justice into academic processes in order to make scholarship more equitable and inclusive.
Engaging in pedagogical practices where learners are creators of knowledge and have agency in their own education.
Connecting and engaging with communities, networks, and the broader public.

Open scholarship is an umbrella term which encompasses open access, open research, open science, open data, open education, open pedagogy and all other forms of openness in the scholarly and research environment. In POSE, we've broken open scholarship into three main units: Open Access, Open Research, and Open Education, which we'll briefly introduce below.

Open Access

The term open access was first clearly articulated in 2002 in the Budapest Open Access Initiative and in its simplest expression refers to academic research that is freely accessible “on the public internet” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002) and available for the public to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to”(2002). Importantly, open Access is a public good, based on the belief that the public, who largely funds education and research, should have broad and unfettered access to the knowledge being produced by the academy. Since the Budapest Open Access Initiative, approaches to achieving open access have proliferated.

Today, multiple forms of open access - Green, Gold, Platinum etc. - provide researchers with a variety of paths and approaches that allow them to achieve varying degrees of openness. While the multiplicity of paths provides necessary flexibility, it has also allowed various stakeholder groups - funders, publishers, governments, universities - to present and promote “lesser, degraded forms of open access” (Budapest Open Access Initiative, 15, 2017) and frustrate attempts to truly transform scholarly publishing. In 2017, reflecting on the 15 year anniversary of the original declaration, the BOAI reiterated its foundational principles and acknowledged that further work would need to be done to “align incentives for scholars to share their work openly and ...lower costs related to open access publishing” (2017) if Open Access was to supplant traditional publishing methods. Today, this is where much of the workaround open access is concentrated, not in articulating the public good of open access, but in developing strategies to make it the default method of academic knowledge dissemination. Finally, the values inherent in the open access movement continue to be influential and have come to form a set of foundational principles visible in all areas of open scholarship.

In the Open Access unit, we will explore the history and basic economics of scholarly publishing as well as the value of intellectual property to academics and publishers. We will also define different types of open access and dive into the benefits and challenges that open access brings to scholarship.

Open Research

The sharing of research results, methods, and data is central to scientific practice, and stimulates new forms of communication and collaboration. Today many funding agencies are mandating open access to the outputs and processes of research, accelerating research and learning, and increasing the impact universities can have beyond their walls. Open science and open data work together to further the reach of scientific research outputs. Open science is a “movement which aims to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society” (LERU, 2018). It supports the scientific community and the advancement of scientific discovery by promoting transparency and in turn supporting reproducibility and credibility. Open data focuses on making machine-readable datasets from a primary source accessible within the confines of privacy and cultural protocols.

Transparency is a core value in both open science and open data and refers to open sharing of data, research design, and materials, making it easier to reproduce the evidence derived from research (McKiernan, et al., 2016). Openness in the sciences also seeks to make research outputs comprehensible to a broader public providing the opportunity for scientific research to have applications in non-academic environments (Bartling & Friesike, 2014). The “citizen science movement” creates the opportunity for public participation in research and practical applications supporting the greater reach of scientific outputs.

In the open research unit, we will examine the relationship between open workflows and open software and reproducible research. We'll also look at the value and importance of open data for enabling research transparency, reproducibility, and innovation.

Open Education

Open education can trace its roots to the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations 1948, which states “everyone has a right to education.” The seminal 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration stated that open education and the use of open educational resources (OER) contribute “to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.” In 2012, the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration [pdf] recommended that governments “promote and use OER to widen access to education at all levels, both formal and non-formal, in a perspective of lifelong learning, thus contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs education.”

Open education thus encompasses a set of practices directed at making the process and products of education more transparent, understandable and available to all people. Open educational resources (OER) are “teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this reuse permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, a Creative Commons license) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere”. OER creates accessible learning opportunities on a large scale by eliminating cost barriers to educational resources and providing opportunities to adopt, reuse, and adapt resources for sustainable use in classrooms.

In the open education unit, we'll explore the basic concept of Creative Commons licenses and how they can be applied to educational resources, we'll discuss strategies for adapting and contextualizing learning materials that have open licenses, and examine the pedagogical benefits and impacts to integrating an open approaches into teaching and learning.

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Getting Started

efields — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:07:13 +0000

Open Scholarship is a broad and somewhat loose term that has emerged in response to a need to identify and speak to a growing number of open practices within academia. Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, and Open Education make up a sprawling landscape of interconnected approaches to and focuses on “openness”.

Welcome to the Program for Open Scholarship and Education!

Welcome! The Program for Open Scholarship and Education (POSE) is a new flexible and blended program jointly presented by the UBC Open Working Group, the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology and UBC Library. The program is intended to help you develop foundational knowledge of Open Scholarship, Open Education and Open Research. By engaging with the POSE program, you will:

Develop an understanding of open scholarship in higher education and the intersections of each area: open access, education, data, and research
Develop strategies to address potential risks and challenges when planning to engage in open practices
Be prepared to support and develop open education, open access or open research projects
Create an open project with the support of UBC experts and receive feedback from peers.

POSE is designed to take no more than 3-5 hours per month including synchronous workshops, online modules, and personal project work. It should take approximately 21 hours to complete.

This brief getting started unit will introduce you to the concept of open scholarship as well as provide an overview of how the program will run.

Get Started

Why Open Scholarship?

efields — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:09:13 +0000

While there are a variety of objectives associated with the different aspects of open scholarship, there are also commonly held values that operate across different areas. Some of these values are more prevalent in specific open scholarship areas (e.g. transparency and reproducibility in open science); however, the core values of participation, community building, and free and unrestricted access to research outputs are fundamental to all facets of open scholarship. The following is a list of values held by open scholarship found within the literature:

Value of Open Scholarship, Open UBC, Licensed under CC By SA 4.0

Martin Weller, in his open access book the Battle for Open, describes some of the motivations that scholars may have for adopting open approaches. These include:

Increased audience through the removal barriers to people accessing a resource, be it an article, book, course, service, video or presentation. This means it has to be free, easily shareable, online, and with easy rights.
Increased reuse by allowing others to take what you have created and combine it with other elements, adapt it and republish. The same considerations are required as above, but with an extra emphasis on minimal rights and also creating the resource in convenient chunks that can be adapted. Whereas increasing audiences mean releasing an article online, increasing reuse might lead someone to share the data that underlies it.
Increased access with the intention is to support particular groups who may be disadvantaged. This may mean incorporating a social justice approach to scholarship or developing strategies such open access admission or courses such that no formal entry qualifications are required to study.
Increased experimentation through the use of different media or approaches that wouldn’t fit within the normal constraints of standard practice.
Increased reputation by being networked and online can help improve an individual’s or an institution’s profile. As an academic, operating in the open, publishing openly, creating online resources, being active in social media and establishing an online identity can be a good way to achieve peer recognition, which can lead to tangible outputs such as invites to keynotes or research collaborations
Increased participation and input through open practices. This could be crowdsourcing in research or getting feedback on a book or research proposal. Being open allows others to access it and then provide the input required.

Additionally, open scholarship can make research and other academic processes more efficient: greater access to scientific inputs and outputs can improve the effectiveness and productivity of the research system, by reducing duplication and the costs of creating, transferring and reusing data; allowing more research from the same data; multiplying opportunities for domestic and global participation in the research process. Open approaches can also improve the quality and integrity of scholarship: open access to scientific outputs, data and other assets that support the research process offer the opportunity of a wider evaluation and scrutiny by the scientific community, thus allowing a greater and more accurate replication and validation of research results.

Finally, by making the processes and outputs of scholarship open, researchers and educators promote awareness, knowledge, and learning among the public. Openness evidences the outcomes of public funded research and learning can help to build trust and support for public policies and investments. Moreover, it promotes citizen’s engagement and even active participation in scientific experiments and data collection. This engagement can promote collaborative efforts and faster knowledge transfer. This allows better understanding of challenges that require coordinated international actions such as climate change or the ageing population and also could help identify solutions more effectively.

In Their Own Words

Jon Beasley-Murray, Associate Professor, UBC Latin American Studies: "I have always been a strong believer in open access. The university is no ivory tower, and especially at a public university, it is our ethical and political duty to share what we are doing with as broad a public as possible. Otherwise, we are simply pandering to the notion that learning is something that individuals purchase for their own personal self-improvement or betterment. As far as possible, instead of inhabiting educational walled gardens, we should be trying to dismantle the barriers (largely imaginary, in any case) that separate academia from the rest of the world. But we should do so without losing sight of the fact that the university has a logic different from the rest of the world—not least, for instance, in that it refuses the commodification of knowledge, the idea that anything and everything can be bought and sold. Teaching “in the open” drives this point home."

Surita Jhangiani, Assistant Professor of Teaching, UBC Faculty of Education: "There are many reasons [it is important for instructors to consider using open educational resources], but one factor that particular resonates with me is diversity. Creating OER resources and collaborating with others allows for a diversity of voices and perspectives to be presented. Often textbooks are written from a hegemonic Eurocentric bias, and different ways of knowing and difference experiences are disregarded. OER creates the space to disrupt this landscape and challenge longstanding ways of thinking, which are proving to be harmful. The diversity that can be embedded into OER creates spaces for growth and transformation, which to me is compelling on its own."

Arthur Gill Green, Affiliate Assistant Professor, UBC Geography: "If we believe education leads to human flourishing and that education is a right, then the use and creation of OER in tandem with effective teaching and learning strategies (that is, open pedagogy) is required to establish and protect that right. Open pedagogy fulfills one of the core commitments to a democratic system by cultivating an informed, educated, and engaged electorate."

Credit: Material on this page has been adapted from Weller, M. (2014) The Battle for Open. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bam, licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license; and What are the benefits of Open Science? by the FOSTER open science consortium, licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

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POSE Walkthrough

efields — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:11:56 +0000

https://youtu.be/NBKI6yYKv20

Key Dates and Sessions

January 1 - Open Access Unit Released
January 13 - POSE Kick-Off Session; 10am to 11:30; access the session recording and materials here.
January 20th - Open Chat: Challenges in Open Access; 12pm to 1pm. Register here.
February 1 - Open Research Unit Released
February 10 - Open Chat: Open Research; 11am to 12pm; Register here.
March 1 - Open Education Unit Released
March 31 - Open Chat: Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices; 10am to 11am. Register here.
April 1 - Capstone Unit Released
April 8 - Capstone Learning Lounge; 11am to 1pm. Register here
April 15 - Capstone Learning Lounge; 11am to 1pm. Register here
April 22 - Capstone Learning Lounge; 11am to 1pm; Register here
April 29 - POSE Wrap Up; 10am to 11:30am; Register here

Learning Activities

The program has a total of 4 units that will be released monthly to support the cohort model. The Open Access, Open Research, and Open Education units will contain the following:

3 Modules (Required). Modules are composed of text and interactive content.
3 activities from the open Activity Bank (Required). Activity Bank assignments are required assignments in each unit. The activities will vary and may require analyzing content, engaging with a tool, or both. The completed activities are openly shared in the Activity Bank section of the site.
1 Shared Reflection activity (Required). The shared reflection activity will provide examples of the different ways you can apply what you have learned in practice. This activity will directly support the Capstone Project unit.
1 Discussion Forum activity (Required). The discussion forum is a chance for you to further explore the material and reflect on what you have read or learned on this topic.
1 Open Chat Session with guest speaker (Optional). Open Chats are optional for you to attend, The sessions are meant to provide you with a space to explore the unit of the month with an expert in the area.

The final Capstone unit will guide participants through putting what they have learned in the previous units into practice through a project. The Capstone unit will offer optional Learning Lounges for participants to drop-in and discuss their projects. Learning Lounges are optional drop-in sessions to provide you with an unstructured space to ask questions and work on further developing your capstone project. The sessions will be held weekly in April 2021.

Each unit will have a unit completion quiz to assist you in tracking your progress.

Program Delivery

In designing POSE, we've tried to incorporate open practices as much as possible. POSE uses both this WordPress site and a Canvas course space. On the POSE WordPress site you will find content units and modules which include short interactive activities developed using H5P and an activity bank. The Canvas course space is primarily for tracking your progress through POSE and as a space for course discussions. The Canvas course space is openly available, however; in order to participate in discussions and track your progress in the course, you will need to enroll in the program.

For in-person interactions, the program will use Zoom. You will need to register for all in-person sessions. We will then share the Zoom link with you for the synchronous sessions two-weeks before the session. If you do not have a Zoom account you will be prompted to download the software. Remember you do NOT need a Zoom account in order to access a session. If you do not want to download Zoom, you may want to access the session using a web browser. We will share recordings of synchronous sessions after the session for those of you who are unable to attend.

All content in the POSE program will be available under a Creative Commons license for re-use upon completion of the program.

How to Complete POSE

Review the Getting Started Unit
Attend the POSE Kick-Off Session on January 13 (access the session recording and materials here)
Complete the Open Access Module:
- Read all content
- Complete three Open Access activities from the Activity Bank
- Complete the Open Access Shared Reflection
- Complete the Open Access Forum Activity
- Attend the Open Chat on January 20th (optional)
Complete the Open Research Module:
- Read all content
- Complete three Open Research activities from the Activity Bank
- Complete the Open Research Shared Reflection
- Complete the Open Research Forum Activity
- Attend the Open Chat to be scheduled (optional)
Complete the Open Education Module:
- Read all content
- Complete three Open Education activities from the Activity Bank
- Complete the Open Education Shared Reflection
- Complete the Open Education Forum Activity
- Attend the Open Chat to be scheduled (optional)
Complete a Capstone Project
Attend the POSE Wrap Up Session

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Question Forum

efields — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 18:39:14 +0000

Do you have any questions for the facilitators about the program? Do you have something you would like to share with participants about open scholarship? The General Discussion Forum is meant for participants and facilitators to share their ideas, experiences, and questions both about the POSE program and about open scholarship more generally.

General Discussion Forum

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Capstone Project

efields — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 19:58:56 +0000

A capstone project supports students drawing together what they have learned by focusing on a specific area of interest as the basis for their project work. The purpose of the project is to incorporate what you have learned during the POSE program in a practical way.

The capstone project is meant to support you critically thinking about the POSE content, selecting an area of interest, setting practical goals, and completing those goals with the potential for long term application in your practice. While the capstone project can take a wide variety of forms, from engaging in a tool to openly sharing your educational materials to applying the principles of open workflows to an existing project, the capstone project should provide you with an opportunity to engage in open scholarship with guidance and support from the POSE program participants and facilitators.

This unit covers the following:

An outline of the capstone project requirements, including suggested content and how to share your completed project
Strategies for developing your capstone project
Examples of projects related to open access, open research, and open education
How to get support and feedback for your project

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Want to Get a Head Start on Your Capstone?

Take a look at this Capstone Project Template as a guide to developing your project.

Wrap Up

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:00 +0000

In this module we have explored the publication ecosystem, including how the current system is impacting the academy.

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Defining Intellectual Property

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:58 +0000

In Canada there are 4 main types of intellectual property (IP) rights, and more than 1 can apply to your creation. Watch the video to learn about the types of IP in Canada.

https://youtu.be/AzQzSUZsT_k

What is Intellectual property? by Canadian Intellectual Property Office.

What is Intellectual Property?

Intellectual Property is what you create, invent or develop as a result of your intellectual activity. Intellectual property is valuable, and just like other types of property you own, it comes with legal rights. (Intellectual property: It's yours. Own it.)

IP is defined as knowledge or expression that is created by an individual and can be legally protected. IP refers to the product of the creative process and can include:

Trademark

A trademark covers contractual obligations over the identified goods or services of a company. This can include business methods, inventions, recipes, and manufacturing processes. Example: The name and logo of Apple, Microsoft, etc.

Patent

A patent provides rights over an original and useful idea that is not considered an invention. This can include physical products or processes. The rights exclude others from using, making, or selling the patented item and is valid in Canada up to 20 years from the date of filing. Example: Apparatus for production of three-dimensional objects by stereolithography (3D Printer)

Industrial Design

Industrial design details the rights over the visual design of an object. This can include features, shape, pattern, and configurations of the object which protects the appearance of use. The rights exclude others from using, making, or selling and is valid in Canada up to a maximum of 10 years. Example: 22 Hybrid Tube Amplifier

Examples of Intellectual Property

Inventions
Industrial Design
Musical Works
Literary Words

Image Credit: 
Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash licensed under the Unsplash License
Melbourne City Bikes by Papier K  licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Music by Jesse Kruger licensed under CC By 2.0
Untilted by Pexels licensed under a Pixabay License

Copyright

Copyright details the rights to produce or reproduce a literary, artistic, musical or dramatic work - or part of a work - in any form. This can include software, sound recordings, photography, paintings, and textual content. The rights exclude others from reproducing the original work and is valid in Canada for the life of the creator plus 50 years. This has recently been extended to 70 years by Bill C-4 receiving royal assent; however, it is not in effect as of yet.

For additional details on the types of intellectual property rights, review the Intellectual Property in Canada table by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada.

For the purpose of this module, we will focus on the intellectual property rights associated with Copyright. For additional resources on the other 3 types of intellectual property rights, go to the Additional Resources section.

How is Intellectual Property Determined in Canadian Copyright?

Automatic upon creation of a work in a tangible form (e.g. book, recording, etc.)
Protects the rights of the creator to use their work
Protects the rights of performers (e.g. dancers, musicians, etc.)

For intellectual property rights to be determined for literary, artistic, musical or dramatic works, the "works" must meet three criteria.

Originality

Originality relates to how the work is expressed and the effort of the expression itself. For Canadian copyright, originality does not reflect the creativity or uniqueness of the work but the intellectual effort expressed in the work.

Fixation

Fixation is not defined in the Copyright Act but is formed through court cases dealing with copyright. Generally speaking, fixation refers to the expression in a tangible form of the work itself. This can be a book, article, a performance, and an audio recording.

Nationality of the Creator and Place of Publication

Test Your Knowledge

Dig Deeper

To learn more about intellectual property from a Canadian and international context, watch: Intellectual Property Rights by Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Adapted from Discover Intellectual Property - Module from Canadian Intellectual Property Office licensed under a Non-commercial reproduction.

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The Value of Intellectual Property

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:42 +0000

IP is important and it matters to creators for a variety of reasons. As we create and express new ideas in tangible ways, protecting your intellectual property is a means by which you can gain benefits from your work, whether that be financial or social value. The financial benefits of intellectual property are a more obvious form of value when talking about intellectual property. Your labour results in currency that funds your ability to continue your work and maintain your lifestyle; however, the value of your intellectual property can mean much more, especially for those connected to the academy.

In this familiar scenario, the idea of value for intellectual property takes on a more nuanced meaning and the impacts of maintaining rights becomes more complex.

As an academic author, your goal is to get your work published in the best journals or publications in your field. Publishing in these journals ensures your content has the greatest reach and the highest impact, as identified through impact factors and metrics (See: Citation Metrics).

Scenario - Publishing a Journal Article

Dr. Ada Olowe is a tenure track Assistant Professor. She has just completed an article on a research study with colleagues from another university. She is publishing the article in a prestigious journal and will use it as a basis for a course she is developing for the coming year. As part of the publishing agreement, she has been asked to sign a form by the publisher of the journal that will transfer the copyright of the article to them.

For academics, like Dr. Olowe from the scenario above, the tenure and promotion process requires a portfolio of your work to be presented to secure rank, and job security, in the academy. This added pressure can often convince authors to sign a publisher copyright agreement that transfers their copyright completely to the publisher. These agreements transfer your intellectual property to the publisher and in the case of Dr. Olowe, restrict her ability to:

Use the research in future publications
Use the research for teaching and learning, including providing students access to the article
Share the whole or part of the research either electronically or in print
Modify or provide errata to the published research

Publishers & Intellectual Property

When you decide to publish an article or monograph, you own the full copyrights. As the copyright owner, under Section 3 of the Copyright Act (website), you are allowed:

Reproduce your work
Create new works based on your original work
Share your work with whomever you choose
Perform, display, or broadcast your work in public
Transfer all or some of your rights to third party

If you choose to publish through traditional publishing systems, you will be required to sign a form transferring some – or all – of your copyrights to that publisher by signing a publishing agreement. A publishing agreement is a legal contract that transfers the rights of your work to the publisher provisioning them with exclusive publishing and distribution rights to material submitted to them in the original manuscript. Publisher agreements will vary and the contract you sign will outline your rights and the publisher's rights to your work.

Scenario - Journal Publishing Agreement

Dr. Ada Olowe's article has been accepted to the Journal of International Political Theory (SAGE). She must sign the Journal Contributor Publishing Agreement before her article is sent for editorial review and copy editing. Dr. Olowe is not concerned about royalties for her work but would like to be able to use the article for her courses, posting a version in her departmental profile, and developing new research and publications.

Review the Journal Contributor Publishing Agreement and answer the following questions:

Is Dr. Olowe able to use her journal article in all the ways she has outlined?
What rights does Dr. Olowe maintain if she signs the agreement?
What rights is Dr. Olowe assigning the publisher if she signs the agreement?

These may seem like tricky questions.

Understanding publisher agreements can be difficult. The legal terminology used in the contracts will indicate the rights of the publishers and your rights to your original work but as the phrases are not in everyday language you may not know what you are agreeing to.

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The Digital Shift and Open Access

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:10 +0000

The development and proliferation of the internet has been the most powerful force to disrupt the academic publishing ecosystem since its inception over four hundred years ago. Among other things, the internet promised to provide a cheaper and faster way to disseminate knowledge. As a result of this potential, open access emerged as an alternative to traditional paywalled journals.

As a movement, open access is best understood as a commonsense response to one of the fundamental weaknesses of scholarly publishing - research is largely supported through public funds, yet the vast majority of funded research is published in paywalled journals that only those affiliated with academic institutions have access to. Limiting access to this knowledge not only prevents those who have funded the research from accessing it, it also severely undercuts its potential to positively impact the world and contribute to innovation and the betterment of society.

Promise vs. reality

While there is no denying that the internet has had a profound effect on the publishing industry, for many it has not lived up to its more radical and transformative potential.

Perhaps the biggest threat to traditional publishing models, open access is hard to conceptualize without the internet, as it relies largely on online platforms as a means of public dissemination.

Interestingly though, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002, which is often considered the first formalized articulation of open access, imagines open access to be possible not so much because the internet will make all things discoverable, but because the costs of publication will decrease dramatically and publishing will be much easier over the internet, making it possible for the academy to take back control of the publishing enterprise from commercial publishers.

Reflecting on the 15th anniversary of the original BOAI, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:

"Much has happened, and much of it is positive, but taking stock of what has been achieved has also become an urgent task, if only to get a clear sense of our bearings: while Open Access is now here to stay, it also displays a variety of forms that do not all conform with the project of distributed human intelligence with which it is associated. Lesser, degraded, forms of Open Access have also and gradually emerged, sometimes as the result of power plays by powerful actors, sometimes out of compromises proposed by people of good will. At the same time, the very multiplicity of social actors now involved in Open Access has made the field much more complex than it was fifteen years ago. "

If we compare the early articulation of the promise of open access to its contemporary reality, it is easy to see that the promise of the internet with respect to transforming academic publishing, has largely been unfulfilled. While open access continues to be an important and growing force withing publishing, the more radical elements of open access - based on the assumption that the academy would regain control over knowledge dissemination - have not come to fruition. Today commercial publishers are key players in the open access publishing ecosystem, having learned how to monetize open access publishing by charging back the cost of publication to authors.

Refer to the Pathways to Open module to learn more about open access.

Dig Deeper

To read the rest of Jean-Claude Guédon's reflection, review: Guédon, Jean-Claude (2017) Open Access:Toward the Internet of the Mind. Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

The impact of COVID-19

Recent events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic provide another opportunity to reflect on the current state of academic publishing and highlight the need to quickly and freely disseminate scientific research. In a recent statement on the importance of sharing COVID-19 data UNESCO stated, "the value and necessity of Open Solutions is crucial. Open Access to scientific information and open data facilitate better and faster research towards a vaccine and inform public health measures essential to contain the spread of the virus."

The fact that so many publishers, funders, governments and researchers have promised to release their COVID-19 related work open access both demonstrates the real value of open access and begs the question, why hasn't open sharing become the norm for all scientific publishing?

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The Economics of Publishing

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:36 +0000

As of 2015, the academic publishing ecosystem is a 25 billion dollar a year industry. In addition to being a large industry it is a consolidated one, with only 5 for-profit publishers responsible for approximately 50 percent of all output.

Test your knowledge

can you name the 5 publishers responsible for 50% of all academic output?

Reed-Elsevier
Wiley-Blackwell
Springer-Nature
Sage
Taylor & Francis

The consolidation of publishing varies across disciplines, reaching an upper limit of around 70% in areas such as Psychology and Chemistry.

Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline in the Natural and Medical Sciences, 1973–2013. Retrieved from Larivière et al. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.

Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 1973–2013. Retrieved from Larivière et al. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.

Unsurprisingly, a lack of competition among publishers has had a significant impact on the price of scholarship. Decades of subscription cost increases and talk of 40 percent profit margins for the biggest names in academic publishing, have been concerns for academic libraries for years. Unfortunately, unsustainable pricing is an issue that has not garnered as much attention with the larger academy. This is perhaps due to the peculiarity of the economics of scholarly publishing whereby the main consumers of academic research (academics and students) are largely shielded from the cost.

Aside from purely financial considerations, consolidation and commercialization have the potential to cause harm to the integrity of science itself. Increasingly, publishers favor positive results and novel studies. Researchers, realizing what is likely to get published, may then direct their research in order to meet these demands. In recent years scientists have begun to reckon with the consequences of publication bias, including bringing awareness to the replication crisis and advocating for high impact journals to highlight negative results studies.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about consolidation in academic publishing, review: Larivière et al. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. Licensed under CC-BY.

Publishers as research analytics providers

At the same time that big publishers have been creating new journals and purchasing smaller publishers and independent journals, they have also expanded their portfolios to include products and services relevant to other parts of the research life cycle. For example, along with its scholarly publications Elsevier is also the owner of Scopus, SciVal, Pure, Clinicalkey, Mendeley, SSRN, and several other tools that researchers, librarians, and institutions rely on to support the research endeavor.

As these publisher brands continue to expand and integrate other pieces of academic infrastructure into their portfolios, there is growing concern about the implications this will have on the academy. While it may be feasible for scholars and institutions to publish their own journals and make their research available, it is much harder to imagine them recreating tools like SciVal, which pulls data from other Elsevier products to visualize research performance and benchmark scholars relative to their peers. It is perhaps telling then that in recent years Elsevier has rebranded itself as a "global information analytics business", choosing to highlight its value not in publishing but in analytics tools, which are supported using data generated via its publishing arm.

Case Study - Bepress

In late 2017 Elsevier announced their acquisition of Bepress, a scholar-led company responsible for Digital Commons - a cloud-based institutional repository software that allows universities to share research outputs such as preprints, student theses, data sets and special collections with the public for free. The sale to Elsevier, long considered an adversary to many in academic libraries, prompted sharp rebukes from Bepress customers, spurring some to call for a "beprexit".

Should libraries and academic communities be concerned with consolidation within the researcher infrastructure marketplace? What are the advantages and disadvantages to consolidation?
Should there be an expectation that scholar-led or community supported endeavours remain non-profit?

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the consolidation of academic infrastructure, review: Posada, Alejandro and George Chen (2018). Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers. Licensed under CC-BY.

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The Role of the Academic Library

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 14:00:34 +0000

In many ways, academic libraries are well positioned to see the effects of publisher consolidation first hand, as they remain the primary purchaser of scholarly content.

Since the 1990's academic libraries have largely transitioned their purchasing of academic content to "big deals", under which publishers bundle together hundreds or even thousands of journal titles into packages.

When this model emerged it offered substantial value for libraries as the per-title cost of journals went down. "Following this new model, size of serial collections in academic libraries increased almost fivefold from 1986 to 2011".

While this new purchasing model allowed libraries to rapidly increase their collections, it also resulted in increases in collection expenditures and decreases in the value of these investments, as researchers and students still largely read and cited only a fraction of the titles held in library collections.

Transitioning away from the big deal

In more recent years, the thinking around the value of the big deal has slowly changed as libraries have come to terms with the fact that it is no longer possible, nor necessary, to keep up with the every increasing level of scholarly output. For decades now, publishers have been increasing the costs of journal subscription deals at rates that outpace inflation. As a result, subscriptions become more expensive every year. This has resulted in what is often referred to as the "serials crisis", whereby academic libraries are increasingly unable to keep up with the rising cost of subscriptions.

In the last few years frustration over the rising cost of subscriptions, paired with the growing availability of open access research has led many libraries to either cancel their big deal subscriptions or work with publishers to draft new types of licenses that incorporate open access principles and offsets. In a 2020 survey of academic library directors, half indicated that they will likely cancel a journal package in the next five years.

While big deal cancellations are still news-worthy occurrences, there is good evidence to suggest that they will become more commonplace in the future. Schools that have yet to make the difficult decision to cancel are looking to trailblazers like the University of California, which recently cancelled its subscription with Elsevier after a long and ultimately unsuccessful renegotiation. The UC system was able to marshal faculty support for their cause, but many schools are still unsure if their faculty and students will support a decision to cancel a large subscription package.

Scenario – Breaking up with the 'big deal'

Let's consider this scenario: The library has just informed your department that due to budget constraints they plan on cancelling a large subscription package that includes many of the journals you regularly read and cite. The library will be purchasing individual subscriptions to a much smaller number of journals and while a few of the key journals you rely on are on the list, others are not.

What would be your initial response to the library's decision?
What should the library do and who should they consult before finalizing their new approach?

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the cancellation of big deals, review:

SPARC's Big Deal Cancellation Tracker

Anderson, Rick. (2017). When the Wolf Finally Arrives: Big Deal Cancellations in North American Libraries (comments on this post highlight the ongoing debate).

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Predatory Publishing

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 14:00:38 +0000

Predatory publishing is the name given to a parasitic form of open access publishing that asks authors to pay the costs of publication often associated with open access (read more about these fees in the Pathways to Open module), but doesn't adhere to the rigorous ethical standards expected by authors and readers. As a result of this strategy, predatory publishers are often accused of having high acceptance rates and not conducting thorough peer review. Predatory publishers typically have greater profit margins, as they accept a higher number of articles and collect more fees yet do not spend these fees on the publication process (peer review, copy editing, etc.).

Who are the prey?

For many active scholars, predatory publishing is nothing more than a nuisance, as easily ignored as the unsolicited emails they receive inviting them to submit a manuscript in a discipline far outside their area of expertise. Unfortunately not all scholars are able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate publishers with graduate students and early-career scholars being particularly vulnerable to predatory publishers.

There is also evidence beginning to emerge that suggests that some scholars are knowingly publishing in predatory journals in response to mounting pressure to publish their research as quickly as possible. While traditional publication timelines can stretch into months or years, predatory publishers often advertise turnaround times of only a few weeks.

Nuisance or threat?

There is growing concern that predatory publishing is having a cumulative negative effect on the value of and trust in academic research by the public, especially given that this potentially low quality research is easily available to a public audience that still cannot access much of the "gold standard" research made available in the prestigious paywalled journals.

While it is beneficial to make research available to a public audience, many in the general population are not able to easily distinguish between high quality and low quality research. They expect that the research they find online in scholarly journals can be trusted because it has been vetted by other experts in the field. This implicit trust in scientific research has built up over hundreds of years, but ultimately rests on assurances from publishers (the peer review process is rarely made available to readers). As a result, academic publishing is particularly vulnerable to bad faith actors.

Scenario – Quality control

Let's consider this scenario: A graduate student you are supervising has recently completed an interdisciplinary research project and is looking to publish her research in an open access journal. Due to the nature of the project she is looking for publication venues outside those you typically recommend.

What guidance would you give this student to help them find a legitimate place to publish?

Signs of a predatory journal

Identifying predatory journals is an important skill set for authors and readers to hone. Think. Check. Submit., a cross-industry initiative to educate authors on how to identify potentially predatory journals provides useful resources to help guide decision making.

Watch the below video for a brief overview.

https://vimeo.com/151882443

Think. Check. Submit. (2016). Licensed under CC-BY.

Refer to the Gold Open Access section of the Pathways to Open module to find information on selecting an appropriate open access journal.

Tarnishing the reputation of open access

Predatory publishing also does a disservice to the larger open access movement, as some scholars do not distinguish between high quality open access journals and predatory ones. Additionally, there is concern among open access advocates that emerging and global south publishers are unfairly accused of being predatory and that this conflation stems from global north bias in using things like English proficiency as a shortcut for assessing journal quality.

The distinction between predatory and not becomes even more muddied when we consider that some previously labeled predatory publishers respond to criticism and institute policies and workflows more consistent with other reputable publishers. At what point should these publishers be deemed legitimate, and who has the authority to decide? If we take alone the academic community's willingness to publish somewhere, then all publication channels are valid.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the challenges of the term 'predatory' publishing, review: Anderson, Rick (2015). Should We Retire the Term "Predatory Publishing"?.

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Open Access Mandates

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:27 +0000

As interest in and support for open access grows, funders and institutions have responded by enacting their own open access policies. These polices are an important force within the larger open access movement as they encourage and sometimes require researchers to make their research publications openly available. Critics of open access mandates express concern over policies that appear to dictate where and how authors can publish and often cite academic freedom as an argument against such policies. Balancing a desire to support open access with the need to support researcher choice can be complicated for funders and institutions. As a result, the success of open access mandates is unevenly distributed across geographical regions and organizational structures.

Europe is Leading the Pack

In Europe, where funding is very centralized, there has been a concentrated effort to operationalize a broad open access policy referred to as "Plan S". Plan S has been put forward by cOALition S, a group of national research funding organisations supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council. Its primary objective is to reach complete open access for all funded research by 2021. Since its announcement in 2018 stakeholders in Europe and across the globe have shared both their support for and criticism against the project and the proposed implementation strategy. In response to early criticisms, the original plan was pushed back a year in order to give publishers time to ensure their publications would meet Plan S requirements for authors. Other concerns have also been addressed by the addition of new principles. Despite these modifications, many are still concerned about the consequences - both intended and unintended - that Plan S will have on the academic publishing ecosystem.

North America has seen a much more uneven growth of open access mandates and while many notable funders do require open access (for example: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation), many others do not.

Individual institutions also have open access policies in place, with MIT and Harvard being notable examples. The University of British Columbia does not currently have an open access policy, but did issue a position statement in 2013 in support of open access.

A comprehensive database of funder and organizational mandates from around the world can be found at ROARMAP (https://roarmap.eprints.org/).

Canada's Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

In Canada the Tri-Agencies released an open access policy on publications in 2015 which now requires all funded research published in academic journals to be made open access within 12 months of publication.

Watch the video below to learn more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy71FEAHR_w

Take 5 with UBC Library – Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, The University of British Columbia, 2018.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the impact of open access mandates, Review: Larivière, Vincent and Cassidy R. Sugimoto (2018). Do authors comply when funders enforce open access to research?

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Preprint Servers

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:31 +0000

Sarabipour, Sarvenaz et al. (2019). On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective. Licensed under CC-BY

Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal can take months or even years from the time of initial submission owing to the time required by editors and reviewers to evaluate and critique manuscripts and the time required by authors to address critiques. The need to quickly circulate current results within a scholarly community has led researchers to distribute documents known as preprints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo peer review. The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.

Although preprints have been in circulation dating back to at least the 60s, the internet was cause for an explosion in their availability and dissemination. This has given rise to massive preprint databases such as arXiv.org and to institutional repositories.

While preprints have not traditionally been afforded much weight in the academic prestige economy, this is slowly changing and the role that they play is becoming more important to the scientific process, particularly in mathematics, computer science and other physical science disciplines.

Adapted from Preprint on Wikipedia. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the value of preprints, review: Sarabipour, Sarvenaz et al. (2019). On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective. Licensed under CC-BY.

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Open Access Discussion

lucaspractice — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:25 +0000

Now that you have completed the Open Access Unit, you may have many ideas, thoughts, and questions you want to explore. The discussion forum is a chance for you to further explore the material and reflect on what you have read or learned on this topic. This activity should take approximately 30-45 minutes to complete.

To complete this activity:

Write a post in the discussion forum. You may use your own website or blog to post a response and provide a link in the discussion forum. If you would like to share your thoughts publicly to encourage conversation, use the Twitter hashtag #POSEUBC.
Contribute to the conversation by responding or asking questions in the forum

Discussion Topic

In the forum, respond to the following:

In the article "Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities: Turning Academic Labor against Itself", David Golumbia writes:

Open Access (OA) advocacy is the only perspective I know of from which it has been suggested that the laborer should sacrifice that interest (ownership rights) in the name of some putative “greater good,” a good that is too often alleged to be in the laborer’s own interest. This is especially true when we are told that it is not in the laborer’s own interest to be able to decide when and how she expresses those property interests in her work.
(Golumbia, 2016, P. 102)

Reflecting on what you have learned about OA, do you think OA potentially inhibits ownership of intellectual property (IP)? How does the framing of the "greater good" impact the conversation around OA and IP?

Discussion Forum

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Open Access Shared Reflection

lucaspractice — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:33 +0000

During the capstone module, you’ll be asked to work on a project in which you’ll apply one or more aspects of open scholarship to your scholarly practice. In this activity, please take a moment to reflect on Open Access and think about some different ways it could be applied to your work. This activity draws upon the Stanford University design thinking framework and a goal is, as a group, to generate and capture different ideas that could later be developed into capstone projects. This activity should take approximately 20 minutes.

Scenario: Breaking News!

Your university has just instituted an Open Access mandate! To help this mandate succeed, your department or unit head has just given you a meeting release that has freed up three whole hours in your schedule. During these three hours, you must develop an idea for how you will address the mandate.

Step 1: Brainstorm!

Take three minutes and think about a recent practice, project, or process that is not currently open. How could you change that practice or project to help meet an open access mandate? Write down as many ideas as you can generate in three minutes.

Examples:

My last publication was in a non-open access journal. I could look at publishing in open access journals.
I spend a lot of time developing resources (modules/quizzes) for my courses but I never share them with my colleagues. I could share more.

Step 2: Reframe the Idea!

In this step, please take one of your ideas that you have jotted down and reframe it in terms of the practice that you would like to change. Please restate your idea using the following format: Transform [the practice] to [the goal].

Examples:

Transform [my publishing] to [be more accessible].
Transform [my resource development process] to [include more sharing]

Step 3: Getting Started:

Take your reframed idea and write down two or three steps that you could accomplish in three hours that would help you begin to meet your idea.

Examples:

Transform [my publishing] to [be more accessible].
- Research what are the open access journals in my subject area
- Review my past publisher agreements to see if there are any open access polices (such as if I’m allowed to deposit copies in open repositories).
- Investigate Creative Commons licenses so I’m more familiar with the different license options.

Step 4: Share!

Take your ideas and getting started steps and share them with the group. To do so, we’ll be using a padlet, which is a form of an online sticky note board. To get started, click on the + symbol in the bottom right of the below padlet to start a blank note and then write or paste your idea into the new note.

Add your reflections to the padlet below.

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Open Access Unit Completion

lucaspractice — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:35 +0000

As a way to track your completion of each of the units. Please navigate to the completion quiz located on the POSE canvas site. On the site, you will complete a short quiz confirming that you have completed all of the required unit elements. As you go through the completion quiz, you may want to revisit some of the elements and complete them as needed. If you are not in the POSE cohort you can just sit back at this point and enjoy the deep satisfaction of unit completion.

Open Access Completion

Other Open Access Models

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:16 +0000

While all forms of open access fall broadly into either the green or gold classification, there are additional, nuanced, forms of open access which are used to highlight distinguishing features among the varieties. Because these terms are also often used to describe open access, it is worth understanding their unique features.

Platinum or Diamond Open Access

Platinum open access gets its name from its association with gold open access, as it is seen as a premier or superior form. The distinguishing characteristic of platinum open access is that articles are published open access immediately in open access journals but there are no article processing charges (APCs) back to the author. As discussed previously, APCs are a common characteristic of gold OA, yet it is not true that all or even most OA journals charge these fees. Many gold OA journals rely on institutional support, grants, memberships etc. to fund their publication and as a result do not ask their authors to contribute any additional funds. It is because these journals do not charge back any costs to authors that they are granted the platinum distinction.

Hybrid Open Access

Hybrid open access is used to describe a journal that publishes both gold open access and traditional subscription-based research. These journals present their authors with the choice to either pay an APC and have their work disseminated as open access, or to submit it as a non-OA article. Hybrid journals are a contentious issue among OA advocates, as they largely reinforce the supremacy of traditional publication venues and often provide an additional revenue stream to already profitable journals. Hybrid journals also tend to have substantial APC charges, with the more prestigious journals charging the highest fees. Notably, academic libraries take issue with hybrid journals as they charge authors to make a subsection of their articles open access, but still require libraries to pay undiscounted subscription fees to access the additional pay-walled content. As a result, hybrid journals are often accused of "double dipping".

Bronze Open Access

Bronze open access refers to scholarship that may be publicly available online but does not include clear reuse permission. Because of this lack of clarity, bronze is used to confer its inferior status in relation to gold or platinum open access literature, which is clearly marked for reuse. Whether or not bronze open access meets funder requirements or other open access polices is dependent on individual polices. According to a 2018 study, Bronze OA, while little talked about may be the most prevalent form of OA in practice.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the challenges of hybrid open access, review: Matthias, Lisa. (2018). The worst of both worlds: Hybrid Open Access. Licensed under CC-BY.

Kingsley, Danny and Philip Boyes. (2016). Hybrid open access – an analysis. Licensed under CC-BY.

Image Credits: 
Key by Adrien Coquet. Licensed under CC-BY.
Diamond by JuliAya. Licensed under CC-BY.
Copy by Pamarat. Licensed under CC-BY.

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Publisher Agreements

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:16 +0000

As stated earlier, a publisher agreement is a legal contract that transfers the rights of your work to the publisher provisioning them with exclusive publishing and distribution rights to the material submitted to them in the original manuscript. The terms of publisher agreements vary widely and the kind of controls on how an author's work can be used later will vary based on the contract signed. Before signing a publishing agreement, it is important to recognize that the agreement is an exchange between author and publisher. For example, authors will transfer or license their copyright to a journal publisher, often without compensation, in return for the work being published in a credible journal, making the article visible with the potential for yielding readership and citations that increase the article's impact. The publisher in return will gain the ability to control how the work is published and made accessible to others, setting the type of access (e.g. online, print) and the cost to access (e.g. subscription fees).

There is some common terminology that you should be aware of to better understand an author's rights as outlined in a publisher agreement. Before we look at the terminology, it is important to understand the different phases an article may go through in preparation for publishing. The terminology may vary by the publisher but the phases are generally as follows:

Pre-print

Also called an author’s draft or pre-refereed version, pre-print refers to the article as it was when it was initially submitted to the publisher for peer review or any other earlier version.

Post-print

Also called an author's final or accepted manuscript, post-print refers to the post-peer-review and accepted version of the article, before the publisher has created the final layout for the work. This is generally the version that the publishers allow researchers to parallel publish in a repository (i.e. self-archiving).

Publishers Version

Also called the version of record, the published version is the article as it is in the final publication, including the final layout. The publishers rarely allow researchers to parallel publish the publisher’s version. Publishers are protective over the final published version articles they choose to publish and often negotiations to openly share finalized versions are restricted.

Common Publisher Agreement Terminology

Assignment

Assignment refers to the transfer of copyright ownership either in part or in whole. Example of the terminology in use: The Author hereby assigns to the Publisher the copyright and all the exclusive rights comprised in the copyright in the Work and all revisions thereof….

Grant of Rights

A Grant of Rights sets out the rights you are maintaining for your work and what you are giving to your publisher.

Exclusive License

A license that sets out agreements not to grant other licenses that have the same rights within the scope of the exclusive license. Example of the terminology in use: The Author hereby assigns to the Publisher the copyright and all the exclusive rights comprised in the copyright in the Work and all revisions thereof….

Embargo

A period of time during which the publisher has the exclusive right to make the research available. Typically, for self-archiving, the publisher will require an embargo (ranging from 6 to 24 months) before the item is released openly. There is some debate over why a publisher might request this, but the simplest answer is that publishers are concerned with the exclusivity and novelty of the research they choose to publish.

Non-Exclusive License

A license that allows the same rights to granted to several licensees, either consecutively or simultaneously.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

A policy that may be required by a publisher indicating a conflict of interest when submitting a manuscript that could be perceived as impacting the judgement of the author. Some conflicts of interest could include receiving fees for consulting, receiving funding for the research, and employment with a company impacted by the research.

Reversion Rights

A provision in a publisher contract that permits the author to regain some or all the rights over the work under conditions set out by the publishing agreement. Example of the terminology in use: If the Work has been declared out of print by the Publisher in the Canada, the Publisher may, but shall not be obligated to, offer to revert rights to the Work to the Author.

Adapted from Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts (PDF) from the Authors Alliance, by Brianna L. Schofield & Robert Kirk Walker, licensed under CC by 4.0.

Reviewing the Publisher Agreement

Thoroughly reviewing the publication agreement is the first step in understanding what the consequences and benefits are when signing an agreement. Publishers’ agreements are written by publishers and may capture more of your rights than are necessary to publish the work. Ensuring the agreement is balanced and has a clear statement of your rights is up to you.

Publishing agreements are negotiable. Publishers require only your permission to publish an article, not a wholesale transfer of copyright. Hold onto rights to make use of the work in ways that serve your needs and that promote education and research activities. Value the copyright in your intellectual property. A journal article is often the culmination of years of study, research, and hard work. The more the article is read and cited, the greater its value. But if you give away control in the copyright agreement, you may limit its use.

Review the Journal Contributor Publishing Agreement from Journal of International Political Theory (SAGE) and test your knowledge below:

Test Your Knowledge

Before transferring ownership of your intellectual output, understand the consequences and options. Answer the following questions when reviewing a publisher agreement:

Is your grant of rights an assignment, an exclusive license, or a non-exclusive license?
Does your contract limit the scope of the rights granted?
Does your contract limit the duration of the grant?
Do you have a license-back for your own future uses?
Does your contract contain a revert-back clause in case your publisher doesn’t exploit certain rights?
Does your grant of rights section reserve all rights not granted to your publisher?

The next section on publisher negotiations outlines approaches and strategies authors can take to negotiate the rights they retain when publishing their work.

Book Publishing

Book publishing is a much more intensive process although many of the considerations mentioned do apply. However, from first receiving a publication contract to understanding the common clauses and terms of rights that may impact your interests both locally, nationally, and internationally, book publishing agreements can be overwhelming. We encourage you to use the dig deeper section to begin investigating book publishing and intellectual property.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about monograph publishing negotiations and contracts, review Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts (PDF) from the Authors Alliance, by Brianna L. Schofield & Robert Kirk Walker, licensed under CC by 4.0.

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Open Access Activity Bank

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:34 +0000

The Activity Bank are activities that you will complete as part of the POSE modules. The concept behind the activity bank is to learn by doing. This bank is adapted from the D106 Assignment Bank and the Agora Challenge Bank.

Now that you have completed the Open Access Unit, apply what you have learned so far by completing the Activity Bank.

To complete this activity:

Go to the Activity Bank, and complete any three of the Open Access categorized activities
You may wish to share your completed activities publicly. If you use Twitter, use the hashtag #POSEUBC.

Activity Bank

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Additional Resources

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:19 +0000

UBC Resources

External Resources

Glossary of Scholarly Communications Terms
the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Think. Check. Submit.
DORA – San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Using the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum to Secure Your Rights as the Author of a Journal Article (PDF)
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Pre-Print, Post-Print or Offprint? A guide to publication versions, permissions and the digital repository
Directory of Open Access Journals
Sherpa Romeo (online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies)
OpenDOAR (global Directory of Open Access Repositories)
Plan S (European open access initiative)
Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

Wrap Up

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:41 +0000

In this module we have explored author rights, focusing on how authors are protected, or in the case of traditional knowledge, are not protected under copyright; the ways in which authors sign over their rights; and strategies to negotiate with authors when dealing with publisher agreements.

Key Takeaways

Canadian copyright for literary, artistic, and musical works must meet the criteria of originality, fixation, and the creator is a Canadian citizen, resident of Canada, or another treaty country.
As the copyright owner of your work, you are allowed to reproduce your work, create new works based on the original, share however you would like, perform or display your work in public, and transfer your rights to a third party.
Publisher agreements, a legal contract that transfers the rights of your work to the publisher, can have consequences for your copyrights and will impact how you use your work in the future.
Negotiation with publishers using such tools as author addendums provides you with an opportunity to maintain the rights over your work that are of importance to you.
While sharing your work in the open allows you to set the rules around how your work can be used by others, priorities of promotion and tenure processes, academic conventions in your field and considerations related to the potential financial benefits to your findings (e.g. patents), are considerations that need to be evaluated before engaging in open.
Indigenous cultural heritage and identity is expressed through creative works like storytelling, song, dance, rituals, and practices and is connected to land and community across time. The Canadian Copyright Act, as it is currently structured, cannot protect traditional knowledge due to the focus of copyright on economic benefits, individual creators, and the time-based nature of protections.

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Wrap Up

efields — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 14:00:26 +0000

In this module we have explored the pathways to open, including OA challenges and opportunities and the growth of funder and institution OA mandates and policies.

Key Takeaways

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.
Open access provides greater readership due to open widespread sharing, an increase in citations of the material shared, and it eliminates access barriers based on the time it takes to go through the traditional publication processes.
While there are a number of benefits to open access, the challenges, such as the importance of impact metrics in the academy and the offloading of cost to publish to the researcher (i.e. APCs), impact the success of the movement taking a larger hold.
Funders (e.g. Tri-Agencies) and institutions (MIT, Harvard) have responded to open access through the development of mandates and policies that encourage and sometimes require researchers to make their research publications openly available.
There are a number of inequalities within the open access movement that need to be addressed by the community, including equal participation of research sharing from the Global South and the potential for OA to reinforce a culture of extraction of Indigenous knowledge. The OA movement needs to ensure that it does not replicate the publishing practices of the past.

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POSE Code of Conduct

wikiadm — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:24:20 +0000

The Program for Open Scholarship and Education (POSE) is committed to providing a safe, respectful, and productive environment so you can fully engage in learning with your peers and colleagues. The University of British Columbia, which hosts POSE, has a commitment to a respectful environment that states:

Respect for the value of freedom of expression and promotion of free inquiry are central to the University’s mission. However, these freedoms cannot exist without an equally vigorous commitment to recognition of and respect for the freedoms of others, and concern for the well-being of every member of the university community. Excellence in scholarship, teaching and employment activities flows from active concern and respect for others, including their ability to participate meaningfully in the exchange of information, ideas, beliefs and opinions.

The purpose of this code of conduct is to provide a safe, harassment-free learning environment.

All POSE participants, organizers, and volunteers must abide by this code of conduct as part of participation.

What is harassment?

Everyone in the POSE program has a responsibility to create and maintain a respectful learning environment by exercising consideration and respect in our speech and actions and refraining from demeaning, discriminatory, or harassing behaviour and speech. Harassment includes behaviours such as:

Offensive verbal comments that reinforce social structures of domination related to and including gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, ability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, or religion
Sexual language and imagery any POSE environments, including synchronous sessions, online comment and discussion boards, online learning spaces, and social media
Deliberate intimidation or stalking
Taking screenshots or recordings of other people without their consent
Sustained disruption of talks or other events
Unwelcome sexual attention

Expected behaviour

Do not harass others (see above)
Focus on impact, not intention. This includes considerations like offering warnings if forthcoming content or topics may be difficult
Attempt collaboration before conflict

If you are being harassed or notice that someone else is being harassed, please contact the POSE organizers immediately at open.ubc@ubc.ca. Anonymity will be maintained as much as possible, but may be compromised if action is required. Thank you for helping to co-create a learning environment where the exchange of ideas is vibrant, respectful, and free of harassment. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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Synchronous Kick Off Session

lucaspractice — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 20:01:35 +0000

Thanks for attending the synchronous kick-off session. We wanted to follow up with an archive of the session.

Session Recording

We have shared an edited version of the session Zoom recording below.

Session Slides

We have embedded the session slides below.

Map Activity

We have embedded the Padlet map activity below. If you haven't had the chance already, you may want to browse the map and take a look where different members of the cohort are located.

Breakout Room Google Document

During the session, you participated in a group activity where you shared the answers to the questions below in small groups. We have gone through the notes that you added to the Google doc, organized these and described some of the resources that you shared. You may want to spend some time going through some of the links to open projects that groups shared during the session. Compiled Notes from the activity

What inspired you to participate in this program?
What kinds of open scholarship practices/projects interest you?
Share a link in this doc to an open project(s) that interest you.

Resources

rienamba — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 16:58:45 +0000

On this page you can access archives of the past synchronous session, slides, padlet, and more. On this page you will also

Past synchronous session

Jan 13- POSE Synchronous Kick off session (Recording, Slides, Google Doc)

POSE Open Resources

All of the POSE resources and course elements are open and licensed. Please use, revise and remix. You can import the XML file below into any instance of WordPress or Pressbooks. All POSE course content is licensed CC-BY unless otherwise stated. Please contact us if you require guidance setting up your own Open Scholarship program or adapting and revising these resources for your context.

POSE XML Export File

Suggested attribution: The Program for Open Scholars and Educators (POSE) by the University of British Columbia, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Open Code

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:39 +0000

As we mentioned in the first section of this module, a key element of open software includes using tools that enable human and machine interpretable content so that even if a particular piece of software is no longer available, a human should still be able to understand what the intent of the code was.

When we talk about open in the context of creating human and machine interpretable content, we’re talking about organized, documented code supported through scripting and literate programming.

Readable code

It’s all well and good if we make our code available by the ethos of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and engage in literate programming when compiling our data and outputs. But if the syntax and structure of our code are not clear, we are no more transparent than the black box of 0s and 1s we are trying to overcome.

Writing clear code that a human can make sense of is critical for both transparency and reproducibility in the research life cycle.

So, what does readable code look like? The following video Readable Code (3:59) from Khan Academy gives a pretty good overview of how code can be made more accessible to a human reader. Don’t focus on the actual coding language but on the principles of making it readable.

https://youtu.be/_u-fqfr86Ro

Readable Code | Computer Programming | Khan Academy

There are a lot of opinions out there on just what makes readable code readable code. After all, some of our most beloved authors break all the rules of good grammar. Some manage to explain the world in a single sentence, while others will fill pages with the briefest moment. In general, this concept is captured well in the WTF per Minute measurement:

Cars have MPH (Miles per Hour) that measures the speed that they travel. The better the car the faster the MPH or speed. Developers have WTFPM (WTF per Minute) that measures the number of ‘Works That Frustrate’ that the developer can read per minute, aka code quality.
WTF Per Minute – An Actual Measurement for Code Quality

The short of it though is that all rules will be contextual, depending on why you’re writing what you’re writing and who your audience is. As well as the reality that conventions exist in certain circles of programmers, researchers, and learners.

Dig Deeper

Written for programmers, the introductory content in this book is widely applicable: The Art of Readable Code: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code, by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher.

Note The above text is available only to UBC Library card holders. I know. The irony in a module about Open. We're actively seeking an alternative that is open. In the mean time, you can check availability at your local library using WorldCat and putting in your postal code.

Literate Programming

Clean, readable code is just the first step in increasing our transparency and reproducibility. Literate programming takes us to the next level.

Formally introduced by Donald Knuth, literate programming is inspired by a shift in how one's code is communicated; the goal being to, as Knuth states:

[i]nstead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do... [achieved] ... by considering programs to be works of literature.
Knuth, Donald E. (1984). “Literate Programming”. The Computer Journal. 27: 97–111.

Common implementations of literate programming that you may have heard about include R Markdown and Jupyter Notebooks.

What is R?

R has taken academia by storm. R is a programming language that is becoming commonplace in many disciplines. R is open source and community developed. It is great for statistical analyses. It makes beautiful visualizations from your data. Thanks to community efforts it has add-ons that produce gorgeous documents, allowing you to write something once and export it to html, pdf, or Microsoft Word.

Is R the be all and end all?

No. Open, reproducible work flows should be tool agnostic. R just happens to very accessible and well supported. And it is what we'll be referring to when we talk about scripted programming in this module. You'll find plenty of alternatives, and more about R, on the Additional Open Software page!

The following is an example of what literate programming looks like.

First, we have a traditional output, a pdf, that we might be used to seeing; this includes some text and a few tables or graphs. We have no insights into how the data has been handled, and how the visualizations were derived (select the image to view the pdf).

mtcars Download

Second, we have the underlying document that generated the above, written using R Markdown. It integrates the code used to generate the above document! If on a system using R, and the tools to interpret R Markdown, it can be used to generate the above document, making our work reproducible. Better still, this document can be opened by virtually any text based program, making our work transparent; even without access to R, we can still read the below and understand how the processing was handled.

---
title: "mtcars"
output: pdf_document
---
```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)
```
R Markdown documents allow us to interweave narrative text and R code. For more details on using R Markdown see .

R contains several datasets to allow a user to explore various features of the software before we have our own data to work with. One of these datasets is called mtcars.

The data, from 1974, details 10 aspects of design and performance for 32 car models.

The following is a summary of the data for a subset of the variables:

```{r}
summary(mtcars[c(1:3,6)])
```
And here is a tabular view of the data for these same variables for all cars with V6 engine, sorted by increasing mpg

```{r}
library(kableExtra) # load needed libraries

# select and view subset of data in tabular format
V6 <- mtcars[order(mtcars$mpg, decreasing = FALSE),] %>%
  subset(cyl == 6)
V6[c(1:3, 6)] %>%
  kbl() %>%
  kable_styling()  
```
What we really want to know though, is, is there a correlation between a car's weight, and it's MPG. Well, actually, being in Canada, we want to know this relation in KPG. So, first we'll add two columns to our data that contains the converted values (MPG to KPL and lbs to Kg, the latter rounded to the nearest whole number) and then we'll run a scatter plot to investigate.

```{r}
mwt <- round(mtcars$wt * 1000 * 0.45359237, digits = 0) # convert imperial to metric and round off
kpl <- mtcars$mpg * 1.609 # convert imperial to metric
mmtcars <- cbind(mtcars, mwt, kpl) # add metric data to existing data set

# plot
plot(mmtcars$kpl, mmtcars$mwt, xlab = "Kilometres per Litre", ylab = "Weight in Kilograms", col = "#4682b4", fg = "#888888", col.lab = "#4682b4", col.axis = "#888888", bty = "n")
```

If you’re interested in exploring how R and R Markdown can be used in teaching and reproducible research, check out the work of Jason Pither, Associate Professor, Biology, UBC Okanagan, on the Biology 202: Introduction to Biostatistics materials (web page written in R Markdown using RStudio and exported to html).

Test your knowledge

Dig Deeper

To learn more about literate programming and readable code, look into the following:

An interesting web site with a host of resources and references about literate programming: http://www.literateprogramming.com/
A lecture on literate programming delivered by Donald Knuth: Literate Programming (1:14:55)
A good overview written for tidyverse, but widely applicable: The tidyverse style guide, by Hadley Wickham

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Degrees of Transparency

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:13 +0000

So far, we’ve covered three broad areas related to open software.

First, the development of software that we might choose to employ in our research. We’ve discussed the fact that Open Source and Free Software differ from closed source software in that the code behind the program of the former can be accessed by anyone with the knowledge to interpret it. This is one level of transparency in the larger digital ecosystem in which we work.

Second, we’ve touched on how we might shift the paradigm of a piece of software or code that tells the computer what to do, to one where it tells the human reader of the code what the computer should be doing. In this way, literate programming tries to wed together one’s inputs (data) and one’s outputs (manuscript). This adds a further level of reproducibility.

And finally we’ve talked about clearly communicating what our code is trying to do, enhancing transparency through legibility.

We can also take this discussion down a slightly different avenue and introduce the impact of user interface on the transparency and reproducibility of the various aspects of our research.

So let’s talk about WYSIWYGs for a moment.

WYSIWIG vs Markup & Scripted Language

An important differentiation when we talk about software that supports open research and transparency is the difference between WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software — which may well be open source and even adhere to the ethos of Free Software — and software that requires the user to explicitly markup what they’re doing — generally both human and machine readable, to a degree. We've already introduced aspects of this when talking about literate programming.

You may also hear or read the acronym GUI - GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. This is very much synonymous with What You See Is What You Get; the GUI allows us to undertake actions without explicitly marking up or writing out what we want to do — whether that's saving a document, setting text to bold, or transforming our data. Day to day, all of us engage with GUIs, from tapping our phones to using Microsoft Word! But a bit more on the implications of this for research...

Structure and Content

Openness in a computing environment will always be intrinsically limited — when a program is compiled (turned into a series of 0s and 1s representing computer operations) the resulting product is indecipherable to a human. That being said, if any document is going to pass the test of time in a computing environment, it is a plain text file. The issue with plain text files is that they convey only words — all structure (things like pagination, headings etc) and semantics (word meaning and / or emphasis) are not built-in characteristics. Structure and semantics are an added layer, and bring meaning to the reader.

This might be why we like things like Microsoft Word so much — the program allows us to easily see our document structure and encourages a sense of semantics — through the use of bolding, italics, colour, titling and pagination we construct our prose and our document structure at the same time. The catch is that our prose (content) and structure are embedded in a particular program. This has two knock-on effects. First, lose the program and you lose your prose. Second, you lose the ability to view your content independent of its structure and risk obscuring content behind structure.

Markup, or Markdown — a markup implementation — attempts to resolve this by separating out document structure and document content. Some markup languages integrate significant levels of semantic integration, while others are more focused purely on structure. R Markdown, which we've already encountered, is one implementation of markdown. Another popular option in certain disciplines that you may have come across is LaTex. HTML, a markup language, provides the underlying structure to the webpage that you are viewing right now in a plain text environment; your web browser renders the content in a pretty way. If you want to see the underbelly of this web, or any webpage, you can right click on your mouse right now and select the option that reads something like "View Page Source".

What all of these iterations of the 'markup' model have in common is that they rely on a second program to translate the markings in the document to visual, interpretable content for human digestion — look back at the R Markdown document and corresponding pdf on the previous page to see this translation in action. What they also have in common is an underlying plain text document that can be read on virtually any computer from the inception of the computer and that will still be readable by both a computer and a human for decades to come.

If you've used a wiki editor, you've used markdown. And wikis can be a great way to introduce students to practices in open sharing of knowledge created through a transparent, text based tool, that allows for greater portability and adaptability than what we would find in a WYSIWYG editor.

Let's briefly recap.

WYSIWYGs give you a graphical interface (GUI) where your content and your structure cannot be separated - they provide a document with pagination and the ability to change fonts, bolding, colours etc. on the fly with the click of a button.
Markup, or markdown, employs a three step process. In a plain text editor, you write, without distraction from the ability to change your formatting. When you're done, you call on another program to transform your text into a Word document, pdf, PowerPoint etc. To view the formatted document, you open it with a third program — your web browser, pdf reader, or word processor.

Dig Deeper

Check out some basic markdown syntax with this markdown guide.
Check out the Additional Open Software page for help in selecting a markdown editor in which to start composing beautiful text-based documents.

Going Up the ladder

At this stage, we’ve touched on the applications that support one's work. These applications all reside within a larger ecosystem, an operating system.

Operating systems exist in a similar environment to that described in our discussion about closed source, open source, and free software. Your choice of operating system will impact your choice of applications to pursue your research, how interoperable these programs are (and by virtue, the content that you build in them), and how transparent and reproducible you can make your work.

Windows OS is entirely closed source. Mac OS is closed source, but because of its underlying structure it is compatible with many tools and scripts built for Linux. Linux is open source and distributions are often driven by the GNU philosophy of Free Software.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), take a look at the treasure trove of information, guides, and tutorials on everything Linux and open source found here: It's FOSS (Free and Open Source Software
Want to explore Linux without committing? Check out the resources on the Additional Open Software page.

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Version Control

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:19 +0000

Continuing on the journey of increasing the openness of our research with software solutions, we move next into version control.

Version control likely was first born in the context of records management, and has historically relied on naming conventions and multiple copies - or versions - of documents being created and managed. But software developers working in distributed environments really pioneered the way forward in how we track changes in a document and across a project, especially in a digital environment.

In research, version control comes into play in a variety of ways, sometimes in the context of software, sometimes data, as well as in our methods, protocols, and manuscripts. Before delving into each of these aspects, lets start with the following video, LEARN GIT version control in 10 minutes!, that discusses why we might want to leverage a version control system instead of naming conventions across multiple documents. There is no need to watch beyond the first 4 minutes and 10 seconds. Indeed, we highly recommend a hard stop at 4:10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCI4DxAF3Ak

Learn Git version control in 10 minutes! | Python Programmer

Version Control in Open Research and Open Education

In the context of open research, version control provides a window into the evolution of our project, allowing changes in one's plans to be identified and rectified against an original plan. This is transparency in the research life cycle. This is equally as relevant for our protocols or methods as it is for our scripts and our manuscripts. In the context of open education, version control can track the evolution of educational content co-developed in a class across cohorts; version control and time stamps can help other users identify the currency and relevancy of the resource.

Undo or Version Control

We should differentiate here though between version control for transparency and version histories for recovery or tracked changes. Tracking every change made is more about recovery than versioning. Versioning instead is very much about capturing moments of significant change or phases of implementation.

If our methods change, our protocols need to be updated to reflect this, and the nature of these changes should be documented. If our script is processing our data in one way, and we discover the need to adjust this, this update should be captured and documented. The same goes for our manuscript; when a revision is made, this should be both noted and documented to allow a transfer of the tacit processes of the project to be embedded into the project workflow.

Recovery (Undo)

When we think recovery, it’s more like having an undo function: the whoops moment, I made a mistake — I didn’t mean to delete that paragraph or I didn’t mean to put that file in the trash — let me undo that.

So, for example, MacOS Time Machine allows you to trace your documents back through time and recover an older version. Google Docs allows you to see a history of edits over a specified time period. Your R script can document each change you make to your data to get from A to B. Open Refine, a graphical data cleaning tool, similarly keeps a record of every change made to your data set.

Common to all these platforms is the ability to retrace your steps and go back one step. Your individual steps or changes are also not commented; we don’t know why what happened happened, we just know it happened.

Version Control

When we think of version control, we should be thinking of a timestamp to capture significant decisions made in the transition or evolution of a project, ideally accompanied by a description of what these changes were.

In the context of a manuscript this might be recording two draft versions: the first, ready for review by my supervisor or journal editor, the second reflecting edits made after receiving feedback. Or for our script, a first version that imports and tidies our data, and then an updated version that fixes an issue in our calculations to convert imperial to metric.

The difference between recovery and version control is more nuanced than this, but this dichotomy helps to highlight the role of version control in transparency versus recovering from a mistake.

Version control is made possible with both software and platforms. Most people have heard of GitHub. Git is the software that handles the version control. GitHub is an implementation of Git owned by Microsoft. Git is designed with text-based documents in mind, which is why it is so popular with people who write code.

OSF provides a similar versioning service as GitHub, but is designed primarily for people working with binary documents - non plain text files like pdfs, word documents and the like.

Common to both of these platforms is that major revisions can be stored on both your local computer and in a remote repository for potential sharing and collaborating. They also encourage you to document your changes.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about version control and the different platforms that enable this, review the following:

Learn how OSF manages versions of documents: Version control on OSF
Learn about setting up a UBC affiliated account on OSF Institutions.
Pro Git is an excellent read on all things Git; the introductory chapter is the place to start: Chapter 1.1 Getting Started - About Version Control in Pro Git, by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub
Some people prefer to watch a video. For those people, here you go: Git Tutorial Part 1: What is Version Control? (9:35)

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Reproducible Environments

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:28 +0000

At this point, we have covered quite a bit. Open as a principle of software development, open as a principle of human and machine interpretable, and open as a facet of reproducible workflows.

If we think back to the content covered in Open Workflows, and the discussion of reproducibility and replicability, it's worth considering that reproducibility is really about internal validation while replicability is about external validation. Reproducibility confirms the same data and processing methods will produce the same result. Replicability contributes to the evidence base by conducting a new study modeled on a previous study.

In the spirit of open as it relates to the digital environment and reproducibility, one of the gold standards when we're looking at a single study is computational reproducibility; that is to say, if I pass off all of my inputs (data, scripts etc) to someone else, can they, on their computer, reproduce what I did exactly. Unfortunately, the answer is frequently no, because computers are complex environments, and no two machines are going to have exactly the same environment; hardware and software differences will exist and these will impact how data is processed by a program. That is, unless we use a container and employ the concept of containerization.

The full details of how containerization is deployed are really beyond an introductory module on open research. But the principles being addressed by containerization are critical to navigating a digital environment when we think about the ability of work, embedded within a piece of software, to be validated by others.

A Recipe for Understanding Containers

The thing about any piece of software or any script is that it is never fully self-contained. We always rely on dependencies or pre-existing bundles of code, usually called libraries. Think of it like baking muffins.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

When you write your R or Python script, you're writing out your recipe; a set of instructions with particular steps that need to be followed. Your recipe requires certain things to be fully executed though. It requires:

an environment in which to run; let's call this your kitchen
something to process your ingredients into the end product; let's call this your oven
something to validate all the ingredients; let's call this your mixing bowl
a list of ingredients; let's call these your dependencies or libraries.

Finally, your favourite muffin recipe is dependent on you having eggs, butter, white flour, and cow's milk. Let's now imagine that when you built your working environment -- your kitchen -- you made sure to include a lifetime supply of all of these dependencies -- your ingredients. All is good until you come home one day, and realize that your partner has done some upgrades. One of these upgrades is to replace all of your white flour with rye flour and your cow's milk with goat's milk.

This upgrade was ostensibly made to reflect the need for a healthier lifestyle. Beyond potentially being annoyed about the lack of consultation, maybe you see the problem? Next time you try to make your muffins, your validator -- your mixing bowl -- will be expecting white flour and cow's milk. Unable to find these ingredients, your mixing bowl will fail to pass all the ingredients off to your oven. No more muffins, in spite of the most well-documented script -- your recipe -- being in hand.

Even if you never had any upgrades done, what if your friend wanted your recipe? Sure, you could give them the script, and they could source all the ingredients. But if you wanted to ensure that the recipe was a perfect match to your own, you'd gift-wrap all the ingredients with the recipe attached, ensuring success.

This gift wrapping, or bundling, is exactly what software that containerizes a piece of code does -- it ensures that the code is accompanied by the appropriate environment and dependencies so that it will run into the future. This is a critical aspect of reproducibility.

Docker is a popular open-source tool for containerizing software and code. For those working in the realm of High-Performance Computing, Singularity is another popular option.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about containers and the way they can improve reproducibility, review the following videos:

A conference presentation on the basic elements and implementation of Docker: Using Docker Containers to Improve Reproducibility in PL/SE Research (42:08)
An introduction to containers using Singularity and some of the differences between Docker and Singularity (48.23)
An introduction to setting up a container using Singularity (13:06)

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Implementing Open Software

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:27 +0000

This brings us to the final chapter on our journey through open in software. And it is here that we tackle the difficult question of implementation. We'll do this the best we can realizing that there are as many valid solutions out there as there are researchers when it comes to strategies to integrate openness through our choice of digital tools.

Some of the key questions we should be asking ourselves when we think about software selection and implementation for transparency, reproducibility, and longevity of access include:

Is the code open source?
Is the software Free?
Does the solution allow for human and machine interpretation?
Do I need a graphical user interface?
Can I adopt version control?
Would my work benefit from containerization?

Choosing Open Source Software

Following on all of this is the question, how do I choose a piece of open source software?

This is a hard question to answer. It will depend on your research needs, your level of comfort with your computing environment, and your desire to get into the nitty gritty of working with code and the command line.

There are some baseline considerations though, not least of which is trying to pick something established and with a strong support community. To figure this one out, do a quick search of the internet. Are the help resources well established? Are the existing users discussing the software in a way that you’re comfortable with? What version is the software at — anything that starts with a 0 will require more user intervention and debugging than something that is greater than 1. And of course, the higher the number, likely the more robust the implementation and the larger the support network behind it.

Lastly, the internet loves a top 10 list, and a simple search for “[proprietary software name here] open source alternative”, will get you a blog or similar post discussing the pros and cons of various alternatives to the closed source application you’re looking to replace.

The following table explores some common examples of proprietary software and their open source alternatives. Learning resources for the Open Source options can be found on the Additional Software Page.

WYSIWYG* Open Source Software and their Closed Sourced Alternative

Review What You See Is What You Get in the module on degrees of transparency.

Use	Open Source Program	Closed Source Equivalent
Word Processing	LibreOffice Writer	Microsoft Word
Data Manipulation	LibreOffice Calc	Microsoft Excel
Citation Management	Zotero	RefWorks

Open Source Software and their Text Based Equivalents

Use	WYSIWYG	Text
Word Processing	LibreOffice Writer	Markdown
Data Manipulation	SPSS	R
Citation Management	Zotero	Bibtex
Version Control	OSF	Git

* Many aspects of WYSIWYG applications can be accessed from a text based interface, and many text based programs have had graphical user interfaces built around them.

Dig Deeper

Learn more about choosing open source software:

Visit the Additional Open Software page for a detailed list of open source alternatives and learning opportunities for each of these.
An article discussing in more detail some of the above: How to Choose the Best Open Source Software.

An Ideal World

In an ideal world, full transparency in relation to the use of open software would involve using software whose code is transparent and that allows for transparent processes -- interpretation by both humans and machines, while also permitting a record of contextualized actions to be maintained.

We do not live in an ideal world though. And there are a host of limitations that might prevent the above from reflecting our reality, not least of which will be discipline-specific idiosyncrasies. And all things are ultimately ephemeral. But, with an eye to the ideal, we'll do the best we can, cognizant of the impact our decisions will have on transparency, access and reproducibility.

Additional Resources

It is not possible to cover every piece of open software for every given task a researcher or learner might wish to undertake. The activities in the activity bank for this module aim to provide a breadth of opportunities for engagement in software you may never have used before. We have also compiled a separate list of learning resources for a few key pieces of open software that touch on Word Processing, Data, Text Analysis, and Workflow Management, ranging from very low barrier options to ones which will require more investment in time to learn. If open software is in you future, you may wish to check these out alongside the other additional resources.

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The Value of Open Data

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:10 +0000

When research data and any code associated with the data is made open by applying an open license and depositing it into a data repository, it allows others to easily access, share, and/or re-use the data.

Reproducibility: At the most basic level of access and use, your code can be re-run to reproduce your results thus validating your research findings.
Public Service Improvement: Open Data provides citizens with data they can use to engage their governments and improve public services. Open data in British Columbia allows individuals to reference any BC Legislation as a data-point.
Accelerates the pace of discovery: When datasets are openly available, they can be easily accessed and used to create a fuller picture of a given area of inquiry, or analyzed by data mining software that can uncover connections not apparent to those who produced the original data.
Research Transparency: Research transparency is required and recommended from funding agencies who request that authors make copies of their research outputs open access and, more recently, increasingly request that the associated data be made open whenever possible and appropriate.
Impact: The impact of others using your data can increase the number of times you are cited, raise your research profile and improve your chance for future funding.
Data Management Practices: Opening data encourages and requires good data management practices by establishing a workflow for each stage of the data life cycle so that you can find and interpret that data months and years after having collected it.
Data Control: Data deposited into an open repository in non-proprietary formats allows you to control how the data is shared and reused

Now that you have looked of the ways for that open data can be valuable, watch the following video TedX talk of Kristin Briney, a Data Services Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In this video Briney discusses some of the reasons open data can be so valuable in research and society.

https://youtu.be/dXKbkpilQME

Kristin Briney is a Data Services Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Dig Deeper

With the emergence of the COVID pandemic in 2019, a growing number of organizations have been advocating for open data sharing to harmonize global efforts to combat the virus. Read Why open science is critical to combatting COVID-19 by the OECD to learn more about the importance of open data and open science to improve global pandemic response.

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What is Open Data

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:04 +0000

This module will focus on open research data, the raw material. Data is often central to research and a key aspect of open scholarship.

In the digital age, data is the raw material on which discoveries are built, and unfettered access to research data, whether in the Life Sciences or the Social Sciences, is crucial to accelerating progress in research. Data plays a central role in our ability to predict and counter natural disasters, understand human biology, and develop advances in computing technology.

Despite its tremendous importance, today, research data remains largely fragmented—isolated across millions of individual computers, blocked by disparate technical, legal, and financial restrictions.

The amount of scientific and scholarly data grows exponentially each year, yet we still lack the infrastructure, policies, and practices to harness this vital resource. While some high profile projects—such as the Human Genome Project and the Large Hadron Collider—make their data openly accessible, too often data isn’t shared beyond those who generate it. The Internet was built by researchers to share data, but data sharing isn’t yet the norm in research.

Text Adapted from Setting the Default to Open, by SPARC Europe used under a CC-BY License.

Open Data: an Introduction

To understand what is meant by open data, start by watching this quick video introduction from the University of Guelph. Questions about open data at UBC can be directed to research.data@ubc.ca.

https://youtu.be/frPFDAvc15Q

The previous video provides some broad strokes about what open data is, but as researchers and open scholars we need to understand the concept of open data in more detail. Let's start with a simple definition and break this down even further.

Open Data is defined as structured data that is machine-readable, freely shared, used and built on without restrictions.

“Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike."
From the Open Data Handbook https://opendefinition.org/

The Open Definition provides more detail and is summarized in the Open Data Handbook by highlighting the most important points:

Availability and Access: The data must be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost, preferably by downloading over the internet. The data must also be available in a convenient and modifiable form.
Reuse and Redistribution: The data must be provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution, including the intermixing with other datasets.
Universal Participation: Everyone must be able to use, reuse, and redistribute. There should be no discrimination against fields of endeavour or against persons or groups. For example, 'non-commercial' restrictions that would prevent 'commercial' use, or restrictions of use for certain purposes (e.g. only in education), are not allowed.

As you can see in the definition above, open data is much more than making data available. It requires an established workflow for collecting, managing and storing that data and should adhere to standards for making that data open. The FAIR principles described in the next section are standards that can support researchers ensuring that their data is truly open. By using the FAIR principles to take care of your data from the planning stage, providing metadata and documentation to accompany your data and code in one container is the best way to easily make your data both future proof and open.

The FAIR Principles

Related to open access, open government, and open source, open data ensures public access to data and should include sufficient details so that others know how that data can be reused or repurposed. Reusable open data are guided by the FAIR principles for sharing data, meaning that they should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (Wilkinson et al., 2016). These principles provide guidance for scientific data management and stewardship and are relevant to all stakeholders in the current digital ecosystem.

https://youtu.be/5OeCrQE3HhE

FAIR principles by CSC — Tieteen tietotekniikan keskus / CSC — IT Center for Science

Dig Deeper

Read about how the future of FAIR might look according to research scientist Brian Lavoie

The Future of FAIR, as Told by the Past by Brian Lavoie

Privacy and Open Data

While open data should be governed by the FAIR principles to promote transparency and reproducibility, not all data can or should be made open. There are always privacy, ethical, or cultural issues to consider.

The FAIR principles provide guidance for sharing data, but it is with the understanding that ethical and contractual obligations will be upheld.

Some data may contain personal or other sensitive information that should not be readily accessible. For example, open data that contains the location of a rare plant or species at risk may further endanger that species if others are able to locate it. We should also consider personal information that may be available when collecting data and whether it is ethical to disseminate that information widely. Consultation with a Research Ethics Board may be necessary before making personal information open. In Canada the Tri-Agency Council Policy Statement on the Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Human (TCPS-2) provides guidelines for research and the use of research data.

There are methods to de-identify data and repositories may offer options to keep the data closed or embargoed. Good data documentation/metadata will protect sensitive data while still making it discoverable. Even in a more closed scenario a best practice is to let others know the data exists by creating a description of your data and using a metadata standard so others can find it, cite it, and request access if that is an option.

Policies and Open Data

Open data may be required by granting agencies or journals as part of their agreement for funding or publication. For example the Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management stipulates that, "research data collected with the use of public funds belong, to the fullest extent possible, in the public domain and available for reuse by others" (Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management, 2016).

This draft policy recommends that institutions have a strategy in place to support researchers fulfilling their data management requirements for funding and when implemented will require a data deposit into a recognized repository.

Reflection

Read the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy and reflect on how this might impact how you manage your data.

Further reading:

Support for the Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management in UBC
Canada's Open Data Initiative
Visit the Portage learning module RDM 101: Canadian Policy Review for further reading and background on open research data.

Publishers

Publishers are also requiring open data and have various levels of policy in place. There are even entire journals dedicated to publishing data for all domains such as Scientific Data and the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines outline standards journals may adopt to demonstrate how the journal has introduced open practices.

Blog post: Is it Finally the Year of Research Data? The STM Association Thinks So

Test Your Knowledge

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What is an Open Workflow?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:23 +0000

In the Open Access unit we discussed making publications, often one of the primary outputs of research, freely accessible. In this module, we will take a step back and explore how increasing the openness of research workflows - the processes and methodologies used to conduct the research - can help improve research outcomes by increasing the amount and quality of information placed on the public record. Having more information available about how research will be, is, or was conducted can help other researchers validate and reproduce published research results, understand how a scholar developed an idea, increase evaluation from the research community, and allow for increased public engagement. It also buffers against future loss of scholarship due to a lack of ownership, digital decay, software deprecation, and missing files.

In other sections of this unit you will learn about best practices surrounding the use of open source software to help buffer against this loss and around open data to ensure that core research artifacts are recorded and shared in meaningful ways. But for now we will consider the steps we take to complete research work. Small decisions such as a consistent file-naming convention or making open backups of data stored in a proprietary tool can make it possible to continue work even a few years or decades down the line. These are small but intentional interventions but make all the difference to future scholars.

Defining a research workflow

A research workflow is a series of steps that processes and transforms information in some way, be it through a study design or deep reading. This series of steps should ideally be repeatable or understandable by others and, in the STEM fields, must be reproducible within disciplinary expectations. In the humanities and social sciences a research workflow may be more individual and less reliant on reproducibility by others but the process one took to reach an argument, and sources that were consulted, should be transparent to others.

A workflow may be straightforward and linear or can be complex, involving the addition of subsequent steps depending on how the process is going. Being able to communicate your workflow in all of its complexity is essential for supporting the validation of published findings or enabling other scholars to understand the context behind your reasoning. It is essential to new scholars engaging with your discipline for the first time.

A research workflow has many stages from ideation to output, and many tools come into play throughout this process. The 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication Project surveyed tools used by researchers for different aspects of their work and has generally sorted academic workflows across disciplines into six higher-level categories: discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach, and assessment. Their circle of tools demonstrates the exponential growth in available workflow tools for each stage of this process.

Source: 101innovations website

Tools and workflow stages

For each stage in a research workflow, different tools contribute to each of these categories. Some categories have a higher number of proprietary tools that can impact our ability to see how work was done in a decade or two; others have more open tools. On the spectrum of what makes a tool open we generally refer to "open source" tools as the most open but a proprietary tool that uses open formats is more open than a proprietary tool with a custom file format. Sometimes the decision on what tool to use is determined in advance for you by best practices in your discipline. We will expand on the value of open-source tools later in this unit but for now it's important to know that their ability to be referenced or even included wholesale, with all source code, in the record of a project provides rich context for how work was done and allows future scholars to repeat and build on what was done.

As we can see from the 101 Innovations project, for every stage of the research process there are many equally valid and useful tools to choose from, and it is possible to plan for a more open workflow by considering alternatives to what you might normally rely on. Beyond disciplinary considerations, open might also mean accessible to your community or easier to access within your project team. Using tools that enable internal openness can help you transition to open publications in the future and make sure that you keep a meaningful record of important information, and tools that are difficult for your team to use might get less use. Ultimately, the most important consideration for whether a tool makes sense for you is very context specific. No matter what tool you end up using you can go a long way to shaving an open workflow by ensuring that your metadata is sufficiently rich, that the tools you use are accessible to your team and your community, that you are able to export your work out of them in an open format, and that your files are predominantly stored in open file formats.

Workflows and "Open"

Now that we have a sense of what we mean when we say “workflow”, let’s consider what makes an open workflow. At its simplest, an open workflow is when each of step of the research process is openly shared through clear documentation that makes the research project transparent and reproducible. Clear documentation includes using best practices around file naming conventions, project metadata, file formats, etc. In fact, well curated metadata and open file formats go far in enabling the clarity and longevity of your work.

It’s important to remember that openness in workflows does not mean “exposed” but is rather about making sure that enough information about how you got from an idea to a conclusion, an inspiration, or an output, the tools that you used, and enough of the interim steps are shareable in a way that communicates the complex context of your work. It’s a way of reinforcing your work so that it won’t go away or become inaccessible in a few years when a tool or format stops being available.

In practice, open workflows may be context and discipline-specific but there are some key pieces that apply across the board. Openness for workflows generally comes down to how information is stored and used in every step of your work. For one project team, an open workflow may mean using best practices within your team with the eventual goal of opening your workflow publicly. For another, it could mean working in a fully open way where individuals outside of the project team are able to find and view project files and activity. On either side of this spectrum, the use of best practices around file naming conventions, project metadata, file formats, tools used, and many other nuances of workflow management help to enable meaningful long term preservation of research outputs.

Steps for getting started with open workflow

Small interventions go far. To set yourself up for an open workflow start planning from the start.

Consider some of the following questions:

Are there existing open projects that can inspire your workflow?
Are there tools with templates that can help you create a research plan or protocol; if your discipline does not create protocols, are there tools for open composition, citation sharing, or peer review that you can incorporate into your work?
For each step in your process, are there relevant open tools and open file formats that you should keep in mind?
As your project moves forward and you start creating outputs how will you keep track of things? Document everything and preregister important study design and analysis information to increase transparency and counter publication bias of negative results.
Consider which open licenses can you add to your project outputs as you collect research data, create code, and compile materials. What are the best practices in your discipline?

As you plan the steps of your work it might be useful to centralize and organize your project management using an online platform, a central repository, or folder for all research files. You can also self-host your files which can be more secure but takes more planning. As soon as you are ready, plan to report and publish your methods explicitly and transparently to allow for replication. Using a central online tool such as OSF for your project can help make this process of exposing your steps easier. We'll explore the practicalities of working with open workflows further in this module.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about open workflows, read the following:

Weiland, S. (2018). The Scholarly Workflow in the Digital Age: What Do We Know? What Should We Do?. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/charleston/2017/scholcomm/4/
Two pieces from 2015 on the 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communications project.
- https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/01/28/report-101-innovations-scholarly-communication
- https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/11/11/101-innovations-in-scholarly-communication/

Explore more arguments for open research workflows from "Why Open Research?"
Leek, J. T. (2016). How to be a modern scientist. https://leanpub.com/modernscientist
Explore the Open Science Training Handbook, CC-0

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Some material in this module was adapted from the Open Science Training Handbook, CC-0.

Why Does it Matter?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:31 +0000

Traditional research workflows are in flux with the introduction of new tools, approaches, and software into the way that research is conducted and disseminated. What stays the same is a need to communicate your work to others. All forms of research across disciplines communicate ideas and conclusions so that they may be built on by future scholars. Building on to work requires having enough information to understand how it was done. The increasing of use of new digital tools and methods means that truly understanding how a scholar came to a conclusion may be difficult to do. Providing context about the tools used in addition to source materials becomes more important as more digital tools are used. Whether this impacts a scholar who viewed a manuscript through a tool that removed a blemish on the page, a scholar who mistypes an Excel formula, or one who wrote a piece of software to accomplish a task but designed it specifically to run on their machine, sharing context helps future scholars understand why a conclusion was reached and contribute their own ideas more meaningfully.

This is all the more difficult because projects often have many collaborators, many different types of files, and many ways to work on, share, or save those files. This complexity poses challenges that can be hard to address. How we manage our files and workflows can have a major impact on the quality and usability of what we leave behind when a project is over. Imagine reading a paper but never being able to open the related data or see the working manuscript because the original materials that the author worked with no longer exist. What about if they do exist but you're not sure exactly which version the author worked with, what tools they used, whether something else impacted their conclusions because their workflow is unclear. Worse yet, what if all of the work happened in proprietary software which, while necessary and relevant to use at the time, is no longer available. Not only is this a challenge within the scope of individual projects, it's a challenge for whole disciplines where work is simply lost over time.

Increasingly research communities are pushing back and recognizing the importance of openness in research workflows. With the rise of communities of practice that embrace open, reproducible, and replicable work across disciplines. Closed workflows that make use of proprietary tools and data formats may limit the number of people we can communicate our work to and make it more difficult for anyone to understand why we did things in the way that we did them in the future. While a proprietary tool might be the best tool for a job (for instance, a specialty scanner or a writing tool that your collaborators are familiar with) considering what happens when it ceases to exist can help buffer against future losses. Avoiding a worst case scenario in which work simply disappears can be as simple as a bit of planning around exporting backups into open formats or as complex as shifting your workflow to new, more sustainable, tools.

In the Open Software and Open Data modules in this unit, you will learn about best practices surrounding the use of open software to help buffer against this loss and around open data to ensure that core research artifacts are recorded and shared in meaningful ways. For now, though, we will consider the steps we take to complete research work. Small decisions such as the lack of a file-naming convention or the use of a proprietary tool without open backups can make it impossible to continue work even a few years down the line.

Test your knowledge

Dig Deeper

To learn more:

Armeni, K., Brinkman, L., Carlsson, R., Eerland, A., Fijten, R., Fondberg, R., … Zurita-Milla, R. (2020, October 6). Towards wide-scale adoption of open science practices: The role of open science communities. 10.31222/osf.io/7gct9
Bartling, S., & Friesike, S. (2014). Opening science: The evolving guide on how the internet is changing research, collaboration and scholarly publishing (p. 339). Springer Nature. http://book.openingscience.org.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/
Fenlon, K. (2019, September). Interactivity, Distributed Workflows, and Thick Provenance: A Review of Challenges Confronting Digital Humanities Research Objects. In 2019 15th International Conference on eScience (eScience) (pp. 510-513). IEEE. 10.5281/zenodo.3459770

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Reproducibility & Replicability

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:14 +0000

Reproducibility and replicability are different but related concepts. There are important distinctions between the terms that need to be made when discussing how research workflows unfold across disciplines. Not all disciplines have historically paid attention reproducibility as it plays out within the scientific method but the increased use of computational tools and methods across all fields of research has made concepts around replicability and, in some cases, reproducibility more ubiquitously relevant.

Reproducibility

Reproducibility for research means the workflow and data used in the research project can be used to yield the same results. For research to be reproducible, a new team of researchers must be able to use the same experimental method, data, population, and general conditions of the first experiment to reproduce the same results. Improving reproducibility leads to increased rigour and quality of scientific outputs, and thus to greater trust in science. There has been a growing need and willingness to expose research workflows from initiation of a project and data collection right through to the interpretation and reporting of results.

Dig Deeper

Read a run down on reproducibility in science from The Nib.

Replicability

Replicability of research means that the same workflow is used by different people for a research project using a new dataset yielding different but expected results. This proves the transferability of the workflow. Replicability is more difficult to achieve as the results of a replicable research project are based on the reported methods of the original research using new data.

To get a better sense of the difference between these ideas, consider the image below. For something to be reproducible it needs to be possible for a group to repeat the same steps, with the same hypothesis, data and environment as before and get the same value. The value is the only unknown in this case. For something to be replicable a different group should be able to take the same context or population, research question, experimental design or approach, and analysis plan and make use of this approach to do new work with it on new data.

Source: https://coderefinery.github.io/reproducible-research/01-motivation/

Reproducibility & Replication in the Humanities and Social Sciences

There is an ongoing debate around the degree of whether the concept of a "reproducibility" crisis can equally apply to the humanities and social science disciplines. While notions of one for one reproducibility do not always reflect the nature of work in these non-STEM disciplines, computational replicability is deeply relevant with the rise of digital scholarship. The ubiquitous use of digital tools and methods in modern research requires us to think about the ways in which our work, whether reliant on digital technologies or using digital technologies to augment existing workflows, will be possible to open, view, and manipulate in the future. A document written in proprietary software from twenty years ago may not be viewable on a modern device without intervention. Similarly a digital humanities project which uses a script to draw conclusions off of data will not be replicable unless that script is made available along with the data. This lack of persistence puts fundamental characteristics of humanities and social science research at risk and makes it difficult to build onto knowledge over time.

Source: phdcomics.com, used in https://coderefinery.github.io/reproducible-research/01-motivation/

Incentives

Incentives to engage with open, reproducible, and replicable workflows vary greatly on both personal and professional levels. Disciplinary guidelines, tenure incentives, grant requirements, and peer workflows all contribute to varying degrees of planning and implementation of reproducible and replicable workflows. If your discipline has traditionally published monographs an open process of composition, feedback, and open resource lists might not be the norm and engaging with it may not be a high priority when the tenure process does not recognize it. Similarly a discipline in which results have traditionally been reported with descriptions of workflows, packaging an environment in which a workflow was run may seem like added labour that is not incorporated into existing timelines and workflows. Upskilling team members, particularly across interdisciplinary teams, can be an immense challenge.

Dig Deeper

Explore this Code Refinery lesson on motivation and reproducible research.

Learn more about replicability in the humanities, by reading the following:
- Peels, R. (2019). Replicability and replication in the humanities. Research integrity and peer review, 4(1), 1-12. 10.1186/s41073-018-0060-4
- Peels, R., & Bouter, L. (2018). The possibility and desirability of replication in the humanities. Palgrave Communications, 4(1), 1-4. 10.1057/s41599-018-0149-x

Scenario – Reproducibility

Let's consider this scenario: you are starting a new collaborative research study and have engaged your partners in a conversation about how to make the results of the study reproducible. One of the project leads, an experienced researcher with many publications under their belt, made the following comments:

"All of the results will be in the paper, won't people be able to reproduce our results from there? If they have any more questions they can reach out directly."

How would you respond to them?

You may wish to note that having an extremely detailed description of the methods and workflows employed to reach the final result will not be sufficient in most cases to reproduce it. This can be due to several aspects, including different computational environments, differences in the software versions, implicit biases that were not clearly stated, etc. Additionally, spending the time and effort to put this together will increase both the scientific validity of the final results as well as minimize the time of re-running or extending it in further studies.

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Future Trends

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:12 +0000

The future of reproducible and replicable computing in the academy is directly tied to strong digital research infrastructure that can support the needs of these workflows. Often this means providing high performance computing power and or controlled access to large datasets through virtual machines or containers that are the reproducible objects for work undertaken. Whether we are working with provisioner files which can help define and run an installation process to "provision" or install everything necessary for a process to run, to more comprehensive environment managers, containers, and virtual machines. Many tools exist to allow you to take a snapshot of the context in which you are working.

The use of container tools such as Docker or Singularity, environment managers such as Vagrant, and dedicated provisioners such as Ansible can go far in helping to make the environment in which work occurred reproducible. We will touch on this further in the Open Software section.

Dig Deeper

Learn more about using containers in research and digital research infrastructure:

Read about using Docker in research
Read more about Data Capsules
Read about containers specialized to High Performance computing.
Learn about digital research infrastructure in Canada by reading "What is Digital Research Infrastructure"

Explore virtual research environments, a tool for the replication of these environments, and discussion about how simple or minimal approaches can remove some of the barriers to preservation of outputs.

Example of virtual research environment architecture: PARTHENOS
Reproducible Zipping with ReproZip

Finally, read about a related approach to replicable computing: Minimal Computing.

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Open Research Shared Reflection

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:00 +0000

During the capstone module, you’ll be asked to work on a project in which you’ll apply one or more aspects of open scholarship to your scholarly practice. In this activity, please take a moment to reflect on Open Research and think about some different ways it could be applied to your work. This activity draws upon the Stanford University design thinking framework and a goal is, as a group, to generate and capture different ideas that could later be developed into capstone projects. This activity should take approximately 20 minutes.

Scenario: Breaking News!

Your department has just received internal funding to help support transparent and reproducible research practices! This funding can be used to help provide time for developing an open research strategy. To get started with this initiative, your department or unit head has asked you to reflect on your own research practices and suggest some strategies on how to make it more open.

Step 1: Brainstorm!

Take three minutes and think about any of your research processes, practices, or tools that are not currently open that you’d like to be open. Write down as many ideas as you have (on a piece of scratch paper or on your own computer).

Examples:

I don’t publish much or any of the data that underlies my research
I’ve never pre-registered a study

Step 2: Reframe the Idea!

Examples:

Transform [my research data] to [be accessible to other researchers].
Transform [my research plan] to [be more transparent during my research process]

Step 3: Getting Started:

Take your reframed idea and write down three or four steps that you could accomplish in three hours that would help you begin to meet your idea.

Examples:

Transform [my research plans] to [be more transparent]
- Research different types of pre-registration that would be relevant to my work
- Review different places or platforms for preregistration in my discipline
- Review the templates and processes for preregistration at those platforms/sites
- Choose a preregistration site and develop the strategy (i.e. collect the information needed) to preregister my next research plan

Step 4: Share!

Add your reflections to the padlet below.

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Open Research Unit Completion

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:08 +0000

Open Research Completion

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Working in a Reproducible & Replicable Manner

efields — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:36 +0000

Working in a reproducible and replicable manner first requires examining the research workflow and finding ways to improve the organization and share-ability of the materials, ephemera, data, instruments, and reasoning.

Increasing Documentation

Documentation is a necessary part of reproducibility and replicability in research; however, to create useful documentation there are some key issues to address, including. The vast majority of the research workflow is obscured. There is either no detail or little detail around the workflow to allow others to reproduce the results of a study. Similarly the reasoning behind decisions that contributed to the use of specific computational tools or methods may never be communicated outside of the project team. Without the accumulated unpublished workflows and research outputs (e.g. data), it is difficult to perform additional analysis to expand upon the research or to apply the same approach to a new idea.

Version Control - Version control is a system of recording changes made to a file or set of files over time to recall specific versions later. Version control is especially important in reproducibility and replicability as it allows researchers to track when issues were introduced into the research and the decision making behind those decisions. To learn more about version control, review the module on Open Software.
Including appropriate meta information - From a Readme to a codebook, documentation about your project describes the content and structure of a project, data, and files within it. Developing README files and following metadata best practices help make projects more accessible; codebooks are intended as a self-explanatory guide to variables in a data file. This type of documentation supports the research team while also helping those interested in replicating or reproducing the study with the detailed information related data analysis within the project.
File organization and sharing - Housing all materials related to the research study in one place that team members have access to, organized in a meaningful way, and with the application of best practices, helps a team out during the project and improves your ability to share it on.

Reflections

Think back on a project, research or otherwise, from two years ago. Do you remember what you did? Do you remember the details of the project and how you completed it? Do you remember why you made the decisions you did around the project? Could you tell someone how to complete the project themselves with the same results?

Even if you have a very good memory, the answer is probably no.

We will explore increased documentation and organization in the next part of this module, Best Practices for Organizing.

Openly share materials as well as data

The most important factor in workflows for reproducibility and replicability is access to the materials that make up the research. It is difficult for research to be interrogated, reproduced, or replicated without access to the tools creating the data (e.g. research instruments such as surveys), scripts for manipulation and analysis, a record of the decisions about the specific tools and methods used, and the data used or collected. Sharing all the elements of the research project in one location with persistent identifiers (e.g. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) - unique identifiers associated with an electronic object that contains metadata that makes the object significantly easier to find and track how it has been cited) provides the opportunity for the researchers to engage in open workflows while supporting the scientific ideal of reproducible results.

Dig Deeper

To learn more, review the following:

Open Textbook chapter on open science practice.
Grüning, B., Chilton, J., Köster, J., Dale, R., Soranzo, et.al. (2018). Practical computational reproducibility in the life sciences. Cell systems, 6(6), 631-635. 10.1016/j.cels.2018.03.014
Stodden, V. C. (2011). Trust your science? Open your data and code. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8KD27BK/download
Leek, J. T. (2016). How to be a modern scientist.
Go further with the free "Reproducible Research" Massive Open Online Course from Johns Hopkins.

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Adapted from Reproducible Research Practices Slides by Bowman, Sara D, Brian A Nosek, Andrew Sallans et.al. licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal.

Best Practices for Organizing Work

efields — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:32 +0000

Putting time and consideration into how content will be stored will support greater ease of sharing. As stated earlier, reproducibility and replicability are dependent on increased documentation. In addition to increased documentation, organization of research outputs in a manner that are easily identified, collated, and packaged for openly sharing.

When working on research projects, there are often many files that need to be stored on a computer. These files may include:

Raw data files
Processed data files: you may need to take the raw data and process it in some way
Code and scripts
Outputs like figures and tables
Writing associated with your project

The following provides best practices around organizing files that should be incorporated into research workflows, including open workflows.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about organizing research, review the following:

Explore best practice guides from UBC Library Research Data Management and particularly best practices in creating a ReadMe
Best practices for file naming by Stanford University Library

Importance of File Names

As new files are created on a researcher's computer, a carefully crafted naming convention needs to be developed that makes it easier for anyone to find things and also to understand what each file does or contains.

It is good practice to use file and directory names nthat are:

Human readable: use expressive names that clearly describe what the directory or file contains (e.g. code, data, outputs, figures).
Machine-readable: avoid special characters (e.g. & or accents) and spaces. Instead of spaces, you can use - or _ to separate words within the name to make them easy to read and parse.
Sortable: it is nice to be able to sort files to quickly see what is there and find what you need. For example, you can create a naming convention for a list of related directories or files (e.g. 01-max.jpg, 02-terry.jpg, etc), which will result in sortable files. The most important part of a naming convention is that it's consistent; beyond that, order information as it is useful for ways that you would want to sort your files.

Learn more about best practices in file naming and look at examples here:

These guidelines not only help you to organize your directories and files, but they can also help you to implement machine-readable names that can be easily queried or parsed using scientific programming or other forms of scripting.

Using a good naming convention when structuring a project directory also supports reproducibility by helping others who are not familiar with your project quickly understand your directory and file structure.

For practical examples of naming conventions, watch the following video on document naming:

https://youtu.be/rai-fEXqnJ0

Records Management 101: Document naming conventions by the University of British Columbia's Records Management Office

Scenario – Video Interview File Naming Conventions

Let's consider this scenario: Professor Sam Meyers is performing over 200 interviews with first-generation undergraduate students for their research on information retrieval. Professor Meyers is developing a file naming convention to ensure the data is easily retrieved on their shared drive for future use. Their study is currently titled "IR Study." The interviewees have been labelled 1 to 200 for anonymity. The first video recording occurred on November 5, 2020, and was performed by their graduate research assistant Karina Cassidy.

Professor Meyers and their research team decided to include the following information in the file naming conventions:

Project Name
Date of Data Collection
Content of the File
Researcher's Initials
Interviewee Label

Best Practices for File Naming

Computer Readable Conventions

If your files follow identifiable patterns or rules, it will allow you to more easily manipulate them. This in turn will make it easier for you to automate file processing tasks.

A few other best practices to consider when naming files within a project:

Avoid spaces: spaces in a file name can be difficult when automating workflows.
Use dashes-to-separate-words (slugs): dashes or underscores can make is easier for you to create expressive file names. Dashes or underscores are also easier to parse when coding.
Use the ISO Date Standard: use the date standard of YearMonthDay (e.g. 20201106)
Consider whether you may need to sort your files. If you do, you may want to number things.

Consistent File Names

It might be tempting when naming files and directories to use lower and Upper case. Case can cause coding issues for you down the road particularly if you are switching between operating systems (Mac vs Linux vs Windows).

To keep things simple and to avoid case sensitivity issues, using lower case naming conventions for all file and directory names is suggested.

However, consistency is key when developing naming conventions and you can choose to use CamelCase. CamelCase is the practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation, indicating the separation of words with a single capitalized letter, and the first word starting with either case (e.g. instead of Case study, you would write CaseStudy).

Use Meaningful (Expressive) Names

Expressive file names are those that are meaningful and thus describe what each directory or file is or contains. Using expressive file names makes it easier to scan a project directory and quickly understand where things are stored and what files do or contain. Consistency is key when developing naming elements and structure and following the conventions for all project files.

Example Naming Elements and Structure

_{DescriptiveTitle_DocumentType_Date_VersionInformation}

Sample Named File

_{Xyz_ContractNegotiations_20170104_Rev0.pdf}

Additional information about file naming and how it relates to open data can be found in the Open Data module.

Create a README File

A readme file at the top level of your project is a standard convention. The readme is a file that describes data/software packages and tools used to process data in your project. The readme should also describe files, associated naming conventions and other details important to understanding the files.

Readme files can be as simple as a text file (Example: README 4) or they can involve greater formatting and design elements (Example: Sulu). The most important part of a readme file is the content.

Additional information about readme files and how they relate to open data can be found in the Open Data module.

Proprietary File Formats

Proprietary formats are formats that require a specific tool (and often a specific license) to open. Examples include Excel (.xls) or Word (.doc). These formats may change over time as new versions come out (example: .xls upgraded to .xlsx).

When choosing file formats for a project, it’s important to consider ongoing access to the license of the tool and whether others have access as well.

Choosing formats that are operating system and tool-agnostic such as .csv and .txt is one way to avoid the issues related to tool licenses and to increase the potential for sharing fully usable content.

The Open Software module provides insight into open source tools.

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Adapted from Lesson 3. How To Organize Your Project: Best Practices for Open Reproducible Science by Jenny Palomino, Leah Wasser, Max Joseph (Earth Lab) licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 LICENSE.

Using Open Data

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Research can generate open data, but it can also leverage existing open data. Leveraging open data requires all the same considerations as creating open data - it must be well described, discoverable, and licensed to be of any use. It must also come from a trustworthy source. To help build this trust affiliate your data with a trusted repository, keep it organized, and link the data to its outputs.

Now that we have looked at some of the reasons that open data is valuable as well as a process for implementing open data in our research, let's take a look at leveraging open data in government and in teaching and learning.

Open Data in Government

Government collected data whether for administrative functions or research are increasingly being made accessible and can greatly compliment your own self generated data. In fact, working with other open data can be a great lesson in learning exactly what makes for valuable contributions to that data in terms of its description, discoverability, and licensing. Open government data can be a great way to start exploring some of the dos and don'ts of open data sharing, while leveraging data that might enhance your own research.

The core idea behind open government data is a simple one: public data should be a shared resource. It is valuable not only to the government departments that collect it, but also has value for citizens, entrepreneurs, researchers, and other parts of the public sector.

Securing government accountability, coordinating action to improve society, and bootstrapping new business ideas can all benefit from access to government data. Yet far too often, access to data, and the skills to use it, are unequally distributed, and there are unnecessary technical and legal restrictions that prevent data re-use. Calls for a data revolution are placing renewed attention on ensuring the collection and management of high-quality data around the world through strengthened statistical capacity, and are driving a focus on the use of new ‘big data’ resources in policymaking. Against this backdrop questions concerning who has access to data, and whether citizens have the capability and freedoms to create, access, and analyze data about their own communities and concerns, are ever more important if we are to secure a fair balance of power in our societies.

According to the Open Data Barometer, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the leaders in making open data available and accessible. Open government data ranges from legislative data, to census date to crime statistic data. Examples of the types of government generated data that can increasingly be accessed to support discovery and research include:

Map data
Land ownership data
Census data
Budget
Legislation
Transit data
Crime statistics

Text Adapted from the World Wide Web Foundation, Open Data Barometer Global Report (Second Edition), 2015 and include a link to and is used under a CC-BY 4.0 License

Dig Deeper

To explore how different governments share open data explore the Open Data Barometer website. Produced by the World Wide Web Foundation with the support of the Omidyar Network, the Open Data Barometer aims to uncover the true prevalence and impact of open data initiatives around the world. To explore the site begin by skimming the report, From Promise to Progress. Then using the Barometer list explore one of the countries in detail and the type of data shared. Note how the country scores according to the barometer.

Space Apps COVID Challenge (Link to the Space Apps Challenge Site)

5,000 participants in 150 countries worked to solve using COVID-19 related challenges using NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, and CNES space agency data. Participants used open and international open data to evaluate the effectiveness of a country’s public health measures by comparing the number of COVID-19 cases and infection rates. Through their data analysis, the participants were then able to develop recommendations to help minimize the negative impacts of the pandemic on a global and national scale.

Training the Researchers of the Future with Open Data

With the increasing availability of open data, teachers can carry out research-based learning activities using real data, without having to leave the classroom. Using open data in teaching brings other benefits as it helps to make scientific organizations more transparent, it further provides evidence that public money is well spent, and it demonstrates scientific knowledge use for society. Open data also affords opportunities for teaching researchers to connect and share experiences, data, and activities. Javiera Atenas et al "identifies a set of core, discipline-agnostic competencies" that they believe students can acquire using open data sets.

Critical thinking: Students can understand, verify data, and develop evidence-based arguments across different disciplines.
Data curation skills: Students can analyze data and present complex reports
Research skills: Students can compare data from multiple sources and replicate the research
Statistical literacies: Students can perform statistical operations
Teamwork skills: Students learn skills to help them collaborate in multidisciplinary research teams
Global citizenship: Students can critically evaluate and use data to solve local and global challenges

Text adapted from Use Open Data in Teaching, by Foster Open Science, used under a CC-BY-4.0 License

Examples of Open Data in Teaching and Learning

Open data is used by faculty and instructors in different disciplines for course assignments. For example:

Exploring Datasets in Math 210 at the University of British Columbia

As a course assignment students find an open dataset online, use pandas to explore the dataset, and write a Jupyter notebook to present their work. Students chose the subject and the open data-set with the requirement that the dataset must be open meaning that the readers of their notebook should be able to find the data online and recreate the analysis.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about how open data can be used in teaching and learning read Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Towards transversal skills and global citizenship. The rubrics included in the article on page 384 describe some of the ways you can integrate open data in different disciplines and teaching contexts.

Atenas, J., Havemann, L., & Priego, E. (2015). Open data as open educational resources: Towards transversal skills and global citizenship. Open Praxis, 7(4), 377-389. doi:10.5944/openpraxis.7.4.233

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What is Open Software?

rienamba — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:07 +0000

Open Software is often articulated as software that can be adapted - that is Open Source software. In the world of programming, this often includes some sense of collaboration where someone else, who is able to view and edit your code, is then able to make a suggestion on how to improve your program. Imagine you're the author of a book, and for each new edition, you crowd sourced edits that your readers think will improve the story; new characters, different timelines, you name it!

We'll get into the nitty gritty of different interpretations or implementations of open in the context of software shortly, but to start, the following CNBC news story, The Rise Of Open-Source Software (13:50), provides a high level overview of the history and future directions of Open Source Software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpeDK1TPbew

The Rise of Open Source Software | CNBC

With this underlying understanding of open software as adaptable, open source code, throughout this module we're going to get more nuanced in exactly how we might interpret open and the impacts this can have on the research life cycle.

But first, in addition to adaptable code, when we talk about software that is open, we often call it free. Free is a very problematic term though. And we'd like to clarify the difference between free software, Free Software (with capitals), and Open Source software.

Although perhaps nothing in life is truly free, free software simply implies no financial transactions being needed in the acquisition of the software. Lots of software is ostensibly free; not all of it has its underlying code available to be adapted by anyone wishing to do so.

When we talk about Open Source software we’re describing the availability of the underlying code for people to edit, modify, and improve. This certainly does not imply that there is no price tag attached to said software.

And finally, when we talk about Free Software, we’re really describing a philosophical approach to the development and distribution of software that goes well beyond simple financial transactions and code adaptability. Free Software, in this latter sense, is grounded in the ability of the user (you) to:

Run the program as they wish;
View and potentially alter how the program works;
Redistribute the program and its derivatives.

Differentiating free software and Open Source software from Free Software is often done, per the GNU philosophy, by suggesting that we're not talking about free in the sense of "free beer", but "free speech".

Dig Deeper

Learn more about the GNU philosophy:

The GNU articulation of Free Software: What is free software?
The GNU on how Open Source and Free Software differ: Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software
Founder of the GNU, Richard Stallman discusses the ethos behind and need for Free Software: Free software, free society: Richard Stallman at TEDxGeneva 2014 (13:39)

The Many Facets of Open in Open Software

Just as free can be interpreted differently in different contexts, so can the intent of open.

When we talk about open software supporting the research life cycle, we can think of three tiers of open:

Software whose code is open source — that is, anyone can inspect the code;
Software that is open source and community-developed — that is, not only is the code open, it is collaboratively built by developers and users; and
Software that allows for creating human and machine interpretable content.

This last tier can seem like a bit of a leap if you're used to working in programs like Microsoft Word and Excel, for example, to write and build visualizations like bar charts. We'll look more in depth - and with examples - at what it means for the underlying structure of a document and its analysis to be both human and machine interpretable shortly. In the meantime, one example that you might already be familiar with, often used in Open Education, are Wikis. It is not uncommon for class research assignments to be built around editing existing pages on Wikipedia or even generating course-specific content on UBC's Wiki. Wikis employ a flavour of markdown, a key tool in building human and machine readable content. More on this shortly!

Let's briefly recap

Open software can be interpreted by its price tag, the sharing of its underlying source code, and the philosophy that underpins how it should be used and distributed. In short, open source does not equal free, nor does closed source equal paid. And open source can come with many restrictions that Free Software should not.

In supporting transparency in the research process, a key element of open software includes using tools that enable human and machine interpretable content so that even if a particular piece of software is no longer available, a human should still be able to understand what the intent of the code was.

In the scholarship of teaching and learning, engaging in open platforms is just as important as it is in traditional research.

A note on licensing

The above largely speaks to how software is developed and / or interacted with by the user and developers. Software licensing - how it is sold or how it may be copied or altered - is another matter. Understanding licensing is crucial if you intend to get into the world of modifying existing open source code yourself, or you wish to develop your own code from scratch. Unfortunately - or fortunately depending on how you feel about this! - licensing, writing and modifying software is beyond the scope of this module.

Dig Deeper

If you wish to take a bit of a diversion and learn about software licensing, check out the following:

Introductory post from Free Code Camp on open source licenses
A bit more information from Opensource.com
And a 200 page book on open source and free software licenses for those wanting the full story

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Additional Open Software

efields — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:38 +0000

You know your research and what you need. Maybe it's text analysis. Maybe it's ecological data analysis. Maybe you're writing code explicitly to be deployed in data gathering. Maybe you just need prose that's not wrapped inside of Microsoft Word. The following is a list of resources for learning and working with open software tools that hit some of these aspects.

This is just a small example of what is out there. From texts, to blogs, forums, MOOCs, YouTube channels, and other online courses, you will likely encounter a number of other learning opportunities. The hope is that you'll find at least one tool that you can spend a bit of time with, explore how it best fits in with your research life cycle. Pick a tool that is at your level, and expand out as you feel comfortable.

Word Processing

LibreOffice LibreOffice is a full suite alternative to Microsoft Office, available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Installation and use is very straight forward.

Markdown In a plain text editor or dedicated markdown editor, you can mark up your text to indicate what should be a header, bold, italic etc. You can then send your plain text document to pdf, html and other document formats. You can even create presentation slides.

Read a bit more about Markdown in the Markdown Guide Getting Started page
Take a Markdown tutorial
Keep a Markdown cheat sheet
Dig deeper and read about Pandoc, the engine that fuels the conversion of document types

R Markdown Do you work in R or want to work in R? R Markdown allows you to engage in literate programming, interweaving formatted text with R code that is processed on the fly and can be sent to html, pdf etc. You won't look back.

Read and tutorials: R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
Get an overview and tutorial of R Markdown in R Studio

LaTeX Need some serious document formatting? A high quality typesetting application: work in plain text, output beautiful documents.

Start at the LaTeX project page:
Get everything you need to install LaTeX and get started
Get started on your first LaTeX document
Dig deeper and read about Pandoc, the engine that fuels the conversion of document types

Data

LibreOffice Calc Need a spreadsheet? LibreOffice Calc is the perfect open source alternative to Excel.

Open Refine Have dirty data? Want to keep a forensic track record of your changes for reproducibility? Still want a graphical user interface, but also the ability to explore introducing customized elements? Check out Open Refine.

R R has made a name for itself in the statistical world. It is usually paired with the integrated development environment RStudio. So, likely you'll want both R and RStudio. But RStudio isn't strictly necessary.

Python When paired with Jupyter Notebooks, you and Python can join the world of literate programming. Like with R, you'll need both Python and Jupyter Notebooks installed.

Get Python
Get Jupyter Notebooks
Start with a tutorial, like this Jupyter Notebook tutorial from Dataquest or this Jupyter Notebook tutorial from Data Camp
Learn about reproducible research with Jupyter Notebooks: Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Research in Jupyter Notebooks
Get more in depth: Python for data analysis: Data wrangling with pandas, NumPy, and IPython

Text Analysis

Voyant tools An open source, web based graphical text analysis application. Upload a text, or find one online and start your analysis with things like word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, and keywords in context. Built for the digital humanities, its applications can definitely reach further.

Find a text to play with if you don't already have one at Project Gutenberg Canada
Head over to Voyant Tools and plug in your text
Get in depth guidance through the Voyant Tools help pages

Terminal Not where we would normally turn for text analysis, but the command line is designed for handling text and has some powerful tools for interacting with text. A great introduction to both text analysis and the Linux command line.

Get the bash terminal. On a Mac of Linux? You're already set, just pull up your terminal. On Windows? Follow these instructions
Take a tutorial: Basic Text Analysis with Command Line Tools in Linux

R Ostensibly not designed for text analysis, some great tools have been developed to facilitate this work. See above for basic installation.

Read a tutorial: Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach

Python Python is great for natural language processing especially with NLTK. See above for basic installation.

Read a tutorial: Text Analytics for Beginners using NLTK

Workflow Management

OSF Everything you need to keep your project organized and connected.

Check out the module on OSF if you haven't already
Install the R package osfr and get R and OSF connected

GitHub Version control and so much more. GitHub lives in the cloud and on your local machine.

Create a Github account
Install Git on your computer
Take your first tutorial: Getting started with Git and Github, the Complete Beginner's Guide
Read way more in depth in the Pro Git book

Explore Linux

Virtual Box Not ready to commit to a full Linux install? Don't want to mess with a dual boot machine? Virtual Box will allow you to install a virtual operating environment on your PC.

Get Virtual Box
Pick a Linux distribution
Download your chosen distribution. No links here, it will depend on what you learn above.
Install your new operating system
Launch your new operating system
Learn all about open source alternatives and how to's with it's FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)

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Wrap Up

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:20 +0000

In this module we have explored what open data is, how to implement it in your research and how it can be used.

Key Takeaways

Open data is defined as structured data that is machine-readable, freely shared, used, and built on without restrictions.
The FAIR principles are a set of guidelines to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable
Not all data can or should be open, what type of data and privacy are important considerations
Open data is valuable for research and data reproducibility, public service transformation, innovation, impact, and research discovery
One approach to implementing open data is to plan your data management, describe your open data, and preserve and share your open data.
Open data is used in open government to improve transparency
In teaching and learning open data can help students develop critical thinking, statistical and data literacy, and global citizenship

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Wrap Up

efields — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:32 +0000

In this module, we have explored open workflows, their importance in reproducibility and replicability in research across disciplines and best practices for organizing research outputs.

Key Takeaways

A research workflow is a repeatable series of steps that transforms information or processes data or other information in some way. Open workflows are the processes of ensuring that enough information is openly shared about how you got from an idea to a conclusion, an inspiration, or an output, the tools that you used, and enough of the interim steps to communicate the complex context of your work.
The inability to reproduce or replicate research work in the digital age is a major driver in the need for open workflows.
Open workflows begin with analyzing research to find ways to improve the organization and share-ability of the materials, including considering pre-registration of studies, increasing documentation, and sharing research outputs in a manner that is easily identified, collated, and packaged for openly sharing.
Using open workflow tools (e.g. OSF) provides a central landing place for all research collaborators, project files, and to track versions of project outputs. Tools such as OSF can provide a structure for sharing your research openly.

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What Makes an Educational Resource Open?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:13 +0000

Although you can find a variety of educational resources online, just because a resource is available on the web it does not mean that the resource is available for you to use. In this section, we'll discuss different aspects of what makes a resource open and a few different factors that may impact an OER's reusability. Let's start with the following short introduction video for an overview of what we mean by the "open" in open educational resources, and the "5Rs of open".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnFCtP1pPrM

OER, The 5Rs of Open, and Creative Commons Licenses by Martha Greatrix under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

As was mentioned during the video, open is not a binary attribute (in which a resource is either open or it's not) but rather a spectrum that asks how available and editable a resource is. David Wiley, whose scholarly work has influenced the open education movement, proposes that a truly open resource can be reused in its original format, copies of the resource can be retained for personal archives or references, and the resource can be modified or altered to suit specific needs. It can also be adapted with other content to make something new, and it can be shared with anyone else in its original or altered format.

Browse through the 5Rs of OER in the section below. We have included some questions and activities to connect OER and the 5Rs to your current disciplinary practice and context.

The 5Rs of OER

Open Educational Resources provide teachers, learners, and others with legal permissions to engage in these 5R activities:

Reuse

Reuse refers to content that can be reused in its unaltered, original format. This involves the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video).

Revise

Revising allows OER to be adapted, adjusted, modified, or altered. These revisions can range from translating the language of an OER to adapting it for your teaching and learning context. Revising enables instructors and faculty to make changes to OER and open textbooks to adapt the format and content for their course. Revisions may include changing the format of the OER or adapting the OER to your teaching, learning, and disciplinary context.

Dig Deeper

For more in-depth information on revising open textbooks, read Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know.

Remix

Remixing OER refers to combining the original or revised content with other materials to create something new. One example of remixing is mashups and remixes. Remixing open educational resources involves combining resources like open textbooks and media into something new. One example of remixing is the creation of open textbooks through the remixing of different open textbook sources. For example, you could develop a new open textbook by remixing media and content from different OER.

Dig Deeper

For step by step instructions on remixing content, read the ISKME's Teachers and Makers Remix Lab 2013.

Redistribute

Redistribute means that content can be shared with anyone else in its original or altered format. Users have the right to share copies of the original content, their revisions, or their remixes with others. For example, they can share them directly with other individuals or post them on websites.

Retain

The 5th R (Retain) was introduced seven years after the 4R’s (reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) were identified. As the cost of textbooks has been climbing, institutions have been trying to make books more affordable by decreasing access to them (buyback, rental, subscription, digital rights management).

Retain refers to making, owning, and controlling copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage). Consider a publisher eBook that you purchase. Depending on the contract you may not have permission to download multiple copies of the text, and you may only be able to use the text in certain formats. Compare this to an open textbook that you can retain. You can access the open text, download it, make copies of it, and control your own copy.

Creative Commons Licensing

As we discussed in the Creative Commons module, CC licenses provide legal permissions to access and use resources in specific ways. While a free and perpetual granting of the 5R permissions by means of an “open license” qualifies a creative work to be described as open content, many open licenses do place requirements (e.g., mandating that derivative works adopt a certain license) and restrictions (e.g., prohibiting “commercial” use) on reuse of the work. The inclusion of requirements and restrictions in open licenses make open content less open than it would be without these requirements and restrictions.

Open Formats

While open licenses provide users with legal permission to engage in the 5R activities, many open content publishers make technical choices that interfere with a user’s ability to engage in those same activities

Scenario – What is the consequence of not using an accessible format?

Let's consider this scenario: Erina found a CC-BY licensed infographic that provides information about the food supply chain in the US. They want to modify the infographic so that the infographic fits in a Canadian context. However, the infographic is only available in PDF format so Erina cannot edit the image. In the end, they decide to not remix the infographic and create a new infographic from scratch.

In this situation, the creator wanted someone like Erina to be able to revise the work, but they didn't share it in a way that makes revising easy to do. What would make it easier for Erina to reuse to work?

The ALMS Framework provides a way of thinking about technical choices and understanding the degree to which they enable or impede a user’s ability to engage in the 5R activities permitted by open licenses. Specifically, the ALMS Framework encourages us to ask questions in four categories:

Access to Editing Tools: Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive (e.g., 3DS MAX)? Is the open content published in an exotic format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that run on an obscure or discontinued platform (e.g., OS/2)? Is the open content published in a format that can be revised or remixed using tools that are freely available and run on all major platforms (e.g., OpenOffice)? In the scenario above, one way the creator could make it easier for Erina to reuse the work would be to provide a format that easily allows for adaptations or remixing. The creator of the infographic could have provided an .eps (vector file) file format of the infographic in addition to the PDF format so that it will be easier for Erina to modify the infographic.
Level of Expertise Required: Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount of technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Blender)? Is the open content published in a format that requires a minimum level of technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Word)? In the scenario above, if the creator has created a fancy infographic with complex JavaScript animation, it would still be hard for creators like Erina to edit the work.
Meaningfully Editable: Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document or a PDF of a scanned document without optical character recognition)? Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content easy to revise or remix (e.g., a text file)? In the scenario above, if the creator of the infographic has used the creator's handwritten text, it would be hard for creators like Erina to replicate the text.
Self-Sourced: It the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g., HTML)? Is the format preferred for consuming the open content different from the format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g. Flash FLA vs SWF)? Going back to the scenario above, if the creator of the infographic has only provided an .ai(illustrator) file for their infographic, creators like Erina will need an access to Adobe Illustrator in order to edit the infographic.

Using the ALMS Framework as a guide, open content publishers can make technical choices that enable the greatest number of people possible to engage in the 5R activities. This is not an argument for “dumbing down” all open content to plain text. Rather it is an invitation to open content publishers to be thoughtful in the technical choices they make – whether they are publishing text, images, audio, video, simulations, or other media.

Accessibility

Open licenses and formats can help provide access to learning but the resources themselves may not be fully accessible. For instance, according to Statistics Canada, an estimated one in five Canadians over 15 years old has a disability. This factor slices through all sectors of our society and is a significant part of every community and it impacts how people are able to use, or learn from, an OER. Accessibility is about making sure all of the materials, including images and media, in an OER are accessible by as many users/students as possible. Designing OER for accessibility is good learning design.

Accessibility for education gives all students equal opportunities to learn. Following accessibility best practices and guidelines when creating or adapting OER helps to broaden the goals of open education to make learning be more inclusive and equitable. In the below video, Tara Robertson, a former accessibility librarian with CAPER-BC, says while the open education movement has helped people in different parts of the world access content that they would otherwise not be able to view or interact with, there's still room for more inclusivity:

https://youtu.be/KcvYG-rkO-Y

UBC Open Dialogues: How to Make Open Content Accessible by Emi Sasagawa used under a CC-BY 4.0 License

It can be easier when faculty and instructional designers think about the accessibility of their open educational resources proactively, from a universal design perspective, rather than trying to retrofit their already created resources. The OER Accessibility Toolkit is a resource for getting started with creating open and accessible educational resource — resources that are accessible for all students. As you work through the content of the OER Accessibility Toolkit, you will find that the suggestions provided are intended for the non-technical user. If you are looking for more technical descriptions of how to make your work accessible, we suggest you review the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

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Why Use OER

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:30 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M

TEDxNYED - David Wiley - 03/06/10 by TEDx Talks under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Using open educational materials in your course means your course can save students money, make educational materials more accessible and can allow you to customize and contextualize your materials. As an educator, what benefits do you see in using OER for you and your students?

Saves costs for students

OER can offer drastic savings in the cost of education. Some students who otherwise cannot afford to buy expensive textbooks or other course materials will appreciate this affordable option when taking your course.

Graphic from the UBC AMS, used in the 2019 Open UBC Snapshot.

Not being able to afford textbooks and other learning materials can be a real teaching and learning issue. According to the 2019 AMS Academic Experience Survey (AES), over 71 per cent of UBCV undergraduate students reported going without textbooks or resources due to cost at least once, with 35 per cent of students reporting they frequently or often go without textbooks due to costs. Additionally, 40 per cent of undergraduate respondents reported that they are not sure they can pay for their course materials. The survey also found that over 16 per cent of both graduate and undergraduate UBCV students reported experiencing food insecurity (unsure of the ability to obtain food or feed oneself) on a monthly basis. The use of OER helps ensure that students have access to the materials they need in order to meet the learning goals of a course regardless of their financial situation.

Helps prior to learning and after learning

If an instructor opens their own course materials and shares them with the public, it greatly enhances opportunities for learning for both students who already took the course and prospective students.

Students often would like to look over course materials before the term begins. If students have that opportunity to take a look at the course materials it will help them make more informed decisions in choosing their courses, and will give them the opportunity to prepare themselves for the class.

Students may also want to revisit their course materials after the quarter/semester is over to refresh their memories or to further study the topics. Open course materials will help them reinforce what they have learned and further develop their level of understanding in the area.

Provides peace of mind for all users

If you’re reusing someone else’s materials, one of the best reasons for using OER is for peace of mind about attribution. The resources are licensed to allow the sharing of content and so you will not need to contact the author about making use of their work provided that what you want to do falls within the open license. Open educational resources are free at the point of use, so you will not need to provide monetary compensation for using them. Then there is the opportunity of discovering alternative ideas for presenting and teaching your subject matter or being able to point your students to the alternative explanations for further study.

Other benefits

Showcases research to the widest possible audience
Enhances a school’s reputation as well as that of the teacher or researcher
Social responsibility – provides educational resources for all
Shares best practice internationally
Creates additional opportunities for peer review
Maximizes the use and increases the availability of educational materials
Raises the quality standards for educational resources by gathering more contributors

Image Credit: Three Books Photo by Alabaster Co on Unsplash, in the Public Domain.

What other benefits do you see? Do the above make sense? Think about what OER can do for you and your students.

Dig Deeper

Select two of the videos from the Open Dialogues playlist. Listen to UBC faculty talk about their projects and why they use and create open educational resources. As you watch these videos think about the extent that these examples might be applicable in your current practice.

Adapted from What are the benefits in using OER? from How to Use Open Educational Resources licensed as CC-BY.
Adapted from Why OER Matters, Open Washington, used under a CC-BY_SA License.

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Creating OER

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:15 +0000

Creating OER is a very appealing idea for many educators who see the value of their work and the potential to support their students and colleagues. There are many reasons to consider creating OER.

The open educational resource movement has been around for well over 20 years, and with it comes many resources that can be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. The first thought before creating OER should be to check if the content already exists and could be adapted. The health and continued success of the commons requires sustainable growth through adapting and improving content.

FIG. 1 Creating OER - Decision Tree provides potential creators of OER a decision process before engaging in creating new content. For a larger view, click on the image.

FIG. 1 Creating OER - Decision Tree
Creating OER - Decision Tree by E. Fields licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Reflections

Take a moment and think about an OER project that you are interested in starting, have already started, or have completed in the past.

Go through the decision tree.

Were there any moments during the decision tree review that you hadn't considered in the past? How would you deal with these issues in your OER creation?

Workflow for Creating OER

Workflows for developing OER will depend on the medium in which you are creating. Textual content will differ from video content; however, there are common workflow elements across all OER that will help you plan your OER project. Review the following steps in the OER Workflow.

Step 1: Copyright & License Review

If you are choosing to use a preexisting resource, you will need to ensure that you can share the content openly.

Identify license of any materials already being used in the resource
Track down original sources and licenses for any unattributed materials
Identify content that needs to be replaced with open resources

Step 2: Identify Needed Resources

Identify the license being used in your OER project
Identify compatible licenses for existing materials you want to use in your OER
Identify what resource types you need and for what purposes

Step 3: Selecting a Tool

While selecting a tool to develop an OER is often at the top of the mind, OER can be created with most tools. The "openness" of the object is largely dependent on the license and the file format that is provided to potential users. However, there are some questions you can ask yourself to select the best tool for the kind of resource you are developing.

What am I trying to achieve with this OER? This will impact your tool decision because of the different features these platforms offer. For example, if you are writing a textbook and you want to achieve a higher level of student engagement, you might be better off choosing Pressbooks (which offers H5P capabilities) over the UBC Wiki, which has no interactive opportunities for students.
What are the Learning Objectives? This is a great question to consider if you're involving students in creating OER. For example, if you want to have students contribute to the project through posting their assignments or papers, or have them help create content for your project, then a Blog or Wordpress site is much better suited to that than Pressbooks where, for example, you would have to request permission to have extra accounts made.
How will I evaluate my project? If you are interested in metrics, then using a platform like Pressbooks would be useful since it provides some metrics tracking. If you are looking to easily keep track of the number of student assignments completed, then bundling up student work into a journal with OJS would be a good choice.
What are the tools used by other faculty in my department? While this shouldn’t be used as a sole criterion for which tool to use, it is useful to talk to other faculty members creating similar OER to see what they are using. There might be a specific reason why a specific tool is being used, and using the same tools consistently can be helpful. For example, if you choose to create a set of questions using WeBWork, students who have used it in the past won’t have to re-learn a new platform or software.

UBC directly supports the use of Open Journal Systems (OJS), Pressbooks, UBC Blogs (Wordpress), UBC Wiki, and WeBWorK. The tools that UBC supports have gone through a review for FIPPA compliance, so if you choose to use a different tool make sure you and your students are informed about their information privacy.

Step 4: Assigning a License

Assigning an open license to your work will depend on a few considerations.

First, you will need to decide what rights you would like to maintain and give to users of your OER. This will direct the type of license you will assign. Review the Creative Commons module for more details.

Second, if you have used materials in your OER that are openly licensed, for example under a Creative Commons license, you will need to abide by the sharing and adaption requirements of the license. This will impact the kind of license you can use on your resource. The following video outlines these considerations:

Creating OER and Combining Licenses by TheOGRepository

For further help, you can use the Creative Commons Choose a License tool or the license compatibility chart on the Creative Commons wiki.

Step 5: Sharing the OER

Sharing open educational resources can be difficult, so developing a workflow for sharing your content through repositories and community networks will help to increase the reach of your work. The Sharing OER module will cover strategies in developing a workflow.

Significant Creation Considerations

While the general process for creating OER is outlined in the video above, there are several significant issues that should be considered prior to creating your resource. These considerations aren't specific to what you create and the license you attach but address how you plan your resource before it is developed to ensure the greatest potential of your content for yourself and others.

Sharing in an Open Environment

A common issue encountered by those engaging in OER creation is the desire to use content that was already created for the classroom environment. The difficulty with using previously developed educational content is often you have not considered the licensing and attribution processes needed in OER development -- mainly making sure that the existing materials can be included in your newly-created open learning resource. Many of the materials you use in courses are likely copyrighted, or you might not have taken note of the licensing or attribution information to make sure they are open. Often retroactively trying to find the licenses can be difficult because the attributions to the original resources are missing.

If you’re adapting an existing resource, you’ve likely used images, graphs or charts to illustrate your lectures, handouts or modules under Fair Dealing. However, according to UBC Copyright's guidelines for open courses and OER, Fair Dealing exceptions cannot be relied upon in open environments since the audience is not limited to registered students.

Scenario – Creating an OER from an Existing Resource

Professor Nader has developed a slide presentation on ocean biodiversity. They have heard about OER and are interested in releasing the slide presentation into the commons, allowing anyone to reuse, remix, and share.

Review the opening slide: Ocean Biodiversity

It is good academic and scholarly practice to always provide citation when using or building off of other people's work. Additionally, tracking your resources so you can update or refer back to the source will help eliminate the guesswork and gray zones for using the resource and making the transition from closed to open smoother.

Accessible & Inclusive Design

Often when people engage in OER development a goal is to develop freely accessible content. The issue with this goal is “accessible” often means available to access but not accessible to all in the sense of providing a resource that addresses the widest possible range of abilities within the community. With OER creation, accessibility can often be an afterthought, which causes issues in design and time when attempting to apply accessibility practices once a resource is created. Inclusive design is beginning with accessible and inclusive practices already embedded into the creation process. When beginning an OER, starting with the core principles of accessible and inclusive design will ensure all possible users of the resource, including those specifically within your education environments, are served.

You can return to the What Makes an Educational Resource Open? page of this module for more information on accessibility and OER.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about Accessible and Inclusive Design for OER, review: Open UBC OER Accessibility Toolkit

Student Engagement

When embarking on developing OER, you may also want to include students in the writing process. Open pedagogy, or OER-enabled pedagogy, is the practice of engaging students in the co-creative process of OER development. This will be addressed in more detail in the Open Pedagogy module. If you are engaging in students creating OER, it's important to discuss with students the benefits, barriers, and potential risks associated with publishing their work openly, including:

Engaging in a discussion about intellectual property.
Discussing the various options they have for choosing a license for their work.
Providing students with a variety of options to share or not share their work publicly. These options could include publishing with a pseudonym or publishing in a way that only other people in that class can see their work.

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Finding and Reusing CC Licensed Works

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:22 +0000

Creative Commons estimates that there are over 1.6 billion creative works that have a CC license. In the next unit, we'll be looking specifically at educational materials that have CC licenses and how those can be discovered and used for teaching and learning, but we'll start here with the basics of finding and reusing CC licensed works.

Finding CC licensed works

There are multiple websites that you can use to find CC licensed or public domain works. Here are a few:

Open Educational Resources Guide - The UBC Library's OER Guide has a curated list of places to find CC licensed materials, including images, textbooks, and audio.
Examples from the Open UBC website- The Examples section from the Open UBC website showcases a list of openly licensed courses, tools and databases that are created by people at UBC.
Creative Commons Search - The Creative Commons organization has built a search tool for creators seeking to discover and reuse openly licensed creative works. At this time, the tool only searches for images, but they plan to add more types of CC licensed materials in the future.

See also the Open Educational Resources module for information on workflows for finding and evaluating OER.

Reusing and attributing CC licensed work

The first thing you must be sure to do when reusing a work with a CC license is to check that your intended use adheres to the terms of the license. So, for example, if you want to make an adaptation of a slide, diagram or image with a CC BY-SA license, and you plan to share that adapted work with anyone else, you must license it with the same or a compatible license.

Secondly, as mentioned in "What are the different types of Creative Commons Licenses?", all CC licenses require that attribution be given to the creator. Even if the work is CC0 or Public Domain, it is still a good idea to attribute the creator: doing so means others can find the original, and the person who created it, to see if they might like to use some of that person's or organization's other work that may have a CC license or a dedication to the public domain (CC0).

Attribution is similar to citation, though not exactly the same. Citation is a long-standing practice in which scholars give credit to others whose work they are quoting, paraphrasing, or building upon in their own work. It has standard practices, rules and styles. One may often be citing works that are "all rights reserved" under copyright and that can't be reused in their entirety.

Attribution, in connection with CC licenses, is about crediting a copyright holder who has given their work an open license that requires providing credit to the creator. Attribution in this context is for works that have an open license and that can be reused in their entirety (so long as attribution is provided). See the BCcampus Self-Publishing Guide chapter on Citation and Attribution for more information on citation, attribution, and the differences between them.

How to attribute CC licensed work

The best practice for attributing CC licensed work is to apply the TASL approach:

T = Title
A = Author
S = Source
L = License

Here is an example of an attribution that uses the TASL approach:

Beech forest Mátra in winter by Susulyka (CC by SA 4.0)

In the attribution, the title of the work is linked to the URL of where the image can be found (in this case, on Wikimedia Commons), the author's name is linked to the author's page, and the Creative Commons license is linked to the Creative Commons license page.

Here is another example: this video, which is a recording of workshop, uses a bit of openly licensed music at its start and end. The video concludes with this final slide, which provides the attribution for the music:

Concluding image from a video showing attribution for the music used in the video.

The attribution list the title, creator, source, and license of the song used. Additionally, the the source of the item is written out since hyperlinks are usually not clickable in videos.

You can see more examples of attribution in Best Practices for Attribution, from the Creative Commons Wiki. The UBC Copyright website page on image attributions also has further examples of how one could attribute CC licensed works.

There are also some useful tools that automate the attribution process:

Creative Commons Image Search - The Creative Commons Image Search has an auto attribution feature.
Flickr CC Attribution Helper (Only for Flickr Images)

Remixing CC Licensed Works

Scenario – Adapting a work that has CC BY-ND license

Let's consider this scenario: Preeda wants to create an open textbook for her ECON 101 course. She decides to search for existing ECON 101 textbooks and adapt them so that the context of the textbook is appropriate for her course. She then realizes one of the textbooks she adapted has a CC BY-ND license. She is unsure whether she can still use material from the ND licensed textbook to create her open textbook. Given what you've learned so far, do you think she will be able to do so?

It turns out that the answer to this question is more complicated than it might at first seem. Preeda is looking to create a textbook that includes and adapts several other openly licensed resources, and she could do so in different ways.

Remixes

One way in which Preeda could create a new open textbook using materials from several others is to create a remix, which would count as an adaptation of the original works. A work that is a remix often includes materials from multiple sources and weaves them together so that it's not always clear when one ends and another begins. In an open textbook, for example (or even this module!), there may be text that is used under a CC license mixed in with other text, and with new words and sentences added in by the person making the remix.

Pink Smoothie by Denis Tuksar, used under the Unsplash license

In the Creative Commons Certificate course for Librarians & Educators section 4.4, the idea of remix is compared to a smoothie, where originally separate ingredients are mixed in together in a blender (see a useful blog post about the smoothie metaphor by Nate Angell).

Collections

As already noted in the CC BY-ND section of the "What are the Different Types of Creative Commons Licenses?" part of this module, putting together non-modified existing works (or portions of them, such as a chapter in a book) into a collection does not count as an adaptation: a collection "compiles different works together while keeping them organized as distinct separate objects" (CC Certificate for Educators and Librarians, section 4.4). Instead of a smoothie, a collection would be if you had several different foods served at the same time without being mixed together (or, in Nate Angell's metaphor, a TV dinner):

Using "No derivatives" materials in a textbook

Would Preeda be able to take a chapter or a portion of a chapter from the ND licensed textbook to use in her textbook if she is creating a "collection," and if if she doesn't modify the material licensed ND in any way that would count as an adaptation?

There isn't a straightforward answer, though the CC FAQs provide some guidance under the question "Can I reuse an excerpt of a larger work that is licensed with the NoDerivs restriction?"

"Incorporating an unaltered excerpt from an ND-licensed work into a larger work only creates an adaptation if the larger work can be said to be built upon and derived from the work from which the excerpt was taken. Generally, no derivative work is made of the original from which the excerpt was taken when the excerpt is used to illuminate an idea or provide an example in another larger work."

This is somewhat vague, and it's in part because, as the same answer to the FAQ above notes, "What constitutes an adaptation, otherwise known as a derivative work, varies slightly based on the law of the relevant jurisdiction."

So can Preeda use CC-BY-ND licensed material for her textbook? As you can see, the question about what Preeda may do is complicated, and perhaps the best thing for her to do in this situation is either: (1) not use the material from the ND licensed work, or (2) consult the copyright office for her institution (e.g., the UBC Copyright Office).

Licensing a textbook

After consulting with the copyright office and her colleagues, Preeda has decided to use the ND licensed work as part of collection in her textbook. Preeda was planning to license her textbook with a CC-BY-SA license, but then realized this license may not be compatible with the ND licensed work she used in her textbook. Does this mean Preeda has to change the license of her textbook to CC-BY-ND in order to be able to use as a collection? According to the Creative Commons FAQ on using CC licensed works in collections, Preeda can still use the ND licensed work in a collection even if her textbook is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license. However, how could Preeda license her textbook so that the reader will know which part of the textbook is under the ND license?

On the license page, Preeda can indicate that "Except where otherwise noted, this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International License," and write the page or chapter of the textbook that us exempt from the CC-BY-SA license. An example of this can be seen on the Keep Teaching site's Copyright license page.

Test your knowledge

Dig Deeper

Consider a different scenario Preeda might find herself in: If some of the materials she hopes use for her textbook are licensed CC BY-SA and some CC BY-NC, can she create a remix using those, and if so, what license can she give her open textbook?

See the CC FAQs on remixing materials and licensing those remixes for information to help answer these questions. If you have questions or comments after doing so, please raise them in the discussion board on the POSE Canvas site.

Adapted from 4.3 Finding and Reusing CC-Licensed Work and 4.4 Remixing CC-Licensed Work from Creative Commons under CC by 4.0 License,

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Examples and Ideas for Open Assignments

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:03 +0000

What does open pedagogy look like inside of a course?

In this section, we've collected some examples of open assignments and projects at UBC and beyond. Let's start with the below video in which Janette Bulkan, Assistant Professor for Indigenous Studies in UBC's Faculty of Forestry, describes how she has been using a wiki to empower her students to create and share conservations resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sRgQ37Oi_E

Janette Bulkan, Assistant Professor for Indigenous Studies, UBC Faculty of Forestry: Using wiki pages to advance student-created knowledge

Scenario – Redesigning an Assignment

Let's consider this scenario: In Dr. Chan's course on food science, they have been asking students to design posters on specific issues related to the topics in the course. At the end of the course, there is a poster presentation session in which students have an opportunity to display their posters in the lobby of the faculty building. Dr. Chan has noticed that while the students put effort into the posters, very few students come to pick up their posters after the session and she ends up recycling them at the end of the term. They would like to redesign the assignment so that the students' work and efforts do not go to waste.

What steps or strategies could Dr. Chan implement to make sure their students' work has meaning and is valuable beyond course?

Open Pedagogy at UBC

There are many specific examples of open pedagogy at UBC, such as:

Latin American Studies students creating and sharing video-based learning objects for their classes

In Jon Beasley-Murray's Introduction to Latin American Studies course, students are creating videos about specific course topics as well as writing weekly personal reflections on their blogs.

Engineering students creating an open online textbook

Agnes d'Entremount's engineering students are using the UBC Wiki to write an open textbook that will contain literature reviews and course topics. The open textbook will be set up on a UBC wiki, and will be available for future students to use and build on it.

Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice students creating, publishing, and sharing zines

This project by Jessi Taylor and Erin Fields saw students in a GRJS course work together to collectively create their own zines around self-chosen topics that will allow students to bring the community into the classroom. The students’ zines were incorporated into an open ‘Zine Faire’ day and put on display in Koerner Library.

Forestry students creating open conservation case studies

Students in several different forestry courses taught by Janette Bulkan and Fernanda Tomaselli are creating open education resources that can be used worldwide. The resources are created on the UBC Wiki and published on the UBC Open Case Studies site, which brings together faculty and students from different disciplines to write, edit, and learn with case studies that are free and open--they are publicly available free of cost, and they are licensed to allow others to revise and reuse them.

Courses across UBC having students analyze, edit, and improve Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the worlds most used open resources but it contains gaps and biases. However, any one can contribute to it and students in UBC courses in history, Latin American studies, biology, food sciences, literature, soil sciences, ecology, and more have been assigned to analysis, create or edit Wikipedia articles. For more information, see Tina Loo's or Jon Beasley-Murray's essays on why they used Wikipedia in the classroom.

Physics students creating course learning resources

In Simon Bates's Physics 101 course, students created original learning objects about a concept or topic in the readings which they found challenging. Students were encouraged to be creative and pick a topic that interested them and share their resources on a course blog. In order to create a collaborative learning community, students were asked to apply a Creative Commons license to their objects, so others could access and learn from their resources.

Classics students creating an open textbook/reader

Siobhán McElduff's students are creating an OER reader on socially stigmatized groups in ancient Rome as part of their course assignments. The reader will contain out of copyright and original translations of ancient texts, along with student-scholar created introductions, glossaries, images and other explanatory material.

Law students publicly analyzing issues and blogging

In Jon Festinger's law courses, students are invited to publicly analyze and reflect on issues related to their course as part of their participation marks.

Other examples beyond UBC

Students writing multiple-choice questions: During each of the 10 weeks when there was no scheduled exam, this instructor asked their students to write multiple-choice questions. However, this assignment also served a pragmatic purpose in that the open textbook that they use for this course does not yet have a readymade question bank.
Students creating open resources: Introduction to the Brain has been created by final year Psychology students including an introductory information pack for high school students and an activity with printable materials.
Open assignment banks: This site hosts the assignments that participants in the open online digital storytelling course, ds106, complete as part of their work in the course. Rather than specifying assignments, everyone must do, participants can choose from an array of ones included on this site- all of them have been created by course participants.
Students writing open textbooks: This book was created entirely by students in a Fall 2016 section of a first-year seminar at Plymouth State University. It was organized around a core set of open pedagogical practices. The theme for the course was “Whose Course Is This, Anyway?” Students created all learning outcomes, assignments, course policies, and grading processes.
Students creating apps: In a course at TRU called Designing Legal Expert Systems: Apps for Access to Justice, students worked with non-profit ‘client’ organizations to take legal knowledge and rules as a series of decision-making trees and translate that onto an app.

This list was adapted from Mural UDG Open Pedagogy module by Tannis Morgan. It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Dig Deeper

To read about more examples of open pedagogy assignments and projects, you may wish to browse the Open Pedagogy Notebooks's Example Repository.

Ideas for Students

Students can also take the initiative on open projects. They can turn assignments, essays, and other academic work into an open educational resources. For example, if you are a student, you could:

Consider applying a Creative Commons license to your work which makes it more shareable.
Make your work easy to download or take apart for remixing.
Publish your course essays on a blog or wiki or in an open journal.
If you take photos or create images or other media, especially if you do so in the course of their studies, consider uploading them to a sharing platform like flickr that allows you to license them openly.

Publishing and sharing is a key part of scholarship and academic life and there are many options for students to publish their work and there are many options for publishing including creating a UBC site or blog for posting and sharing their work, posting their work to UBC Library’s institutional open access repository, cIRcle.

Reflection on Open Platforms

UBC supports a number of different educational technologies that can support open pedagogy assignments. Two of the most commonly used are UBC Blogs and the UBC Wiki. Please read the following teaching guides, which include examples of how instructors using these platforms, and reflect upon your own courses:

Could you see yourself incorporating either of these tools into a course assignment? Would it make those assignments "open"? What would you need to do to get started? What questions would you have and what support would you need? What support would your students need?

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Wrap Up

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:04 +0000

In this module, we've explored different definitions of open pedagogy and some examples of how it is applied in the classroom. We've also touched on some considerations, such as risk and privacy, when we ask students to work in the open.

Key Takeaways

Open pedagogy is the application of the concepts of open to the practices of teaching and learning. It can involve a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities to empower students to have control and ownership over their own learning.
A common strategy for open pedagogy is to transform traditional course activities so that students are collaborators with instructors and co-creators of knowledge and content. Such work is valuable, especially when it is openly published so other people can find and use it. In doing so, students experience authentic learning opportunities and are closer aligned with the academic mission of the University.
When engaged in open pedagogy it is important to treat students as we would want to be treated by our peers and collaborators. Students own the copyright in their own work, and should be given the choice whether or not to share or publish it publicly and with an open license. Students should also never be required or compelled to give up any of their privacy in order to complete an assignment.

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Making Your Data Open

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 17:00:53 +0000

In the next section, we will guide you through the steps in implementing open data in your research. The focus here is on three steps in the process: plan, describe, and preserve and share. The diagram below summarizes the steps and describes them in more detail in the remainder of this module.

Steps in implementing open data

Plan

Before even collecting your data, you need to plan. Each stage of the data life cycle should be considered when planning how you will manage your data and make it accessible. A Data Management Plan (DMP) will address questions about the type of data to be collected and how that data will be stored, shared, and preserved for future access. There are templates such as the DMP Assistant, a tool that aids in preparing a plan guiding you through each step. There are institutional instances of the DMP Assistant including one at UBC.

Upholding open principles and fulfilling grant requirements by making your data open requires the following:

Metadata to describe your data with an accompanying well-formatted readme file
A license that lets others know how the data can be reused
Deposit into a repository that will preserve the data and publish information about the data so that others can find it

Ideally, you will prepare a data management plan so the other pieces of creating, storing, and sharing your data are known. It is relatively easy to put a dataset on a website or upload it into a project in OSF, but messy or poorly managed data does not help with its reuse and you should prepare that data to be deposited into a repository designed to hold data and share information about that data. A data management plan helps you articulate how you will manage your data at each stage from its collection to analysis to preservation, encouraging you to work through the process of managing your data before you start collecting it. This front load of work will save you endless headaches in the long run.

Your institution may provide guidance on data management plans and provide a template such as the DMP Assistant or the DMP Tool.

Dig Deeper

Read:

Best Practice: Plan - Learn more about the planning stage of the data life cycle from DataONE.
Data Management Plan Exemplar: Digital Humanities
Data Management Plan Exemplar: Mixed Methods

Watch:

Tidy-ing Your Data: Simple Steps for Reproducible Research presented by Jeanette Clark from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

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Describe

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:55 +0000

Metadata

"Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. Metadata is often called data about data or information about information." (NISO, Understanding Metadata, 2004). Metadata allows us to understand the details of a dataset, including where it was collected, how it was collected, what gaps in the data mean, what the units of measurement are, who collected the data, how it should be attributed etc. By creating and providing good descriptive metadata for our own data, it enables others to efficiently discover and use the data products from our research.

In order to implement open data you need to include metadata that is essential for data discovery, sharing and reuse. Metadata provides a description of the study, files and variables answering the questions:

Who created the data?
What is the content of the data?
When were the data created?
Where is it geographically?
How were the data developed?
Why were the data developed?

There are three types of metadata:

Descriptive: Provides information about the data that will help people find or understand in the dataset and the context. Project title, authors, keywords and collection methods are all types of descriptive metadata. Be sure to describe your variables giving them clear names. Name files with basic metadata file names.
Administrative: Provides technical, preservation and rights information. It answers questions about what software is required to use the data and what license is attached to the data. File type, file size, copyright status and license terms are all examples of administrative metadata
Structural: Provides information about how the data files relate to one another. You can link between data files and link to the related publication.

When you deposit your data into a repository, metadata fields are required to be completed as part of your deposit. The amount of metadata provided will enhance discovery.

Adapted from the Data Management Skill Building Hub and UBC Library's Research Data Management workshop used under the Public Domain License.

Test Your Knowledge

File Naming and Structure

When creating and collecting your data file naming and structure are important pieces of managing your data to make it easier for others to use. In keeping with the FAIR principles data formats should be in an open format, unencrypted and uncompressed. An open format is non-proprietary so that the file can be opened using open software that is not owned by a specific company. For example, instead of saving to an Excel file save as a CSV or XML. Unencrypted data is easily accessible for anyone whereas encrypted data is secure and locked and would require a pass code or key to unlock the data. An uncompressed file is one that is stored in the original format and hasn’t been compressed into another format. The UK Data Archive provides a list of recommended formats.

File Naming Guidance

Guidelines for organizing your data provide examples of file naming conventions and has guidance for folder hierarchies.
Assign descriptive file names from DataOne complements the above link offering a little more description on what file names should reflect and why.

Readme Files

One of the easiest ways to describe your dataset is with a readme file.

A plain text readme file is a document that articulates your dataset's relationships with other files, whether this be other data files, code, or a manuscript. It ensures that the data can be interpreted by researchers as it includes the contents and structure of the dataset and provides sufficient information so that the researcher(s) can determine if the data will be helpful or not for their own research.

A readme file might also be where you articulate your variable level metadata, for example, what does the column labeled var 1 contain? This information may alternatively be recorded in a separate data dictionary, codebook or other documentation format. The details of how variable level metadata are captured are often discipline specific and so beyond what we can get into here. However, a search in a disciplinary repository can provide examples for what is standard for your discipline.

Review the readme file from this example (ttps://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5nb504n) deposited into Dryad, a discipline agnostic repository. As in the image below, open the drop down to reveal the files associated with the data. Review the readme files to see how the authors have provided guidance to interpret their dataset. Consider how one of the readme files helps interpret the related csv file. Also note the file naming allows you to associate the appropriate csv file with its related readme.

Solarik, Kevin A. et al. (2019), Data from: Local adaptation of trees at the range margins impact range shifts in the face of climate change, Dryad, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j0t179b

Dig Deeper

What is the difference between readme, data dictionary, and codebook and how do they relate? See Readme, Data Dictionaries, Codebooks

Additional reading:

Disciplinary Metadata. Search by discipline and resource type.
Data repositories by discipline
Creating a README for your dataset. A quick guide created by UBC Library covering the essentials.

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Preserve and Share

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:43 +0000

Data repositories ensure a persistent location where the data file(s) and associated documentation will be archived and preserved. They also maintain administrative, bibliographic, and licensing metadata.

An Institutional or a disciplinary repository are two possible routes for publishing data. An example of an institutional repository is UBC's Scholars Portal Dataverse. This repository is generalist and discipline agnostic where any researcher can create an account and deposit data using the provided metadata template that includes all of the necessary metadata fields to enhance discovery. Examples of disciplinary repositories in the Registry of Research Data Repositories hosts a list and links to a variety of repositories where you can search or browse by subject to find a resource relevant to research in your field.

Your choice of repository will depend in part on why you're depositing your data. Is it open to support a publication, open to encourage its re-use as a standalone dataset, or open to contribute to a larger dataset like a gene databank or a databank of biological observations?

Regardless of the route you choose make sure the repository will provide a persistent identifier or DOI. It will include data about you the creator to help users cite your data, subject or keyword fields to help with discovery, information about the files types your data is stored in, and how your data is licensed to help with sharing and reuse.

Scenario – Data persistence

Marija was a researcher at a university and published an article in the journal Conservation Biology. The article provided added information about related data sources and a database with citations that could be downloaded from Marija's faculty page on the institution's website. This worked until Marija left that university and the faculty page was disabled. Subsequently, if readers sought the related data to the article in Conservation Biology they were now directed to an "Access forbidden" page meaning any data or related sources to the article would not be found.

When the institution started its own data repository Marija could deposit that data and related files. This provided a persistent URL. Since the URL is designed to be persistent Marija's data should be accessible for a long time no matter where she is based.

Generalist data repositories:

Choosing a generalist data repository is an option if there is no discipline specific repository in your field. Your institution may have its own repository to store your data providing long term access and preservation. Listed below is a selection of generalist repositories.

Scholars Portal Dataverse: The Scholars Portal Dataverse is a publicly accessible data repository open to affiliated researchers to deposit and share research data openly. It is a Canadian hosted portal that is hosted by the University of Toronto libraries. The affiliated members are primarily Canadian universities. If you have questions about UBC's Scholars Portal Dataverse contact research.data@ubc.ca

Dryad: The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types.

Figshare: Figshare allows users to make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. Figshare is cloud-based and features the ability to preview data.

Zenodo: Zenodo does not impose any requirements on the format, size, access restrictions, or license. All data is licensed CC0

What about OSF?

As an open workflow tool, OSF is a good option when working with raw data or temporarily storing the analyzed data, but it is not ideal for long term preservation and storage. OSF includes Add Ons for data storage options with Dataverse and Figshare, for example. Creating a data component in OSF and adding your data file or files into the component with well structured readme can be a good way to share your data and link that data to and within your OSF project. The publishing option in OSF allows for flexibility in how you provide access to your project’s data. However, the more granular and data specific metadata options as well as the ability to assign user access at the file level as opposed to the component level, and the preservation offered by repositories are recognized as preferred locations for long term preservation.

Licensing Open Data

A license can be applied when depositing into a repository. This is an often neglected step. But without a license, no one knows how they can use the data and how they are expected to give credit for your hard work. The data repository may have a default license so be sure to check the license options and select an open license that suits how you want to share your data and that for attribution enabling the user to download, reuse and repurpose the data.

Choosing a License

During the POSE program different types of open licenses in relation to different aspects of open scholarship are discussed. When we are licensing our data there are particular questions and considerations. Check with the funding agency or journal that requires your data be made open as they might indicate a specific license be applied to your data. If you are choosing you own licensing option, select the appropriate one based on how you want others to reuse your data. It may be helpful and is a good practice to include a rights statement within your dataset or in your readme file.

To compare different data licenses the following table created by JISC can help you select an appropriate license.

Licensing Open Data Table Download

The Public License tool linked below is a selector that helps you decide on the appropriate license for your dataset:

Choose a License

Test Your Knowledge

Dig Deeper

Read:

Watch:

How to choose a license for open scientific data and code The first 4 minutes of this video covers applying a license to data.

Scenario adapted from Case study: Data persistence with permission from Standford Libraries.

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Open Workflows in Practice

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:56 +0000

OSF Research Life Cycle from NYU Libraries CC BY NC 4.0

Let's recap! An open workflow, generally, has the following elements:

The sharing of research outputs, including experiment design, data, analysis, code, etc., openly to the public
The use of best practices around file naming conventions, project metadata, file formats, tools used, etc. to enable long term preservation and access to research outputs
A commitment and adherence to the principles of reproducibility and replicability as a foundation of research and sharing

As we learned in What is an Open Workflow?, a workflow can be composed of any number of tools during the entirety of the research project. For example, if we review the OSF Research Life Cycle image (right) we can see that one research project could include the use of Zotero, DMP Tools, Evernote, GitHub, Zenodo, etc. depending on the needs of the project.

How can projects manage the number of tools without limiting their potential in the project? This is where workflow managers, like OSF, become integral to not only locating all content of a project into one space but also to sharing the material in an organized and logical manner for the public.

OSF

OSF, formerly known as the Open Science Framework, is a workflow management web application that provides a central landing place for project components that may be scattered across many different digital workspaces and might be owned by different people. OSF provides a central place to bring together collaborators, project files, and to track versions of things. It is a free workflow tool that centralizes different types of items in a project. It is not a repository in terms of the functionality of a "data repository" or an "institutional repository" but it is a repository in the sense of a hosted service with storage space on servers in several countries, including Canada.

Benefits of OSF

Version control across the whole project
Server locations in multiple countries, including Canada
Ability to connect many research tools you may already be using (OSF as project dashboard)
Ability to establish a project structure or "fork" an existing project
Sustainable access to your project (read-only at least) guaranteed for the next fifty years
Control over project access at the project, folder, or file level with a highly granular level of control for projects that may not be able to be fully open
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) minting at the project level
Ability to "register" a project, which essentially takes a snapshot of a project in time (eg. before major changes)
Built-in documentation tools and the ability to easily add collaborators outside of your institution

What does OSF not do?

While OSF enables the opening of the research lifecycle it does not enforce decisions around thoughtful project structure (e.g. best practices around file naming conventions). It is also not the only final resting place for data and other project artifacts that may live in other tools connected to OSF. OSF really does act as a one-stop-shop for working on a project through a combination of native storage and integration. Final data outputs should definitely live in a data repository and in some cases, it makes much more sense for working files to live elsewhere (e.g. when datasets are bigger than 5GB), which can then be linked to and accessed from OSF.

While OSF provides a variety of benefits to researchers, it's important to understand the potential risks when using the tool. These risks include:

The possibility to make materials public unintentionally; some functions of OSF will always eventually become public (e.g. registrations)
Server locations defaulting to the United States which is not appropriate for all types of data, especially sensitive data
Uncertain longevity; like all storage sources, long term preservation past fifty years is an issue if the funding model changes

Dig Deeper

Learn more about OSF by reading Foster, E. D., & Deardorff, A. (2017). Open science framework (OSF). Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 105(2), 203.013; 105-126 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5370619/, and exploring this presentation: What is the OSF.

Learn more about structuring projects in OSF by exploring these example projects and repository templates.

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Additional Resources

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 14:00:18 +0000

UBC Resources

External Resources

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Why it Matters?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:55 +0000

In some aspects of the research process, being able to follow the linkages between outputs and inputs is a common expectation. For example, when we read a paper, we expect it to cite its sources. We also expect to be able to track down those sources and investigate the strength and validity of the claims being made.

Consider the following scenario:

Scenario – Open, Reproducible Research

Abdul is a geneticist working at UBC. They recently came across an article in their area of research. Abdul contacted the authors to inquire about accessing the data and scripts for both cleaning and analysing the data; if the results of the study could be confirmed, there could be a huge impact for Abdul's area of practice. The authors forwarded Abdul the data, but responded that they hadn't kept track of everything they did with the data; some of the clean up and organization happened in Excel and subsequent analyses were done in the statistical program SPSS.

Without being able to reproduce the analyses done on the data - changes were not tracked in Excel and Abdul does not have access to SPSS, a proprietary, closed source application - Abdul is unable to verify the findings claimed in the research article. This leaves Abdul unsure how these findings should be evaluated and interpreted.

In the example above, the research that Abdul came across was neither transparent nor reproducible (refer back to the Open Research module on Reproducibility & Replicability). The use of open software in this situation would have been one step the researchers could have taken to remediate this. Such a choice would have also contributed to the posterity and reliability of both their research inputs and outputs.

Increasingly, if data is being summarized, we expect to be able to review the underlying raw data to understand how it’s been transformed.

Likewise, we should also expect to be able to see and understand the software that was used to interpret that data and generate that output. Proprietary software limits our ability to do so. Open software, on the other hand, helps to increase this transparency.

Additionally, we’ve all encountered files in formats not supported by our operating system or any current program available. Ideally, whether it be the ethics application that initiated a research project, the data collection tool employed, the data processing tool used, or the final output – poster, audio, video, traditional manuscript – we expect to be able to review the content 5, 10, 15 years post-production. Open software, using open formats, helps to facilitate this.

Reflecting back to the example above, if the data that Abdul needed was readily available in a standardized, open format (more about this in the module on Open Data) and the cleaning and processing of this data done using a readily available open source software solution with proper documentation, Abdul could have more readily engaged in verifying the results and potentially improving their own research practices. As we'll see shortly, using scripts to handle the data would improve this transparency and reproducibility still further; making the process an open process using open tools.

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Open Research Discussion

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:51 +0000

Now that you have completed the Open Research Unit, you may have many ideas, thoughts, and questions you want to explore. The discussion forum is a chance for you to further explore the material and reflect on what you have read or learned on this topic. This activity should take approximately 30-45 minutes to complete.

To complete this activity:

Write a post in the discussion forum. You may use your own website or blog to post a response and provide a link in the discussion forum. If you would like to share your thoughts publicly to encourage conversation, use the Twitter hashtag #POSEUBC (Links to an external site.).
Contribute to the conversation by responding or asking questions in the forum

Discussion Topic

When we think open, it's often framed in a discussion of access, as we encountered during the Open Access module. Open within research also helps to address issues of reproducibility in one's work which in turn has impacts on such things as public trust in research outputs and the quality of policy that we are able to implement.

In the article A manifesto for reproducible science (Links to an external site.), the authors present several issues connected to open research that impact the reproducibility of research in the sciences. Similarly, in Replicability and replication in the humanities (Links to an external site.) the authors explore the implications of reproducibility in the humanities.

Reflecting on what you have learned in the Open Research Unit, and the content covered in one of the two pieces above (follow the discipline that you're most impacted by) reflect on how feasible and or important a transition to open is either generally for society or very specifically for your area of practice.

Discussion Forum

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Open Education Discussion

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:03 +0000

Now that you have completed the Open Education Unit, you may have many ideas, thoughts, and questions you want to explore. The discussion forum is a chance for you to further explore the material and reflect on what you have read or learned on this topic. This activity should take approximately 30-45 minutes to complete.

To complete this activity:

Write a post in the discussion forum. You may use your own website or blog to post a response and provide a link in the discussion forum. If you would like to share your thoughts publicly to encourage conversation, use the Twitter hashtag #POSEUBC.
Contribute to the conversation by responding or asking questions in the forum

Discussion Topic

For this discussion we are not going to pose a question, instead we will ask you to respond to the following provocation developed at OER18.

To be honest, OER sometimes feels weirdly colonial. Does it create a power differential because of those who have the ability to creating things and make them available to those who do not have, instead of empowering those who do not have to create for themselves and their own contexts, while also being able to support that work, and those doing it, monetarily?
Sava Saheli Singh (read the post)

Discussion Forum

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Open Education Shared Reflection

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:17 +0000

During the capstone module, you’ll be asked to work on a project in which you’ll apply one or more aspects of open scholarship to your scholarly practice. In this activity, please take a moment to reflect on Open Education and think about some different ways it could be applied to your work. This activity draws upon the Stanford University design thinking framework and a goal is, as a group, to generate and capture different ideas that could later be developed into capstone projects. This activity should take approximately 20 minutes.

Scenario: Breaking News!

Due to Covid, your university has pivoted to remote teaching and learning. As a result of being online, there have been increased discussions about the tools and technologies being used, student wellness and equity, costs of learning materials, and the need to build more academic and scholarly practices into course projects and assignments. As a response to these discussions, your department head has asked you if it would be possible to integrate any aspects of open education into your teaching and learning or any of the departmental or university processes.

Step 1: Brainstorm!

Take three minutes and think about a recent teaching and learning practice, assignment, or resource that is not currently open. How could you change that practice or project to help meet an open education mandate? Write down as many ideas as you can generate in three minutes.

Examples:

I currently use a textbook that costs $100. Could I replace that with OER?
My mid-term is a five page paper and I'm pretty sure that after I mark it, my students never look at it again. Could I change the assignment so that the student work has value beyond the course?
At our university, students never know the full price of their course materials until after they enroll in their courses. Would it be possible to provide them info about the cost of course materials (and any OER being used) before they register?

Step 2: Reframe the Idea!

Examples:

Transform [a traditional essay assignment] into a project where [students edit Wikipedia so their efforts have value beyond the course].
Transform the [assigned textbook] into one is [both free of costs and adapted to be more meaningful to the my students].

Step 3: Getting Started:

Take your reframed idea and write down two or three steps that you could accomplish in three hours that would help you begin to meet your idea.

Examples:

Transform [a traditional essay assignment] into a project where [students edit Wikipedia so their efforts have value beyond the course].
- Research examples from other courses or instructors that have done Wikipedia assignments.
- Think about what support I would need to take on this assignment.
- Think about what support and scaffolding my students would need. Think about any risk or privacy aspects that may need to be addressed.
- Sign up for a Wikipedia account and make some edits so I have a better understanding of the processes.

Step 4: Share!

Add your reflections to the padlet below.

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Open Research Activity Bank

rienamba — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 14:00:44 +0000

Now that you have completed the Open Research Unit, apply what you have learned so far by completing the Activity Bank.

To complete this activity:

Go to the Activity Bank, and complete any three of the Open Research categorized activities
You may wish to share your completed activities publicly. If you use Twitter, use the hashtag #POSEUBC.

Activity Bank

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Wrap Up

rienamba — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:16 +0000

In this module we have explored what open software is, how to implement it in your research and how it can be used.

Key Takeaways

Open Software can be defined differently depending on context. Open source does not equal free or Free, nor does closed source equal paid.
Open Software, using open formats, can help to facilitate long term access to your research.
Well articulated code, directly connected to your prose, is fundamental to making your research understandable.
Version control captures major decisions made in the transition or evolution of a project and a description of why this change was made, enhancing your trasparency.
Containerization is a method to bundle materials that you have used for your research, so that other researchers can easily reproduce your research.
There is no right answer when it comes to making a decision on which open software solution to choose, just the one that works for you, your comfort level with the technology and the needs of your research.

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Additional Resources

efields — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:14 +0000

UBC Resources

UBC Funding Support

External Resources

Creative Commons FAQ
Creative Commons License Chooser
Creative Commons Search (searches for CC licensed images)
Open Attribution Builder from Open Washington (fill in the blanks and get an attribution statement to use to correctly attribute CC licensed works)
Faculty OER Toolkit from BCcampus
Open Textbook Adaptation Guide from BCcampus
Open Pedagogy Notebook
UNESCO OER Recommendation 2019 (outlines five action areas to promote creation, adaptation, and use of OER)

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Wrap Up

efields — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:26 +0000

In this module we have explored Creative Commons licenses, reusing and revising CC-licensed works, and sharing your own work with a CC license.

Key Takeaways

Creative Commons licenses are built on top of copyright and work within existing copyright laws. Due to this, creators are able to retain copyright while granting others permission to use their work.
There are four elements to Creative Commons licenses and these are combined to make up six licensing options. The four elements are Attribution (BY), Share Alike (SA), NonCommercial (NC), and Non Derivatives (ND).
NonCommercial (NC) is determined by whether the use of work is for commercial purpose, not whether the user is a commercial entity. For example, a for-profit entity could use a work with an NC license if their use is not for a commercial purpose, and a non-profit entity might violate the terms of the NC license depending on the purpose for which they are using the work.
All six CC licenses require attributing the creator in any reuse of the work; the best practice for attributing CC licensed work is to use TASL (Title, Attribution, Source and License). Works with CC0 do not require attribution, but it can still be a useful practice to do so.
A collection, where you put together multiple non-modified existing works, does not count as an adaption. This means you could create a collection that includes some works with an ND (non-derivatives) license if you do not make changes to those works that would count as adaptations.
In order to make your CC-licensed work reusable, provide an accessible format so that it will be easier for other creators to re-use and remix the work.

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OER Marketing & Promotion

efields — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Scenario – Promoting an OER

Jan has created a series of open 3D models and ancillary resources for their genomics course. They first developed the content to reduce barriers to access resources for students but Jan is curious about the potential of their resource to benefit and reach others. While Jan knows how to share the resource, measuring the benefit is not as clear.

OER & Measurements of Success

Developing strategies and approaches to measuring the success of an OER is more than just the collection of numbers. While repositories will have different kinds of data you can collect about the use of your OER (see Table 1), deciding what you want to measure will help guide you in gathering metrics to provide proof of the success of your project.

Repository	Data Collected by Object	Example
UBC cIRcle	Views and downloads by country; Views and downloads by month and year; Total views and downloads	Teaching in a Digital Age
OER Commons	Number of times viewed; Number of times saved; Ratings out of 5 stars, Comments; If you have a paid OER Commons Hub, there are additional metrics available.	Principles of Management Version 1.1
Merlot	User ratings; Comments; Merlot Awards Systems; If you use the Content builder you can add Google Analytics for additional metrics.	Online Poetry Classroom

Table 1 - Sample Repositories & Data Collection Options

By starting with an understanding of what you want to know about your OER's "performance," you will be able to develop a plan to gather the right metrics for your needs. When considering the success measure for your OER, think through the following questions:

What constitutes success for your OER and how will it be measured? Pedagogical innovation? Surveys? Interviews?
Who do you need to report to about your OER? Funders or your institution?
What data is needed to indicate "success"? Adoption numbers? Number of students impacted?
How do you need to use the data for your own portfolio? Tenure and promotion, merit?

Dig Deeper

To learn more about how individual faculty members and those who support them (e.g., librarians, instructional designers, etc.) can research the effect of their adoption of open educational resources, read the Guidebook to Research on Open Educational Resources Adoption.

Developing a Promotion Plan

A promotional plan is a strategy you develop for marketing your OER to a broader public. Unlike traditional publishing models where marketing and promotion are completed for you, engaging in open education activities requires some effort from practitioners in getting the word out about their resources. There are two ways to engage in developing your promotional plan.

Strategy 1 - Personal Connections

You may already have existing resources, personal channels, and networks that can support the promotion of your work. Consider the following:

Use communications support at your institution
If an OER community exists at your institution, discuss possible promotional opportunities through their channels
Use your personal channels:
- blog posts
- social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
- listservs (in your discipline and across communities)
- email signatures
- conferences
- webinars

Strategy 2 - External Networks

Search existing OER repositories, catalogues, and spaces for communities and groups that align with the subject matter of your OER. Consider the following:

Search for organizations and networks with areas of interest relevant to your OER
Identify existing organizations and networks you engage within your areas of expertise
Using “academic” social media to share your resources (e.g. identify relevant hashtags on Twitter using Hashtagify)
Identify existing listservs (i.e. Communities of Practice) that may support OER development and use
Search through existing subject-specific OER repositories, catalogues, and spaces for sharing possibilities

Sample OER Sharing Plan

To get a clearer understanding of what a promotional plan could look like, review the following:

Global Storybooks is a free multilingual literacy resource for children and youth worldwide. The sharing plan provides general and subject-specific OER repositories, listservs, communities, and language learning websites where the Global Storybooks project could be shared to reach educators and learners in the K-12 range.

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Finding & Evaluating OER

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:35 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbwuMQM-NG8

How to Find and Evaluate OER by Abbey Elder under a CC by 4.0 license

There are many different repositories that focus on collecting open educational resources for people to download and use. While each OER that you are considering using must be evaluated for its content, you can save yourself some time by evaluating the entire repository in which it's located. The idea is that a good repository will have good resources within it.

Workflows for Finding OER

Selecting a Resource

Open educational resources exist everywhere. There is no one place where you can find content, and a simple search for resources on Google can yield millions of possible results. While narrowing your search to resources licensed for adaption, there are many considerations when selecting an OER to use.

As with research practices, developing a workflow on what you are interested in finding and how you will identify the most useful content and discard other content is a necessary part of being effective in finding material. The next step considerations that will help you are: 1) narrow down the number of resources you may find when searching for content; 2) select the most appropriate content based on your specific context and and needs.

Checklist for Including Third-Party OER

As you find existing openly licensed content which you would like to adapt to integrate into your own course, consider the following review criteria:

Permissions

Do you have copyright permission to adapt and reuse the resource as you wish?
Before reusing content, check the license details and the exact terms of reuse to see if there are any restrictions on modifying the resource to create something new.

Appropriateness / Relevance

Is the content appropriate to your audience? Consider, for example, level (i.e. first year, fourth year, etc), expertise/assumed background knowledge.

Clarity, Comprehensibility, and Readability

Is the content clear, comprehensible, and well organised (logic, sequencing, and flow)?

Consistency and Accuracy

Does the resource use consistent language, terminology?
Is the content accurate, error-free and unbiased?
It the resource free from factual, grammatical, or typographical errors?

Adaptability and Modularity

Is the resource in a file format that allows for adaptations, modifications, rearrangements, and updates?
Can the resource be easily divided into bite-sized pieces that can be re-mixed or reordered?

Production Quality

Is the information clear and understandable?
Is the layout and interface easy to navigate?
Do the design features enhance learning?
For audio or video resources, is the sound quality high?
Are there broken links or obsolete formats?

Interactivity

Does the resource encourage active learning and class participation?
Are there opportunities for students to test their understanding of the material (e.g., a video with embedded questions)?

Interface

Is the text free of significant interface issues, including navigation problems, distortion of images, charts, and any other display features that may distract or confuse the reader?

Cultural Relevance

Is the text culturally insensitive or offensive in any way?
Does the resource make use of examples that are inclusive of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds?

Accessibility

Is the content accessible to students with diverse abilities?
Do images have alternate text that can be read?
Do videos have accurate closed-captioning?
Are students able to access the materials in a quick, non-restrictive manner?

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Adapting OER

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:48 +0000

In the Creative Commons module, we explored how open licenses often give permission for making derivative or revised versions of the original. This is important for OER as it is rare to find resources that are perfect for your learning context. How familiar is the following scenario?

Scenario – Assigning a Textbook

Dr. Ferreira is assigning his 3 credit Biology 101 course a textbook. Upon review of the textbook, they notice that the students will only need half of the text to cover the course, some of the learning activities need updating to incorporate recent findings in the field, and the content needs restructuring to flow better with the course content. This book will cost students $150.

With “closed,” or material under copyright restrictions, Dr. Ferreira would not be able to make these changes to make a cohesive learning experience for his students. Resources with adaption licenses allow a work to be revised, modified, altered, or customized in any way that is suitable for the situation. Adapting OER offers the following benefits:

Save time when preparing lessons as resources don't have to be made from scratch.
Benefit from the experiences of teachers who have taught your subject area before, and also improve their resources for your learners.
Cheaper than buying expensive texts or subject resources that don't allow adaptations to suit your needs.
It is legal to adapt and repurpose. No-one will be sued for copyright infringement.

Why adapt open content? by OER Africa licensed under CC By-SA

What is an Adaption?

The following video shows a common adaption example when engaging in OER.

https://youtu.be/0LxD7xAcY3k

Creating OER and Combining Licenses Part 1 by TheOGRepository licensed under CC BY ND

OER adaptions are any modifications made to the already existing openly licensed content for your own purposes. Adaptions to OER can be made in any number of ways and are only limited by your specific needs.

As the video showed, simply taking an openly licensed image and modifying the size and adding descriptive text is an adaption. Similarly, taking a set of openly licensed test questions, removing a few options and adding them to your resource is considered an adaption. Adaptions can be simple modifications made to an object to make it useful for your content.

Examples of OER Adaption

Some adaptions can be simple and low time commitment, while others may be more involved and require greater restructuring and additions to the content. The following are some examples of more complex adaptions of OER.

Diversity, Accessibility & Inclusive Design

The focus of many open education projects is to provide access to education. But what does access mean if the materials are not accessible for each and every student? Do they fulfill the mandate to deliver fully open education? Adaptions to existing OER to improve a resource to make it usable by people with the widest possible range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations (environments, conditions, and circumstances) is an excellent example of equitable OER adaption.

Adapting a text to better represent a diverse population is one way in which open educational resources can improve equity and inclusion. Learners can relate more to the content if they see themselves represented in the materials from which they learn, which can be addressed through things such as: including images of people with diverse identities and abilities, changing names of characters in fictional scenarios or case studies to better reflect people from many parts of the world, revising examples to include situations, issues, and questions that are relevant to many different people.

Example: Dr. Benjamin Cheung is adapting Principles of Social Psychology to replace images with ones that show more diversity to better reflect identities within his classrooms.

Translation

Imagine the world of OER possibilities if the content shared across the globe was translated. Translation of texts in a variety of languages increases the breadth of OER content available for use while supporting the diversity of scholarly voices and increasing access to resources from all parts of the world.

Example: Examples of OER in languages other than English, including adapted translations can be found at the OER In Other Languages portal.

Updating

The ability to update content is one of the most beneficial parts of engaging in OER adaption. Due to the open nature of OER, there is greater potential for sustainability of content over time as the overhead to update (e.g. technical requirements, etc.) is not as cumbersome as more traditional forms of publishing. This allows for updating the resource with the latest research discoveries or theories that can support subject areas that are changing quickly (e.g., political science, media studies, cultural studies, etc.)

Example: Teaching in a Digital Age - Second Edition has not only been updated to add and expand more content, but A.W. (Tony) Bates has also made additions which examines three emerging technologies (artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, and serious/educational games).

Learning Design

A great benefit of OER is the ability to adapt content to the specific requirements of the course, student needs, and teaching and learning preferences.

Example: Fundamentals of Business: Canadian Edition was modified to add content from the Canadian context, adding quizzes at the end of every chapter, and updating the learning objectives to meet the needs of the course.

Practical Adaption Considerations

It will come as no surprise that the biggest consideration when adapting a resource is the license assigned. For OER, Creative Commons is the standard license used to assign usage rights. For more in-depth detail about Creative Commons, review the Creative Commons module. However, finding the license information and understanding the terms of use can sometimes cause some concern with using the content.

Finding the License

Many OER will have a license attached to them directly, either at the beginning or end of the resource or, in the case of an online object, on the landing page of the resource. For example, the resource Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations has a license section in the metadata or information about the book. However, sometimes the license information is not as simple to find. You may need to search with sections of a website called terms of use, copyright, permissions, or licenses as the entire site may have a single license for all resources.

License Terms of Use

While licenses will tell you how a resource can be used, open licenses, like Creative Commons, will also outline requirements related to citing, identification of modifications, assigning licenses, and sharing back with the community. This will impact your adaption as you may need to include aspects of your work that you may not have considered.

Review the following two Creative Commons licenses.

Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Under the following terms:
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

The two Creative Commons licenses [CC BY and CC BY-SA] outline terms of use of the object, and while both require attributing the original work and identification of modifications, the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) requires those that adapt and share the original work to use the same license as original.

Test Your Knowledge – Adapting and OER

File Formats

Adapting content sometimes can be a complicated process as the file formats that are shared may not be easily editable. When sharing OER, original source files used to create the content and the availability of these source files can vary widely, even from the same hosting service.

For example, LibreTexts sometimes offer a downloadable PDF, but no editable files. This means that you will need to manually copy and paste the contents of the text that you want to use, and spend time cleaning up the formatting. This will greatly impact the amount of time spent on adapting the content. This can be even more complicated when adapting media files.

Later in this module you will learn about Creating OER. File formats will be mentioned again as a part of your creation workflow. Sharing content is only one part of the workflow. Sharing your resource in a format that is available for editing provides the greatest advantage to the community.

Dig Deeper

If you want to learn more about using third party materials in your OER, you can watch the webinar on Navigating Fair Dealing and Open Resources - Third Party Materials in OER by eCampusOntario.

Adapted from Adapt an OER by Queen's University Library, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Adapted from the Open Textbook Adaptation Toolkit from UBC Library, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Sharing OER

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:41 +0000

Openness in education means more than just access or legal certainty over what you are able to use, modify, and share with your students. Open education means designing content and practices that ensure everyone can actively participate and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.

5.4 CREATING AND SHARING OER from the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians

By now you probably have a good sense of why sharing OER is valuable to users. However, investment in sharing OER remains limited.

In the article, The Uncertain Future of OER by Tom Berger, the open education sharing economy is identified as not having seen complete success. Berger notes, "...teachers have not taken those materials, adapted them, and re-uploaded them to share their improvements—in the OER field, unlike at Wikipedia, the revising and remixing seem to be happening offline, if at all, and the original resources are not undergoing continuous improvement" (Berger, 2018).

While it can be debated whether the resources are being used and/or improved upon, the issue Berger identifies here is valid. Sharing OER is complex.

Sharing open educational resources is difficult because the discoverability of OER isn't systematic. Unlike libraries where standardization of discovery practices are in place and controlled by librarians and knowledge organization professionals, OER can be found anywhere and everywhere. There is no one system that's going to make it easier to find content because there are just too many systems where OER can be shared. There also is no single process or workflow when it comes to sharing material. Sharing practices will depend on the creator of the OER and how they make decisions about their content. But the practice of generating a workflow to better understand where you are sharing content and how to collect data about those open resources can mitigate some of these difficulties and increase the success of OER in the sharing economy.

This module will provide a workflow approach to sharing OER.

Considerations Before Sharing

Scenario – Sharing Openly Licensed Modules

Professor Pérez has completed a set of course modules titled "Inorganic Chemistry for Chemical Engineers." They have used images, created videos and textual content, and interactive elements. The content has been assigned a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and is ready for sharing.

While Professor Pérez has an OER to share, before sharing they need to consider their intent. What is the purpose for sharing, who do they want to reach, what are they hoping to achieve?

Sharing open educational resources requires a number of steps. When making decisions about sharing your open educational resource, you need to first have a sense of purpose and intent for sharing. The following are a few things to consider when deciding to share your content.

What do I want my OER to do for me?
It may be that the intent for sharing your OER is simply the use by others. This is a fine reason to share your resource. However, you may also want to share to connect with other educators, to gain metrics around the content being used, to promote the work so others may improve upon it. Knowing your intent can help direct where the content should be shared.

Who do I want to have primary access to my OER?
Identifying your key audiences is crucial for developing a plan for sharing your OER. Different spaces may cater to specific audiences, age ranges, and subject expertise. Some spaces may provide functionality that allows you to network with other educators creating similar content. You may also need to develop separate marketing plans or different messages depending on the audience.

Are impact metrics important to me?
Impact metrics refer to whether the repository tracks data about how your resource is performing (e.g. number of downloads, citations). Some repositories will provide very detailed metrics about your OER (e.g. geographic location of downloads, number of views, etc.). Deciding what kind of reporting is important to you and how you will use the metrics is a way to focus where you may share your content and what additional planning you may need to undertake to get the right impact metric details. For example, tracking if others have modified your work can be complicated and may require a different approach to data collection.

OER Sharing Workflows

When engaging in an OER sharing workflow, here are some larger issues to consider when addressing the discoverability and findability of your OER that go beyond how and where to share your content to make it available for people to use.

Developing Standard OER Metadata

Metadata is data about data. It is descriptive information about a particular data set, object, or resource, including how it is formatted, and when and by whom it was collected. For example, take a look at the kinds of metadata that could be added to describe the image below:

^{UBC Library Elmscott Chaucce Ddigital Colouring Book, April 2018.}

Metadata is extremely important in making content discoverable, whether it be on the general web or in a database like those used for research materials.

When developing metadata about your OER, creating a standardized approach is necessary. Standardized metadata, or metadata that has a common meaning, structure, and terms, will ensure your OER is made identifiable across platforms. Additionally, ensuring standardization of your metadata will support others to accurately attribute your work.

Developing OER Metadata

Before distributing your OER, you will need to develop standard metadata about your object. Many platforms you will use to share your content will have a standard structure for metadata entry and will identify the required information, or fields, before you upload your content. However, the details of the metadata (e.g. title, author, description, date created, etc.) need to be developed by the OER creator.

For example, this template shows the metadata that should be filled out for every resource that is shared in the Nordic University Health Hub on OER Commons. OER Commons has a standard metadata form, but the Mandatory Tags/Keywords have been defined by the group to support ease of finding resources on a given topic.

Metadata structure may change across different repositories; however, there are common fields that you will need to include. The table indicates some of those common fields.

Fields	Description
Source Type	Example: video, an audio file, quiz, etc.
Author(s)	Creators of the resource.
Title	Title given to the resource.
Publication Date	Date the resource was created.
URL	Location of the resource.
Subject(s)	This field will outline the subject covered in the resource. Subjects can either be controlled or collaboratively generated.
Abstract	A brief abstract.
Duration/Length	Length of the resource (e.g. minutes, pages, etc.).
Audience	By institution (e.g. College, University, etc.) and by level (e.g. undergraduate year 1-2, graduate, etc.), or if this is a resource for faculty only.
Copyright/Licensing	This field will describe the kind of licensing that has been assigned to the object (e.g. Creative Commons, YouTube Standard License).

Table 1 - Common OER Metadata Fields

Take the time before sharing to fill in standard metadata descriptions that you can then use across all platforms.

Choosing a Repository to Share

Types of Open Educational Repositories

While there are several ways to share your OER once you have created and licensed them, posting them to an OER repository is a great way to increase access to your resource. However, there are different types of repository you have to consider when sharing, and each will offer different features and functionality.

Resource Archives are repositories where you can upload your resource to the repository and it will live there. This is helpful if you do not want to host your resource yourself but want to upload it elsewhere for others to find more easily.

Example: WikiMedia

Archives and Aggregators are repositories which host resources as well as gather metadata from other places. These are third party platforms run by businesses or nonprofits and often require some sort of payment.

Example: MERLOT

Resource Aggregators are repositories that collect metadata from resource archives or resources that are on other websites. Searching in this repository will provide you with metadata and links which were uploaded to the collection.

Example: OER Commons

Aggregator of Repositories are not truly repositories where you can share your content but as aggregators of other repository content. The aggregator of repositories will pull content from other repositories into one space for searching.

Example: Mason OER Finder

Common Features in OER Repositories

The types of repositories listed above have different features and are created for different purposes. Because of this, you may find you are sharing your resource across multiple repositories. However, there are many repositories out there and narrowing down which you will use is an important step in your workflow. There is no single repository that will meet all of your needs or have all of these features, so you will need to pick a few that are most important to you. The following are some of the most common features that will impact your decision about whether or not to use a particular repository. To find a list of OER repositories, go to the UBC Library Open Education Guide.

Hosting

Hosting refers to whether or not the OER can be uploaded to the repository directly. If not, then the resource must live elsewhere (e.g., a personal website) and a link is put in the repository.

Licensing

Some repositories require their items to have a specific license attached to them. Most repositories will accept a range of licenses, but there are some that are more specific.

Peer Review

Peer review is offered by some repositories as a service. In most cases, having your resource peer-reviewed is not required.

Accessibility

Sometimes a repository will have accessibility guidelines for their resources. Some repositories will have special features such as being able to upload multiple formats, video players, or embedded viewing.

Indexing/Discoverability

If the repository is indexed, it will show up within an overarching search engine (e.g., Google or Summon) which in turn makes its resources more findable.

Analytics

Analytics refers to whether the repository tracks data and is able to provide information about how the resource is performing (e.g., number of downloads, citations).

Archiving/Preservation

Some repositories are more stable than others or offer archiving services to ensure the OER is preserved for future use.

Sample OER Sharing Workflow

Now that the we know the workflow for sharing an OER, what does it look like in practice? Let's revisit the scenario of Professor Perez:

Scenario – Sharing Openly Licensed Modules

Having reviewed the purpose for sharing, developed standard metadata, and identified the appropriate spaces for sharing, Professor Perez's sharing workflow is the following:

Figure 1: Professor Perez's OER Sharing Workflow

Step 1: cIRcle Resource Upload and Metadata Creation

The first step was uploading the OER into cIRle, UBC's open repository that focuses on the archival standards of making the item accessible. cIRcle provided support for submitting and indexing to make the content easily findable. cIRcle is indexed in high-profile search engines like Google as well as academically focused search engines like Google Scholar and OAIster, making it quick and easy for scholars and others to find the work. Additionally, loading the OER into cIRcle provides long-term access. cIRcle is an archival space that provides a permanent URL so the links to the OER remain the same over time.

Note -- Not all people have access to an institutional repository. Discuss your options with your home institution. If you are unaffiliated, MERLOT is a good option for housing your content as it is the oldest open educational repository available to those without an institutional repository.

Step 2: Upload Metadata to Additional Repositories

The second step for Professor Perez was to upload the metadata and the permanent link to OER aggregators. So, for example, Professor Perez loaded the information into OER Commons, Merlot, and AMSER, an applied science and math open educational resource repository. The OER will have a permanent location within cIRcle, but, the metadata for the object is going to be located in a variety of aggregators to support greater reach.

Step 3: Impact Metrics

The final step for the OER Sharing Workflow is impact and metrics. Professor Perez has shared their OER in 4 different places and may have a number of data points related to the use of her content from cIRcle, OER Commons, Merlot, and AMSER. Impact metrics and promotion will be covered in the next module.

Open Text Sharing & Discoverability

Sharing workflows are a little different for open textbooks. This module has focused primarily on open educational resources in a very broad way. For open texts, there is some added workflow. Watch the following video to provide you with some processes for open text sharing.

For additional details, review the Open Textbook Publishing Guide - Release Plan

Discoverability, Sharing, & Impact of Open Educational Resources by Erin Fields licensed under a CC BY 4.0

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What is OER

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:44 +0000

In the previous module we explored Creative Commons licenses, and how to apply these to resources and media. In this module we will be exploring Open Educational Resources (OER) and what makes a resource open. We will also look at how you can find, adapt, revise, remix and create and share OER.

Let's begin by looking at an early definition of OER from Hewlett Foundation:

“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (via the Internet Archive)

In this widely used definition there is both an emphasis on openly licensed materials or those in the public domain. Additionally, it emphasizes that OER not only includes more traditional resources like textbooks and modules, and it also more expansive including: test banks, tools, videos and software.

The following video developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers provides a short overview of OER.

https://youtu.be/LDTCdMKlDQw

What is OER? by The Council of Chief State School Officers used under a CC-BY 4.0 License

Now that we have a shared definition of OER, let's take look at some of the initiatives and drivers that have informed the OER movement.

Free Open Source Software Movement

The open educational resources movement initially stems from the open-source software movement, whose outputs are often referred to as FOSS - Free Open Source Software or FLOSS - Free/Libre Open-Source Software; in the later, the word "libre", has been added to underscore that this is software that is free of restrictions. Open-source software is software that is freely licensed to use, copy, and change in any way as the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software.

In the early days, computer software was open-source, allowing people to modify and improve software for their own purposes, a practice that had been established in academia; however, as software creation costs increased and software companies came to the market by the 1980s legal restrictions began to be imposed on the software, thus eliminating the collaborative element within the community. The FOSS movement began as a response to the locking down of software with some major initiatives like the GNU project, the GNU Manifesto, and the GNU General Public License, to what we see now with Github.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the GNU project and the GNU Manifesto, read The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty.

Open Education Developments

As the open-source software work was occurring, other groups began investigating applying the open ethos to other kinds of information sources.

The MERLOT project began in 1997 with the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. MERLOT was modelled after the National Science Foundation-funded project, "Authoring Tools and An Educational Object Economy (EOE)." MERLOT was the first major open education repository that provides access to mostly free, online curriculum materials for use by higher education faculty and students.

Similarly, during this time arXiv was being developed, as Joanne Cohn and Paul Ginsparg recognized the problem of sharing physics preprint articles through email and developed a central mailbox repository for academics to share e-prints. This initial sharing was focused more on simplifying workflows but is identified as the first step toward open access in scientific publishing.

Website banner/logo for arXiv
license under the Public Domain

For open education, there were two major initiatives that have had a great impact on academic institutions moving toward open education. Rice University created CONNEXIONS (now OpenStax), a web-based platform to facilitate sharing education resources. Now OpenStax, the platform helps to develop and share open textbooks. The second major initiative was MIT's OpenCourseWare Initiative, which launched in 2001 with a goal of openly and freely sharing educational materials from MIT's courses. MIT OpenCourseWare shares course materials online in what the MIT Council called a desire to contribute to the “shared intellectual commons,” and through the financial support of the Mellon Hewlett Foundation they’ve provided over two thousand courses free online (their website listed 2400 as of 2021).

These individual projects had a huge impact on open education practice in academic institutions, but larger policy initiatives also were being developed, more firmly rooting open into how institutions developed their larger education strategies.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the history of OER, review: A Brief History of Open Educational Resource and OER - A Historical Perspective.

Organization Supports for OER

Due in part to the success of MIT’s OpenCourseware, the UNESCO Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries convened in July 2002 to foster awareness of open education resources, promote understanding, secure development, and discuss strategies and policies on OER. Of great importance was the adoption of a final declaration in which participants

“expressed their … wish to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity, to be referred to henceforth as Open Educational Resources.”(UNESCO, 2002, p. 6)

As policies and declarations were, in some ways, codifying open as a strategy for education and resource outputs, organizations and foundations were supporting these efforts through funding and organization around open practices.

The Mellon Hewlett Foundation is a non-partisan granting organization that provides grants to research universities contributing to public knowledge, to performing arts centres engaging local diverse communities, and to grassroots organizations working on international development. Since 2018, it has provided over $170 million US to develop OER, starting initially with the MIT OpenCourseWare project. The foundation provides grants to major universities (MIT, Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, Open University, Rice), and has funded projects to support OER development, including OERCommons at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).

In addition to funding, organized practices in open licensing were stimulated by the founding of Creative Commons in 2001. Creative Commons was created to support the legal use of distributing, adapting, modifying, and sharing of open resources (see the Creative Commons module for more about CC's history). CC has become the standard of licensing for open education content and is considered foundational to the work of open education.

In the more recent years since 2012, there have been some major advancements in open education initiatives at the world level with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Paris OER Declaration, where the term open educational resources were founded and UNESCO states were encouraged to participate in the creation, use, and research around OER.

In November 2019, UNESCO adopted five OER Recommendations:

Building capacity of stakeholders to create access, use, adapt and redistribute OER;
Developing supportive policy;
Encouraging inclusive and equitable quality OER;
Nurturing the creation of sustainability models for OER; and
Facilitating international cooperation.

A Timeline of events that informed the development of OER

We have included a timeline below that shows some of the events informing the OER movement. It is important to acknowledge that the movements and events on the time represented only a strand of OER and open education history.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about UNESCO statements on open education and OER, review: Forum on the impact of Open Courseware for higher education in developing countries final report.

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What is Creative Commons?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:51 +0000

In this unit, we will explore how the principles and strategies of open access publishing and open research can be applied to teaching and learning. The use of open copyright licenses and internet technologies have the potential to reduce student costs and lower access barriers to education by making it more distributed, equitable, and open. We'll be begin with a look at Creative Commons - Creative Commons licenses are the most commonly used type of open copyright license used for the sharing and reuse of learning materials in education.

Creative Commons as an Organization

CC Logo by Creative Commons, used under the CC Trademark Policy

Creative Commons (CC) is both a nonprofit organization and a worldwide community. It was founded in 2001 in the United States, by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred. As noted in the CC Certificate program for Educators and Librarians, the founding of CC was in part in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) in the U.S., which extended for another 20 years the term of copyright for every work in the United States, from the life of the creator plus 50 years, to life of the creator plus 70 years. Lessig (a Stanford Law Professor) and Eric Eldred (a publisher dedicated to publishing works that had passed into the public domain) challenged the constitutionality of CTEA; their case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where they lost. The nonprofit CC organization was inspired by the goal to make more creative works freely available on the internet, even while working within the terms of copyright laws.

Though CC was started in the U.S. (and is still headquartered there), it is now a global organization and network that "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges" (Creative Commons: What We Do). The CC Global Network has hundreds of individual and institutional members, as well as chapters in many countries (including CC Canada). There are also several Creative Commons Platforms, which are groups of people who work across countries and chapters on particular topic areas, including Copyright Reform, Open Education, and Galleries, Libraries, and Archives (among others).

General Overview of Creative Commons Licenses

This video from Creative Commons provides an overview of the purpose of using Creative Commons licenses.

https://youtu.be/q0VzUigrb_g

Creative Commons is perhaps best known for their suite of CC licenses. These are built on top of copyright in the sense that they allow creators to retain copyright while at the same time granting others permission to use the works under the conditions stated in the license. In addition, "CC licenses work around the world and last as long as applicable copyright lasts (because they are built on copyright) and as long as the user complies with the license" (CC Certificate for Educators & Librarians, 3.1)

3 layers of Creative Commons license. Image by Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).

This means that anyone who owns copyright in a work (see the intellectual property section of the Open Access module) could choose to add a CC license to that work, granting permission to others to use, revise, redistribute that work under certain conditions--depending on the type of license chosen (see below). It also means that if a work has a CC license, those who want to use it do not have to contact the copyright holder to ask for permission so long as they are using the work under the terms of the license.

Each CC license has three layers. First, there is the legal code, with terms and conditions that can be enforceable in a court. Second, there is a "commons deed" that summarizes the legal terms and conditions in more plain language. See, e.g., the legal code of the CC Attribution license (CC BY 4.0) and the commons deed of CC BY 4.0.

There is also a third layer of CC licenses, which is machine-readable code that allows software and search engines to recognize that a work is CC licensed. Creators can access machine-readable html by using the CC license chooser and then embedding that html code into a web page. In addition, if works are shared under a CC license on some content-sharing platforms (such as YouTube, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, and more), these platforms include the machine-readable code when you share your work with a CC license. See, for instance, how to licenses your photos on Flickr.

Fair dealing and CC licenses

Copyright law in Canada protects a wide range of works and is automatic upon creation of a work in a tangible form. If you wish to reproduce a substantial part of a copyrighted work, you may only copy the work if you have express permission from the copyright owner or if the Copyright Act specifically allows you to do so. If you work in an educational setting, you may be familiar with "fair dealing" practices (in the U.S., there are similar practices for "fair use"). While fair dealing is an exception to copyright (and therefore done without permission from the creator), CC licenses are agreements you enter into with a creator, providing you advanced permission to make certain uses of the work.

Both "fair dealing" and CC licenses allow you to reuse or redistribute copyrighted works under particular circumstances and with certain restrictions, though these differ between the two. Generally speaking, fair dealing tends to be more restrictive than CC licenses on how much of a work you can reuse, and for what purposes.

Other Open Copyright Licenses

Creative Common licenses are the most common license used for open content in teaching and learning contexts (e.g., text, video, images). However, software and data often feature different open licenses, such as the GNU General Public License. that may have slightly different factors around warranties and liabilities. There are many different types of open software licenses, and the Choose a License resource created by Git Hub provides an overview of them.

Dig Deeper

If you are at UBC, please see the UBC Copyright Office's information on fair dealing, and compare with what the various CC licenses allow, as explained in the next section: What are the different types of Creative Commons Module?.

Test Your Knowledge

Adapted from the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians Unit 1: What is Creative Commons from Creative Commons, under CC BY 4.0 license.

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What Are the Different Types of Creative Commons Licenses?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:32 +0000

This short video provides a useful overview of CC licenses and how they can be used to provide different kinds of permissions or restrictions on reuse of works.

https://youtu.be/AeTlXtEOplA

There are six different types of Creative Commons licenses. These licenses are designed so that creators have options to provide restrictions on how they want their work to be used. They are made up of four license elements.

Four license elements

Each CC license is made up of one or more of four license elements: Attribution (BY), Share Alike (SA), NonComercial (NC) and No Derivatives (ND).

Anatomy of a CC License by Rie Namba, licensed CC BY 4.0

Attribution (BY)

"BY" refers to attribution. This means in order to use the work, you must attribute the author of the work. All of the Creative Commons licenses require this condition (CC0 does not, but according to the CC FAQs is it not a "license").

Share Alike (SA)

Share Alike means that if you create an adaptation of a work that has this license, the adaptation must be licensed under the same or a compatible license. See the Creative Commons page on compatible licenses to learn more.

NonCommercial (NC)

NC means that the work may only be used for non-commercial purpose. In NC licenses, non-commercial is defined as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation" (see, e.g., CC BY-NC 4.0). What matters here is the use to which the work is being put, not the user: one has to consider whether the use is for a commercial purpose, not whether the user is a commercial entity. A for-profit company could possibly use a work licensed CC BY-NC in a non-commercial way. In addition, using the work in a tuition-based educational course may still be considered a non-commercial use. The definition of "non-commercial" in these licenses is somewhat vague, and while some uses are clearly commercial and others clearly not, some may be in more of a grey zone. Find more information on how Creative Commons interprets non-commercial use on the CC Wiki.

No Derivatives (ND)

ND means that you cannot share an adaptation of the work, though you could use and share it in its original form. An example of an adaptation of an image would be changing its colour, blurring it, or adding another image on top of it. An example of an adaptation of a written work would be translating it to a different language. The points below, adapted from section 3.3 of the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians, provide more details on what is and is not considered an adaptation:

Syncing a musical work with a moving image is an adaptation regardless of what applicable copyright law may otherwise provide.
Technical format-shifting (for example, converting a licensed work from a digital format to a physical copy) is not an adaptation regardless of what applicable copyright law may otherwise provide.
Fixing minor problems with spelling or punctuation is not an adaptation.
Reproducing and putting works together into a collection is not an adaptation of the individual works so long as they have not themselves been adapted. For example, combining stand-alone essays by several authors into an essay collection for use as an open textbook is a collection and not an adaptation. Most opencourseware is a collection of others’ open educational resources (OER).
Including an image alongside text, as in a blog post, a slide, or an article, does not create an adaptation unless the photo itself is adapted.

Six CC licenses

Diagram from How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

The four elements above can be combined to make up six different licensing options. Note that all CC licenses require attribution, but otherwise the license elements can be combined to allow for or restrict various activities, such as commercial use or adaptation.

Attribution (CC BY)

The CC BY license allows others to reuse, adapt, remix, and and distribute the work for any purpose, including commercial use. The only requirement is that the work or adaptation must be shared with attribution to the creator.

Attribution Share Alike (CC BY-SA)

The CC BY-SA license allows others to reuse, adapt, remix, and distribute the work for any purpose, including commercial use. It requires attribution to the creator, and also that if you adapt the work and share it you must give your adaptation the same or a compatible license.

Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)

The CC BY-NC license allows others to reuse, adapt, remix, and redistribute the work for any non-commercial purpose; commercial use of the work is not allowed. Attribution to the work's creator must be provided.

Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA)

The CC BY-NC-SA license allows others to reuse, adapt, remix, and distribute the work for any non-commercial purpose; commercial use of the work is not allowed. In addition, if you adapt the work and share it you must give your adaptation the same or a compatible license. Attribution to the work's creator must be provided.

Attribution NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND)

The CC BY-ND license allows others to reuse and distribute the work in an unadapted form for any purpose, including commercial use; adaptations are not allowed (see above under the ND license element for more about what counts as an adaptation). Attribution to the work's creator must be provided.

Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)

The CC BY-NC-ND license allows others to reuse and distribute the work in an unadapted form for non-commercial purposes; neither commercial use or adaptation is allowed. Attribution to the work's creator must be provided.

Reflection

Note that there are no Creative Commons licenses that include both Share Alike and No Derivatives (there is no CC BY-SA-ND license, nor CC BY-NC-SA-ND license). Given the information above, why would that be the case?

Public Domain Dedication (CC Zero)

Aside from the six types of Creative Commons license, Creative Commons also provides a public domain dedication tool, CC0, which is a way to relinquish all copyright and mark one's work as being in the public domain. The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive copyright or intellectual property rights apply. Some countries do not allow creators to dedicate their work to the public domain through a waiver or abandonment of copyright rights, so CC0 includes a “fall back” license that allows anyone in the world to do anything with the work unconditionally.

Test your knowledge of CC licenses

Reflection

Now that you have reviewed what Creative Commons licenses do, how do you understand the difference between using a work that is CC licensed and using one under the "fair dealing" exception to copyright?

Adapted from The Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians section 3.3: License Types from Creative Commons under CC by 4.0 license.
Image credit: The license types logos, and the CC logo, are from the Creative Commons downloads web page, used under the CC Trademark Policy.

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What is Open Pedagogy

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:33 +0000

So far, we've been exploring how the use of OER can help to ensure that learning materials are free of cost and access barriers. OER can also support academic freedom by enabling instructors to modify or add additional content to the materials to fit their specifications and goals, which in turn creates the opportunity to provide more relevant and engaging materials for students. Now, we'll look at how principles of open scholarship can be incorporated into the practice of teaching and learning.

Social and Equitable Practices

Open scholarship, as we've been learning, is founded on the premise of barrier-free and equitable access to knowledge, with the understanding that the creation and dissemination of knowledge is a social practice. Under this umbrella term, open education encompasses a set of practices directed at making the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all people. While open education includes the creation and use of OER to achieve these goals, it also includes the application of openness to the practices of teaching and learning (i.e. the pedagogy) and strives to support equitable participation in the creation of knowledge.

The core values for open pedagogy, as Caroline Sinkinson states, include teaching and learning practices that reduce barriers that prevent equitable access to education, including economic, technical, social, cultural, and political factors. Open pedagogy facilitates connections across the boundaries of learning experiences that occur within classrooms, on campuses, and in communities by critically engaging with tools and practices that mediate learning, knowledge building, and sharing. Open pedagogy also protects the agency and ownership of one's own learning experiences, choices of expression, and degrees of participation and resists the treatment of open as neutral by providing space for critical evaluation and reflection.

Open pedagogy is thus situated at the intersection of teaching and learning and social justice and often builds upon theories of critical pedagogy which sought to use the educational process to challenge existing knowledge and beliefs in order to achieve individual empowerment and social change. Earlier critical pedagogists, such as Paulo Freire, saw education as a librating and transformative practice or a practice in conformity:

"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." -Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Critical pedagogy is an educational philosophy drawn from critical theory where instructors and students critically evaluate systems of power in order to understand the oppressive nature of social and political systems. Critical pedagogists, such as Freire, argued that applying critical theory to education, "allows students to recognize connections between their individual problems and the broader social contexts in which their experiences are embedded". Open pedagogy applies much of the earlier work of critical pedagogy to the modern teaching contexts and encompasses a social justice approach to the collaborative and transparent construction of knowledge made openly available through networked technologies.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about critical pedagogy, read:

Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Pres
Kirylo, D., Thirumurthy, V., Smith, M. and McLaren, P. (2010). Issues in Education: Critical Pedagogy: An Overview, Childhood Education.

Defining Open Pedagogy

Having a single definition of open pedagogy can be challenging. David Wiley initially suggested that open licensing of educational materials and permissions for re-use are essential: “Open pedagogy is that set of teaching and learning practices only possible in the context of the free access and 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources.” Many different scholars and educators have put forth additional definitions of open pedagogy that address aspects of the teaching and learning process that go beyond the use of open resources. These definitions include:

A blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities that make the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved. -- Tom Woodward
The potential of openness and sharing to improve learning, as well as a social justice orientation – caring about equity, with openness as one way to achieve this. -- Maja Bali
The ability for learners to shape and take ownership of their own education -- Devon Ritter
A means to connect with a broader, global community as well as a means to challenge and expand existing understandings of student centre learning -- Tannis Morgan
Freedom of action and authority -- Jim Luke
The shift of emphasis to student contribution to knowledge as opposed to simple consumption of knowledge -- Heather Ross

Features and Attributes of Open Pedagogy

What are the commonalities across the different approaches to open pedagogy?

Tom Woodward highlights three features of open pedagogy:

open planning: Prior to the start of a course built on open pedagogy there is a focus on collaboration regarding what the course might be — the content, the lessons, the tools of construction, and the teaching strategies…You can see what other instructors have done — their resources, their lessons, or their reflections on what happened during their course. As Tom points out, these processes are often hidden from public view. Making them open and accessible means that others can learn from them.
open products: Students are publishing for an audience greater than their instructor. That matters. Their work, being open, has the potential to be used for something larger than the course itself and to be part of a larger global conversation. This changes the experience of doing the work, but just as importantly it changes the kind of work you ask students to do.
open reflection: After the course, reflecting and documenting how the course went is valuable both to the instructor and to those who might be considering similar courses or pedagogical strategies. People are happy enough to present and document success but it’s still not common practice to reflect on elements that don’t work well. Documenting reflections on what worked and what didn’t and making that public can lead to connections between people working to address the same challenges.

One could also consider a fourth feature:

open process (of creating OER): If you or your students create open educational resources for a course, it’s useful to share not just the finished resources but also the processes of creating them. Sharing the process can mean many things, e.g., talking about how you made a teaching resource such as a video or podcast (what tools, software, what steps you took, pitfalls you ran into), describing why you created the resource in the way you did (what goals you had, what research underlies the creation of this resource), explaining how you have used the resource in a class and whether it was successful.

Bronwyn Hegarty suggests that are eight attributes of open pedagogy inform its features. These attributes include the use of participatory or social technologies, such as blogs or wikis, which facilitate learners being exposed to ideas and experts beyond their institutional walls, but also to diverse modes of sharing and collaboration. Additionally, as students’ willingness to learn and stretch their boundaries in open spaces can be fragile, another attribute in open pedagogy is openness, trust, and people. Providing support and using scaffolding to build confidence and independence in an open learning situation can help motivate students.

Hegarty’s Attributes of Open Pedagogy from: Hegarty, B. (2015) Attributes of open pedagogy: a model for using open educational resources Educational Technology, July-August, CC-BY 4.0

Another attribute Hegarty suggests is innovation and creativity. The exploration and choice of emerging technologies and new methods that take advantage of the rights inherent in OER as well as facilitate another attribute of open pedagogy, the sharing of ideas and resources. Open pedagogy relies upon peers to share willingly within connected communities. The use of technologies to connect communities can enable collaboration, sharing, and participation, which can enhance the quality and diversity of learning resources and ideas but also teaching methods and the design of learning environments.
Another attribute is that open pedagogy is learner-generated, which involves 'opening up’ the process of teaching and learning to empower students to take the lead, solve problems, and work collectively to produce artifacts that they share, discuss, re-configure, and re-deploy. Building relationships where groups of learners work collectively, with reflective learning and peer review as natural outcomes, Hegarty states, is paramount to open pedagogy. Co-constructing knowledge through facilitated and shared reflective practice can drive deeper pedagogical reflection and student engagement. A vital component of reflective practice is the use of open tools for peer feedback and interactions, which can lead to transformational change.

Open Educational Practices

“Open educational practice” is a term that could actually cover any open teaching and learning activities, but we are using it here to designate teaching and learning activities that are further towards the “fully open” side of the spectrum. In this sense, open practice involves going beyond adopting a few open resources in one’s courses or posting faculty or student work publicly.

Open practice may involve:

Using all and only open resources in one’s course, such as readings that are not only free to read, but also openly licensed to allow downloading, revision, annotating, etc.
One’s entire course site is public and openly licensed even if one doesn’t post ALL aspects of a course publicly. Of course, things such as student marks should remain private, and one may also choose to not post exams so they can be reused later.
Any student work or instructor teaching and learning resources that are posted to a public site are also given an open license.
Openness extends to getting and incorporating feedback on the course and its open resources, whether instructor-produced or student-produced.
Not only products are open (such as the course site, teaching and learning resources, student work), but also processes. For example, one shares the processes of designing a course, of how a video was created, of how well a particular open assignment worked, etc.
One could open an entire course to participants from outside the institution (such as in a MOOC), still ensuring that the course elements are openly licensed

Reflections

Please read the following statement:

Open pedagogy is the natural progression of integrating socially just principles of human relations and the potential of current technology into the educational system. If we believe education leads to human flourishing and that education is a right, then the use and creation of OER in tandem with effective teaching and learning strategies (that is, open pedagogy) is required to establish and protect that right. Open pedagogy fulfills one of the core commitments to a democratic system by cultivating an informed, educated, and engaged electorate...In fact, my theoretical approach to teaching draws directly from critical pedagogy which emphasizes the awakening of a critical consciousness. Critical pedagogy questions the institutions and practices of education by supporting an approach that emphasizes teaching as a political act, learner-centered practices, praxis, the co-production of knowledge, and the educator as a facilitator. I believe practicing contemporary critical pedagogy requires engaging with OER and therefore leads naturally to experiments in open pedagogy
- Dr. Arthur Gill Green, Affiliate Assistant Professor, UBC Geography.

What influences your teaching or learning practices? Do you agree or disagree that teaching is a political act? Why or why not?

Dig Deeper

To learn more about about how different scholars are defining of open pedagogy, please read:

DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R. (2017). Open pedagogy. Open Pedagogy Notebook.
Schuwer, R. (2017). April open perspective: what is open pedagogy?. Year of Open.
Sinkinson, C. (2018). The values of open pedagogy. Educause.

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Applying a CC License and Sharing One's Own Work

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:50 +0000

Now that you have learned about the six different types of Creative Commons licenses (and the public domain dedication tool, CC0), how would you apply a CC license to works you create?

Considerations before you use a CC license

First, be sure you understand the terms of the licenses and CC0, including what others can do with the work once you apply one of these. Review the Creative Commons licenses section of this module.

Here are some other questions to consider.

What would happen if you decide to use a CC license and later change your mind? The original license cannot be revoked, and if someone finds the work under that license they can still use it according to those terms. Creators can remove their original works with the earlier licenses from where they posted them, and re-share with a new license, but earlier versions with the earlier license may still be accessible in some places. See "Things to Consider after CC licensing" from the CC Certificate for Educators and Librarians for more information.

What if someone uses your CC licensed work in a way you don't approve of? The only restriction on purpose of use in Creative Commons licenses is in the"NonCommercial" licenses that restrict the use of works to non-commercial purposes. For works with any other CC license, others are allowed to use them for any purpose (though perhaps with other restrictions depending on the license, such as no adaptations allowed (ND) or that adaptations must be shared with a compatible license (SA)). All CC licenses that allow adaptation, however, require that adaptors clearly mark that the work is an adapation, and do so in a way that does not suggest the creator agrees with the changes. A creator can also ask that attribution to them be removed from someone else's use of the work. See "Things to Consider after CC licensing" from the CC Certificate for Educators and Librarians for more information.

What happens if someone violates the terms of the license? In brief, their right to use the work ends immediately and they could be liable for copyright infringement (unless they use the work under fair dealing or another limitation or exception to copyright). In the 4.0 versions of the CC licenses, if users comply with the license within 30 days of learning they have infringed the license terms, their right to use the work under the license is automatically reinstated. See "License Enforceability" from the CC Certificate for Educators and Librarians for more information.

Choosing and applying a CC license

If you decide you do want to use a CC license, you need to choose which one based on what you would like others to be able to do with the work without asking your permission. The Creative Commons license chooser can be helpful in making this choice.

How do you apply a license or CC0 to your work? There are several ways to do so:

Put a notice of the CC license on the work, such as a sentence that reads, "This work is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0." You could do so, for example on the first slide of a slide deck, or in a caption on an image, or in the credits of a video. Often creators will include an image of the license button as well (see Creative Commons downloads), though this isn't required.
Post the work on a platform that allows you to choose a CC license; a number of photo-sharing and video-sharing platforms allow you to choose a CC license rather than marking your work with the default "all rights reserved."
If you are putting the license on a website, you can use the CC license chooser to get machine-readable html code to include on the site.

See the Creative Commons Wiki page on marking your work with a CC license for more information.

Sharing your work

Once you have created a work and applied a CC license to it, where and how should you share it with others? There are many options, including content sharing platforms that allow you to choose a CC license for your work (such as Flickr for images or YouTube for videos), or a repository such as those listed in the UBC Library Open Education Guide.

Note that sharing in one of these ways can help ensure your work is more easily findable by others, including through tools such as CC Search or the OASIS OER meta search tool, which search various repositories and sharing platforms. If you create or adapt an open textbook, consider submitting it for inclusion in the BCcampus Open Textbook Collection.

Consideration on Accessibility

Scenario – What is the consequence of not using an accessible format?

Let's consider this scenario: Vanda has created a CC BY licensed graph that explains how supply and demand gets affected during depression. the graph became popular and it became used in various ECON courses in universities.

One day Mia, who is a visually impaired student, took an ECON course which uses the graph that was created by Vanda. Mia has hard time interpreting the graph as the graph does not have an alternative text, nor a caption that describes what the graph is about. The course uses other CC by licensed graphs that also do not have alt texts. Every time when this type of graphs are used, Mia has to contact their instructor to ask for clarification on what the graph is about.

CC license allows to easily re-use and share your work. However, what are the consequence if the works you share are not accessible? What are the things that Vanda could have done in order to make their work more accessible?

Many works with a CC license are shared in digital format, and it is important to ensure they follow accessibility guidelines so that they can be used by people with different abilities. For example, video and audio recordings should have text captions or transcripts, images should have alternative text, and documents should be organized in way that allows those using screen readers to navigate them easily. In case of the scenario above, Vanda could have provided alternative text to the graph so that students like Mia can interpret the graph. See the UBC OER Accessibility toolkit for more information.

Adapted from the Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians, 4.2 Things to Consider after CC Licensing from Creative Commons under CC by 4.0 license

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Students As Knowledge Creators

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:35 +0000

While open scholarship focuses on equitable access to knowledge, the focus of open pedagogy is equitable participation in the creation of knowledge. In this way, open pedagogy often transforms the student experience within the classroom. It can help students begin to see themselves as scholars and it de-centres the instructor from the information expert to a facilitation role that supports student negotiation of ideas and transforms the efforts of their learning into open knowledge resources. If a core goal of scholarship is research, dissemination, and dialogue to further the knowledge base and growth of fields of study, then open pedagogy engages students in this very same process within their courses. In contrast to traditional learning assessments such as multiple choice quizzes or essays, student work in open pedagogy is seen as having value beyond just informing the learner or instructor. As such, students are asked to create new knowledge and given a degree of agency, autonomy, and control over their work.

"We are often asking students to do work just to show us that they can do it. I wanted them to do something that had genuine value and not just this makeup exercise they perform just to show [professors] they know how to do things." _{Dr. Rosie Redfield, UBC Zoology}

In the below video, David Gaertner, Assistant Professor, UBC First Nations and Indigenous Studies, describes some of his motivations for why he engages his students in open pedagogy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGVzKqvKhQw

David Gaertner, Assistant Professor, UBC First Nations and Indigenous Studies: How to engage and support students in open pedagogies

Students as Producers/Creators

Image from the University of Lincoln's Student As Producer site.

Having students be creators of content, described as a “Student as Producer” model by Mike Neary at the University of Lincoln, emphasizes the student role as collaborators with instructors in the production of knowledge. By engaging students in knowledge production and sharing, the model helps transform students from being the object of the educational process to being the subject of it. Additionally, in the student as producer model, the university’s approach to learning and research are closer aligned; for example, students, similar to researchers, are asked to share their work with authentic audiences and not just with their immediate instructor or adviser. As Neary and Winn state, in this way students become part of the academic project of the University and collaborators with academics in the production of knowledge and meaning.

According to Derek Bruff, Director of the Centre for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, students are frequently involved in knowledge production outside of the classroom, through undergraduate research, internships, co-ops, etc. However, he suggests that there are many opportunities to engage students in knowledge creation within the classroom and suggests student as producer assignments or courses have the following aspects in common:

Students are asked to work on problems that haven’t been fully solved or questions that haven’t been fully answered.
Students are asked to share their work with authentic audiences, not just their instructor.
Students are also given a degree of autonomy in their work.

Scenario – Engaging Students Through Open Work

Let's consider this scenario: In Dr. Smith's course on forest conservation, they have been asking students to research forest conservation policies in a specific region, critically evaluate the policies, and then write a seven to ten-page essay on the topic. Students seem to have a hard time engaging with the assignment and, in feedback, students have noted that the assignment is both hard but also that it feels like it is busy work. Dr. Smith feels like the assignment is valuable as it gets students to think critically about the topic of the class. More so, they feel like the work the students do has potential as scholarly work and are thinking about having students post their essays on a course website or blog.

How would posting the work on the Internet change the nature of the assignment?
What strategies or scaffolding could Dr. Smith incorporate into the assignment to ensure that the students are successful?
Should Dr. Smith change the structure or the weighting of the marks for the assignment?

Renewable Assignments

David Wiley has argued that much of student work can be considered disposable: “These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add no value to the world, they actually suck value out of the world. As Hendricks states, it’s not that such assignments have no value at all. They can often serve very well to encourage students to learn and apply information, gain research and other skills, engage in problem-solving, and more. If done well, they can show instructors the level of mastery students have achieved. But what is important to consider is find important to consider, is that “disposable assignments” don’t provide any further value to the world after they’re completed.

What makes an assignment renewable or disposable? A disposable assignment, Wiley suggests, is any assignment about which students and faculty understand the following:

Students will do the work
Faculty will grade the work
Students will throw away the work

A renewable assignment is any assignment where:

Students will do the work
Faculty will grade the work
The work is inherently valuable to someone beyond the class
The work is openly published so those other people can find and use it

Test your knowledge

OER Enabled Pedagogy

Building upon the concept of renewable assignments, David Wiley and John Hilton III further refined Wiley's definition of open pedagogy as the practices only possible in the context of free access and 5R permissions. This further refinement is labelled "OER-enabled pedagogy". Wiley and Hilton state that when student works are openly licensed, "granting others 5R permissions in their use of the artifacts, each work becomes the beginning of an ongoing conversation in which other learners participate as they contextualize and extend the work in support of their own learning. Open licensing also ensures that these artifacts will be perpetually and freely available to all who wish to engage them as part of their learning”. Wiley and Hilton suggest the following questions can help to determine the extent to which a specific teaching and learning practice qualifies as OER-enabled pedagogy:

Are students asked to create new artifacts (essays, poems, videos, songs, etc.) or revise/remix existing OER?
Does the new artifact have value beyond supporting the learning of its author?
Are students invited to publicly share their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?
Are students invited to openly license their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?

Why Should Students Care About Open Pedagogy?

Students are often already involved in various forms of open learning. If you are a student, have you ever:

Created and uploaded a video that teaches others how to do something?
Shared your code/project on GitHub?
Spent time on Reddit - accidentally or on purpose to participate in a discussion about something you are interested in?
Published any learning material on a blog, Reddit or Facebook?
Shared or followed a link to learn something from someone you follow on Twitter?
Contributed to or learned from Wikipedia?

If you have done any of these things, you have participated in the open learning in some way. The work that students do as part of their studies has value and sharing this work with others is part of academic scholarship.

When students share their work openly, they are contributing to the building and sharing of knowledge. Working in the open can be both daunting and extremely rewarding and in the next section we'll look at risk, privacy and other considerations of open pedagogy.

Dig Deeper

To learn more about the Student as Producer, Renewable Assignments , and OER-Enabled Pedagogy models: review:

Neary, M. and Winn, J. (2009). The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London.
Wiley, D. (2016). Toward renewable assessments. Iterating Toward Openness.
Wiley, D., & Hilton III, J. L. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning.

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Risk, Privacy & Ownership

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:00:00 +0000

When we ask students to work in the open, what are we asking them to do? Open pedagogy assignments can involve students engaging with communities other than their peers in a classroom, opening their ideas up to public scrutiny, and creating and communicating in new way. When students openly publish their work through online platforms such blogs, wikis, open textbooks, social media, etc, they are not necessarily using the same format or skills that they would in writing a research paper or persuasive essay; instead they are applying new strategies to the information and knowledge they have to produce something people will use.

Working in the open and opening up our work to the public can be scary for almost all of us but doing so usually means it pushes us to a higher standard of work. However, when asking students to work in the open, there are a few considerations to keep in mind.

Risk

“Risk is ever-present with open pedagogy, from the platforms that we utilize that mine and monetize our intellectual labour and the digital footprints that we require our students to leave in the course of their education to the open sharing of unpolished ideas and practices that leave us exposed and open to criticism and judgment. Open pedagogy involves vulnerabilities and risks that are not distributed evenly and that should not be ignored or glossed over. These risks are substantially higher for women, students and scholars of colour, precarious faculty, and many other groups and voices that are marginalized by the academy.” ^{_{5Rs for Open Pedagogy, Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.}}

Learning involves risk taking. When students share their work openly, they are contributing to the building and sharing of knowledge and they are opening up their work for public review. When you are accustomed to learning and creating behind classroom walls and for the eyes of your professor only, working in the open can be both daunting and extremely rewarding. Students will want to understand:

How their work may be evaluated by others?
What their obligations are regarding copyright and appropriate citation of others' work?
How they can license their own work (with an open license) to allow others to re-use and build on their work - while attributing them as the original author?

When sharing content outside of traditional classrooms, different people have different levels of comfort and risk and doing so may require grappling with issues of trust, privacy and ownership. The open Internet can often be a toxic place and students may also have questions such as:

What agency do I have in deciding to work in the open?
Who will see my work?
Why would my work be of value to anyone?
How does working in the open help me learn what I need for this course?
What control will I have over my work?
What support do I have?
Whose voices are marginalized in open or online spaces and how will that impact me?
If I'm using new types of technologies, who owns my data?

Addressing such questions directly, even building them into course discussions, can help students understand why they are being asked to work openly as well as help to build their buy-in and support for doing so. You may also want to provide resources for students, such as the Digital Tattoo project, that can help them make an informed decision about their digital presence.

Dig Deeper

To learn more how open pedagogy can incur risk and ways to address these in practice, review the following:

Campbell, L., (2018), The Soul of Liberty: Openness, Equality and Co-creation, Open World.
Cronin, C., (2017), Open Education, Open Questions, Educause Review.
Dhalla, A., (2018), The Dangers of Being Open. Medium.com.
Gardner, S., (2011), Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia, In Their Own Words, Sue Gardner’s Blog.
Jhangiani, R., (2019), 5Rs for Open Pedagogy, Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D. Blog.
Salter, A., (2015), Re-evaluating the Risks of Public Scholarship, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Privacy

If there is a golden rule for open pedagogy, it is that students should never be required or compelled to give up any of their privacy in order to complete an assignment. When creating an open assignment, it is always good to provide students with options on how they may complete or share their work, such as:

Publishing with a pseudonym
Publishing in a way that only other people in that class can see their work
Submitting only to the instructor or T.A.

Building such options directly into an assignments gives students agency and control over their work.

Additionally, it is also important to be aware of and comply with any relevant privacy regulations, such as BC FIPPA (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act), about identifying information for students. For example, FIPPA requires that student information be stored only in Canada and accessed only in Canada, which may impact the use of third party tools or platforms that store information outside of Canada. Students thus can never be required to use such tools but can consent to do so. According to this fact sheet from the University Counsel office on disclosing personal information outside of Canada, at UBC, consent for cloud-based tools may be used under the following conditions:

In the course description, or in a written communication to the students, describe the cloud-based service and the information that it will be storing or accessing, and explain that if the students choose not to provide their consent they must see the instructor to make alternate arrangements; and
Make alternate arrangements for students who decline to provide their consent, such as allowing them to sign in to the service using a false name and non-identifying email address.

Ownership

Many open pedagogy projects asks students to create open educational resources by adding a Creative Commons license to their work. However, students own the copyright in their own work, and should be given the choice whether or not to share or publish it with an open license. Talk with students about the value of OER and why you are asking them to publish their work openly. Be sure they know about the various options they have for privacy and for choosing a license.

If you are publishing students' work on an open site, ask for students' permission regarding how long they would like their work to be posted publicly. Some may not mind having it posted indefinitely, but some may wish to have their work taken down as soon as the class is finished. At the very least, let them know that if they later decide they would like it taken down, they can contact you.

Test your Knowledge

Dig Deeper

To learn more about student privacy at UBC: you might want to review the following resources:

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The Spectrum of Open

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:45 +0000

In addition to the 5Rs, we can also look at OER according to how people will use them. This can help us think about open educational resources beyond only considering licensing and format. This spectrum allows us to consider what we want to do with OER and how much time and effort may be required for different approaches.

The concept of "touch" that we have articulated here refers to notions of interaction between and among participants in the course as well as interactions with "public" communities and individuals. This may also have an impact on the design effort related to the course. For example, courses supporting interaction with various external communities and resources over a period of time (wikipedia editing; publishing on YouTube; etc) require a high touch approach to the design and also to the ongoing support of those interactions.

Image Credit: Spectrum of Open Practice - Working Draft by Cindyunderhill under a CC BY SA 3.0

Adoption

Adoption of an open copyright licensed (e.g. Creative Commons) resource is a good first step to engaging in open practice. Replacing a high cost textbook with an open textbook or other open resources (e.g. videos, simulations, etc.) reduces barriers for students to access course material needed for their success. In the UBC AMS 2018 Academic Experience Survey Report, 66% of students surveyed did not buy textbooks due to the cost. Adoption of an open resource supports all students to achieve success by providing equal access to all resources available in the course regardless of their finances.

Examples

The following are examples of open resource adoption by faculty at UBC:

Introduction to Physics (PHYS 100) adopted an Open Stax Textbook at UBC in 2015 saving $90,000 in textbook costs
Math, CS lead in adopting open education resources at UBC
In 2019/20, an estimated 18,440 UBC students enrolled in courses using open resources in place of paid textbooks.

Adaption

Adaption is the modification or alteration of an open copyright licensed resource for use within a course. Adaption provides the opportunity to improve teaching materials, provide important local context, and sharing knowledge to ensure sustainability and the ongoing health of open content. There are a variety of ways content can be adapted for course use -- instructors adapt content and/or students adapt content for their own use. Including students in the adaption process encourages peer-to-peer learning, authentic learning opportunities, and digital and information literacy development.

Creation

Many teaching materials can be openly licensed and made available for others to revise or reuse, such as syllabi, lecture notes, presentation slides, case studies, videos, podcasts, study questions, quizzes and more. Some faculty choose to create entire open textbooks (e.g. CLP Calculus) or to post all of their course materials on an open website (e.g. LAST100). Of course, there may be some resources you don't want to share because you want to reuse them in future years yourself (e.g. exams). But you may be willing to share other materials. Even if you think other teachers or students might not find them valuable, even if you think they are very specifically tied to your course context, you might be surprised at how they could spark ideas in others to use in their own teaching.

When you create your own content, you need to consider what someone would want or need to do with your content once they discover it. If they are actively seeking OER content, then we have to assume that they may at some point want to apply any or all of the 5Rs to your materials.

You have to ask yourself the question: “How OPEN do I want to be in my sharing of content?”

Connection

Connection is the application of open practice and extends beyond the use and creation of OER to connecting with communities beyond the classroom. Open pedagogy is an umbrella term that is often used in this area to describe the application of open strategies to the social practice of teaching and learning.

Open Pedagogy

Defining open pedagogy is challenging and we'll be exploring it in more depth in the next module. Some would say that open access and permissions for re-use are key: "Open pedagogy is that set of teaching and learning practices only possible in the context of the free access and 5R permissions characteristic of open educational resources." David Wiley: Defining Open Pedagogy

Others would offer a broader definition:

Looking at open pedagogy as a general philosophy of openness (and connection) in all elements of the pedagogical process, while messy, provides some interesting possibilities. Open is a purposeful path towards connection and community. Open pedagogy could be considered as a blend of strategies, technologies, and networked communities that make the process and products of education more transparent, understandable, and available to all the people involved. - Tom Woodward in an excerpt from an interview in Campus Technology

Open assignments

One can also involve students in adapting or creating OER through open assignments. We will discuss much more about open assignments in the open pedagogy module, including considerations of risk and privacy, but when students publish or share their work openly, they are often extending their scholarly practice beyond the classroom and engaging with communities or people outside of their courses. Here are a couple of examples as a preview:

Students could do some course assignments on open platforms such as blogs (e.g. UBC Blogs) or wikis (e.g., UBC Wiki).
- For example, students in Geography at UBC are creating multiple kinds of educational resources that are posted on a public site, including case studies, infographics, videos and more: Student Research on Environment and Sustainability Issue
As part of a course, students could edit or create Wikipedia articles.
- Students in Spanish 312 at UBC wrote several Wikipedia articles in a project called "Murder, Madness and Mayhem"
- Students in Food, Nutrition and Health at UBC wrote or edited Wikipedia articles on various foods

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Open Education Unit Completion

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:36 +0000

Open Education Completion

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Examples: Open Access

efields — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:00:30 +0000

To develop your capstone project related to open access, it may be helpful to review the Open Access Unit Shared Reflections. The reflections were developed to explore the ways open access could be applied to the work of the POSE cohort. The reflections will provide examples of how to apply open access into practice and the steps needed to accomplish that application.

Sample Open Access Capstone Project

The following are examples of possible capstone projects for the Open Access unit. These examples may not apply to your specific experiences but are meant to provide an outline of what the capstone project should address when you are preparing to share. For more details and templates for the capstone project, review the Capstone Project Requirements part of this unit.

Capstone Example 1 - Self-Archiving Policies

Self-arching policies are permissions given by publishers to allow authors to post their work in an institutional repository or online environment to allow for free immediate access to their research. For my capstone project, I will consult SHERPA/RoMEO, an online database of publisher and self-archiving policies, to locate the self-archiving policies for 3 journals I have published with in the past. The purpose for my project is to better understand my copyrights as it relates to my past 3 articles.

For my project I will review the self-archiving policies to learn:

How permissive is the journal's policy?
Would the journal's self-archiving policy allow me to meet the standard Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications, which requires that all funded research be made open access within 12 months of publication?
How difficult would it be for me to adhere to the policies if I wanted to self-archive my work?

Capstone Example 2 - Calculating My H-Index

Research assessment metrics are an efficient yet highly simplistic method of assessing the quality and impact of research. In recent years there has been a growing call by scholars to do away with them in favour of more nuanced approaches. For my capstone project, I will calculate my personal h-index using Google Scholar Profile. Google Scholar Profile provides data for authors, including Hirsch's h-index, i10 index, and total # number of citations.

For my project I will gather my h-index and will reflect on the following:

What is the value of the h-index as a measure of my research reach?
In what ways does the h-index represent my research impact?
What is missing from portraying my research in this way?
What are the strengths of these calculations? What are the weaknesses?

Capstone Example 3 - Sharing in a Repository

While I do see the value of open access and agree with many of its tenants, I rarely take advantage of the rights to self-archive my work as outlined in my publisher agreements. This is not because I don't value these rights but because I fail to build them into my research workflows and over time forget to take the time to upload the content to an open repository.

For my capstone project, I am going to take the time to gather my publications, develop the metadata need to share, identify the licensing information, and share my objects in cIRcle, UBC Library's institutional repository.

For my project I will do the following:

Review the last 5 years of publications for self-archiving policies
Create a cIRcle account
Upload the publications that allow for self-archiving
Share my newly available open publications via my Twitter account and using the #POSEUBC hashtag

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Examples: Open Research

efields — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:00:04 +0000

To develop your capstone project related to open research, it may be helpful to review the Open Research Unit Shared Reflections. The reflections were developed to explore the ways open research could be applied to the work of the POSE cohort. The reflections will provide examples of how to apply open research into practice and the steps needed to accomplish that application.

Sample Open Research Capstone Project

The following are examples of possible capstone projects for the Open Research unit. These examples may not apply to your specific experiences but are meant to provide an outline of what the capstone project should address when you are preparing to share. For more details and templates for the capstone project, review the Capstone Project Requirements part of this unit.

Capstone Example 1 - OSF

I am at the beginning of a reproducibility study with 4 other institutions and a total of 15 researchers. We will be engaging in researching and replicating over 20 psychology studies to produce the same results. This study will include gathering, synthesizing, and analyzing publications, comments, and data for each of the studies and will use a number of scholarly tools (e.g. Zotero, SPSS, etc.). To prepare for this study I will work with my project team to develop a plan for centralizing our project content and tools on OSF.

For my capstone project, I will attend some training in OSF and analyze our team's workflows to identify how to organize our content in the OSF.

For my project I will:

Attend an OSF workshop hosted by UBC Library
Review the module Working in a Reproducible & Replicable Manner and perform a workflow analysis
Gather all the elements, outputs, and tools we are using for our study
Develop a structure for organizing the study's content in OSF
Create an OSF account and begin developing out the structure

Capstone Example 2 - Portage DMP Assistant & Preservation

With the Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management, it is more important now than ever to really work through the details of a data management plan for my work, including collection, storage, metadata, and preservation. I haven't taken the time to investigate all of the tools available to develop a structured and formalized plan. I also haven't considered the importance of archiving my past data in a manner that is findable and preserved. This is my opportunity!

For my capstone project, I would like to investigate the DMP Assistant and the variety of preservation options available to me for the data I have already collected from past research.

Create an account with the DMP Assistant
Work through the DMP Assistant questions with my current research and export the finalized plan
Book a consultation with UBC Library to discuss my data and ways to archive the content
Begin the process of sharing my data based on the consultation suggestions

Capstone Example 3 - Organize Research Materials

I am currently engaging in research investigating the information behaviour of first-generation undergraduate students at a research-intensive university. The research involves recorded interviews and participatory arts-based elicitation methods requiring interviewees to draw maps of their information-gathering behaviours. This has yielded a great number of files in a variety of formats (e.g. .docx, xls., .jpg, .mp4, etc.)

For my capstone project, I will review my naming conventions and file organization for my current research project in hopes of developing better practices for this project but also in the long term for other projects.

For my project I will organize my research materials to support ease of sharing by doing the following:

Developing naming conventions and file organization using the Best Practices for Organization module and additional guidelines from EarthLab
Developing a README file using the Make a README Markdown Template and including the naming conventions and file organization

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Capstone Project Guidelines

efields — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:00:21 +0000

The capstone project can take a wide variety of forms and will depend on what you would like to accomplish. For example, if you are interested in engaging with the Open Research unit by creating an OSF account for a project, your project output is your OSF space.

To complete the capstone you will need to share information about what your project is, why you decided on this specific project, and what are the expected outcomes of your capstone project.

This information will be shared in the Capstone Project Discussion Forum as your final activity for POSE.

The following provides some guidance on the structure for sharing your completed project in the discussion forum. The list is not meant to be prescriptive but simply a guide on what you can share about your project.

Brief Description

Provide a brief description of what your capstone project will be.

Project Mission

Missions are meant to be broad and longer-term, so your project will at most be making a step in this direction, as opposed to achieving it completely. Discuss what it is that you want to achieve through your project.

Project Goals

Discuss the specific outcome(s) you are trying to achieve through your project. A helpful formulation of goals is “X in order to Y by Z” where X is a concrete action, Y is a measurable outcome, and Z is a timeframe. Goals should meaningful and can be both short-term and long-term.

Project Outcomes

Now that you have your project idea, tell us what your project will actually do. Highlight the activities you engage in to reach your goal.

Project Link

If appropriate, share a link to your capstone project output, for example, a link to an OSF page or an open educational repository upload.

If you would like to download template for your capstone project, go to Capstone Project Guidelines Template [Link].

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Support & Sharing

efields — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:00:39 +0000

Learning Lounges

Learning Lounges are optional for you to attend. They are drop-in sessions to provide you with an unstructured space to ask questions and work on further developing your capstone project. The sessions will be held weekly in April 2021.

General Discussion Forum

Use the general discussion forum for any questions, ideas, or resources you may have for the capstone project. Facilitators will monitor the general discussion forum to assist you with your capstone project questions.

General Discussion Forum

Final Meet-up Lightning Talks

The final POSE synchronous meet-up on April 29th (10-11:30) will include a wrap-up of the program and an invitation for participants to deliver lightning talks.

The lightning talks will be a series of short, 5-7 minute talks by participants sharing their capstone project work. The talks are meant to be informal and low barrier, and do not require the development of slides or speaker notes. However, if participants would like to screen share during their talk, this option will be available to them.

A call for lightning talk participants will be sent through the program updates in April.

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Capstone Discussion Forum

efields — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:00:21 +0000

Once you have completed your capstone project, share your work with the POSE participants and facilitators in the discussion forum.

To complete the capstone project:

Develop a capstone project in one of the POSE areas: open access, open research, open education.
Develop a write-up of your project applying the Capstone Project Requirements. Share your project details in the discussion forum.
You may also use your own website or blog to post a response and provide a link in the discussion forum. If you would like to share your thoughts publicly to encourage conversation, use the Twitter hashtag #POSEUBC.
Contribute to the conversation by responding or asking questions in the forum.

Capstone Discussion Forum

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Wrap Up

efields — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 14:00:48 +0000

In this module we shared a broad overview of open educational resources. We explored some of the reasons for the rapid growth of open educational resources and examined different workflows for adopting, adapting, creating and sharing OER.

Key Takeaways

The development of open educational resources has been informed by events, movements and organizations. Events and organizations included the United Nations Charter of Human Rights, the Free software movement, and the open web.
Students are increasingly advocating for faculty and administration to select open educational resources as a way to make education more affordable and accessible.
While there are different perspectives on what makes a resource open, according to David Wiley open educational resource should allow others to engage in the 5Rs: reuse, revise, remix, reuse, and retain.
In addition to the 5Rs we can also look at OER according to how people will use them. The spectrum of Adaption, Adaption, Creation and Connection allows us to consider what we want to do with OER and how much time and effort might be involved.
Using OER can help save the cost of education for students, help prior to learning and after learning, and can provide peace of mind for all users.
When finding and adopting OER use the Checklist for Including Third Party OER to help successfully integrate it into your course.
OER can be adapted for a variety of reasons including diversity, accessibility and inclusive design, translation, updating, learning design.
Creative Commons licenses outline requirements related to attribution, identification of modifications, assigning licenses to adapted works, and sharing back with the community. This will impact your adaption as you may need to include aspects of your work that you may not have considered.
While how you develop OER will depend on the medium you are creating, the Workflow for Creating OER can guide you through the process.
When sharing OER it is important to improve discoverability with metadata, and select an appropriate OER repository.

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Open Education Activity Bank

wikiadm — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Now that you have completed the Open Education Unit, apply what you have learned so far by completing the Activity Bank.

To complete this activity:

Go to the Activity Bank, and complete any three of the Open Eduction categorized activities
You may wish to share your completed activities publicly. If you use Twitter, use the hashtag #POSEUBC.

Activity Bank

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Congratulations!

wikiadm — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Congrats! You’ve reached the end of the content modules of POSE. Now that you have had a chance to explore different topics in open scholarship, in the final Capstone unit you’ll have an opportunity to apply an open strategy to an aspect of your own work. The unit will guide you through putting what you have learned in the previous units into practice through a project.

Key dates for the Capstone Unit:

April 1 – Capstone Unit Released
April 8 – Capstone Learning Lounge; 11am to 1pm. Register here
April 15 – Capstone Learning Lounge; 11am to 1pm. Register here
April 22 – Capstone Learning Lounge; 11am to 1pm; Register here
April 29 – POSE Wrap Up; 10am to 11:30am; Register here

Even if you have just been auditing the course and do not plan to complete a capstone project, you are are still welcome to drop by a learning lounge to engage in discussion around the application and practice of open scholarship. More so, you are encouraged to attend the POSE wrap-up on April 29th where participants will have an opportunity to share their capstone projects and to share their experience of the program.

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Hello World Slider

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:28:06 +0000

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce eget lobortis nibh. Phasellus risus mi, interdum eu tristique et, vestibulum vel tellus. Aliquam lectus nisi, lacinia vitae egestas vel, feugiat non tortor. Aenean nec eros eu urna mollis rutrum. Fusce nec lacus vel arcu tempus elementum. Nunc rutrum nibh vel leo tempus at interdum ipsum dignissim. Pellentesque tincidunt, est in bibendum euismod, ante orci interdum lacus, at dictum ante eros vitae massa.

Hello World Slider 2

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:31:09 +0000

Find and remix an open video resource

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 03:25:15 +0000

A recent study developed by BCcampus found that instructors cited videos as the type of Open Educational resource they used most often in their courses. Video can involve considerable production time and expense, and finding, adopting and remixing openly licensed videos for a course can not only save time and money, it can allow you to include a variety of engaging content for your course.

For this activity you will find a Creative Commons licensed video on YouTube and remix it. When you are finished, license and share the new YouTube video using the comment box below.

To find a CC Licensed video: Go to Youtube and search for a video. Once the results appear click on the Filter button and select Creative Commons. A list of videos that are Creative Commons licensed will appear. Click on Show More and Remix to use the video editor.

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. If you do not have an account use the credentials below. See the instruction to here to learn how to edit the video directly in YouTube.

Edit the video, add effects and search Creative Commons Licensed videos and add them to the timeline. When you have finished this click Create to publish your new video. Don’t forget to add a new CC License to the video.

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this Activity

After you do this assignment, please share it with the comment below so it can appear with other responses. If your response exists at a publicly viewable URL, you can add the information in the box below.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  On Videotape by Mitchell Joyce  (CC by NC 2.0)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

Recent study developed by BC Campus found instructor cited OERs as the type of Open Educational resource they used most often in their courses. Video can involve considerable production time and expense and finding, adopting and and remixing openly licensed videos for a course can not only save time and money and allow you to include a variety of engaging content for your course or resource.

For this challenge you will find a Creative Commons Licensed on YouTube, remix it. When you are finished license and share the new YouTube video you have created on the challenge bank.

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. . Go to the YouTube Video editor https://www.youtube.com/editor

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this challenge

After you do this assignment, please share it with the comment below it can appear with other responses below. If your response exists at a public viewable URL, you can add the information directly to this site.

Image Credit: Add the Image Credit for featured image you used here. Use TASL format for citing the image.

Journal Self-archiving Policies

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 19:52:15 +0000

Self-arching policies are permissions given by publishers to allow authors to post their work in an institutional repository or online environment to allow for free immediate access to their research.

For this activity, consult SHERPA/RoMEO and try to locate the relevant policy for 3 journals you have published with in the past or hope to publish with in the future. When reviewing the entries, consider the following:

How permissive is the journal's policy (indicated using a color system)?
Would the journal's self-archiving policy allow you to meet the standard Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F6765465.html), which requires that all funded research be made open access within 12 months of publication?
How difficult would it be for me to adhere to this policy if I wanted to self-archive my work?

SHERPA/ROMEO

An online database of publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.

Complete this Activity

Having reviewed the three policies, write a brief insight outlining the policies you reviewed and your response to them in the comments below.

Were they more or less permissive than you expected?
Did each journal have a similar policy, or was there variety among them?
Consider whether the disciplinary culture in your field may have any impact on approaches to and acceptance of self-archiving.

Challenge Image Credit:  The Open Science Training by Gwen Franck et.al., Handbooklicensed under CC0 1.0 Universal

Calculate your h-index

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 21:18:42 +0000

Research assessment metrics are an efficient yet highly simplistic method of assessing the quality and impact of research. In recent years there has been a growing call by scholars to do away with them in favour of more nuanced approaches.

For this activity, calculate your personal h-index using one or more of the tools below.

Google Scholar Profile

Connect: Google Scholar Citations. Set up your own scholar profile here.

Source Data: articles from an undisclosed number of journals, conference proceedings, reports, plus an undisclosed subset of the books available in Google Books, etc.

Scholars must set up their own profiles, and may make choose to make their profiles private or public. Public profiles are retrieved by a search by the author's name in Google Scholar, for example, Edward Slingerland (UBC faculty member).

Reports for each author include:

Hirsch's h-index
i10 index
Total # number of citations

Harzing's Publish or Perish

Download Harzing's Publish or Perish free software: here

Source data: Google Scholar, Web of Science Core Collection, Microsoft Academic Search and several others. i.e. journal articles, conference proceedings, reports, book chapters, etc.

Metrics available for each author include

Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year
Hirsch's h-index and related parameters
Egghe's g-index
Average annual increase in the author's h-index

Complete this challenge

Having produced your h-index, write a brief insight reflecting on the value of such a measure in the comments blow. In what ways does this value represent your impact? What are the strengths and weaknesses of relying on metrics to assess impact?

Challenge Image Credit: Metrics Vectors by Vecteezy

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

Recent study developed by BC Campus found instructor cited OERs as the type of Open Educational resource they used most often in their courses. Video can involve considerable production time and expense and finding, adopting and and remixing openly licensed videos for a course can not only save time and money and allow you to include a variety of engaging content for your course or resource.

For this challenge you will find a Creative Commons Licensed on YouTube, remix it. When you are finished license and share the new YouTube video you have created on the challenge bank.

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. . Go to the YouTube Video editor https://www.youtube.com/editor

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this challenge

Image Credit: Add the Image Credit for featured image you used here. Use TASL format for citing the image.

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

Open UBC

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ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

Card Title Here

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ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

The module is composed of textual and video content on topics related to authors' rights. The module is structured to actively engage you in reflection and practice through 4 types of interactives. Not all interactions are required for the completion of the module.

The following outlines the types of interactives and their status for module completion:

Reflections

Reflections are questions and ideas posed to participants to critically think about key issues related to the module. The participant's reflections are captured in the Open Forum where others can address the ideas and engage in discussion. A final module reflection is assigned at the end of the module. Status: Optional Except Final Module Reflection

Scenarios / Test Your Knowledge

Dig deeper

Dig deeper are additional resources facilitators have identified to further your learning on a specific topic within the module. Participants can use this content to "dig deeper" into the content. The additional reading may initiate new ideas and questions that participants can share in the Open Forum. Status: Optional

Activity Bank

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ctltinstructionaldesignersteam

A recent study developed by BC Campus found instructor cited OERs as the type of Open Educational resource they used most often in their courses. Video can involve considerable production time and expense and finding, adopting and remixing openly licensed videos for a course can not only save time and money and allow you to include a variety of engaging content for your course or resource.

For this activity you will find a Creative Commons Licensed on YouTube, remix it. When you are finished license and share the new YouTube video using the comment below

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. If you do not have an account use the credentials below. See the instruction to here to learn how to edit the video directly in YouTube.

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  On Videotape by Mitchell Joyce  (CC by NC 2.0)

Examples: Open Education

efields — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:00:55 +0000

To develop your capstone project related to open education, it may be helpful to review the Open Education Unit Shared Reflections. The reflections were developed to explore the ways open research could be applied to the work of the POSE cohort. The reflections will provide examples of how to apply open education into practice and the steps needed to accomplish that application.

Sample Open Education Capstone Project

The following are examples of possible capstone projects for the Open Education unit. These examples may not apply to your specific experiences but are meant to provide an outline of what the capstone project should address when you are preparing to share. For more details and templates for the capstone project, review the Capstone Project Requirements part of this unit.

Capstone Example 1 - Transition to Open Pedagogy

Having learned about open pedagogy through the POSE program, I want to explore the possibility of incorporating OP into my ANTH 310 course, Anthropology of Gender. Currently my students write a 12-page paper that explores how gender is understood and how gender is learned within a cultural context (chosen by the student). This work is invaluable as this information is difficult to find within our current literatures and requires a great deal of research and critical synthesis of resources. I think this work could benefit a bigger community than just our classroom environment, and through open sharing the students could engage in authentic participation in knowledge creation.

For my capstone project, I am going to take the time to evaluate one of my course assignments with a focus on re-developing it with open pedagogical practices in mind. I want to explore a few examples I've learned in the POSE program to consider incorporating one of them into my course, including Wikipedia-based assignments, co-creation of an open text, and an Anthropology of Gender blog.

For my project I will do the following:

Attend a Learning Lounge to talk through my current assignment and ask questions about the possible integrations I identified above (e.g. Wikipedia, open text, blog)
Review my course syllabus and course assignment for possible needs and requirements for the students and myself to transition to an open assignment
Review examples provided by Open UBC on Wikipedia-based assignments, open texts, and blogs
Select one of the assignment options and re-develop the assignment, identifying next steps needed to "make it happen" in my course

Capstone Example 2 - Share Educational Resources in a Repository

Over my 10 years of experience as an Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Officer, I have developed many instructional resources -- slide decks, videos, infographics -- that have ended up sitting on my hard drive after my instruction was delivered or put inside a closed system (e.g. Learning Management System) that only my immediate participants can access. I've always felt that I could take a more active part of open educational practices by sharing the content I've created to not only benefit others but to give additional life to the content beyond my instruction. The problem? I've never taken the time needed to do this work. The capstone project is giving me the chance to begin this work and understand the workflows needed to make this a part of my ongoing practice.

For my capstone project, I am going to review the resources I have created for a series of workshops I developed on gender at work and transformative leadership. The review will focus on preparing the resources for sharing in the open education community.

For my project I will do the following:

Gather together the resources I would like to share
Select a repository from the UBC Library Open Education guide
Evaluate my resources for any copyright and attribution issues that may impede me from sharing
Select a Creative Commons license using the license builder and attach the license to my resources
Upload my resources and share on my Twitter account and with the #POSEUBC hashtag

Capstone Example 3 - Developing a Chapter in Pressbooks

For the past 5 years I have taught a course on technical writing and, having not found a suitable text for my course needs, I have used a text that I have developed and added to during this time. I developed the text in Word, and I share it with my students as a PDF at the beginning of the course. The text is now 15 chapters and includes knowledge testing quizzes and activities. In thinking about what I have learned during POSE, I would like to have this text in a more adaptable format that I can also share with other instructors of technical writing.

For my capstone project, I am going to investigate Pressbooks and test the functionality, including H5P interactives, using a sample chapter of my text. I will pay close attention to whether Pressbooks meets my needs and the requirements I may have if I decide to develop a full open textbook using Pressbooks.

For my project I will do the following:

Sign-up for Pressbooks Training through UBC Library or review training videos from BCcampus
Review the Open Textbook Publishing Style Sheets to develop a style for my chapter
Create a Pressbooks account with BCcampus and, using a sample text chapter, load my content
Review H5P interactives (available in Pressbooks) for possible inclusion in the chapter
Evaluate whether the tool works for my needs

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Find an Open Data Set for Your Course

lucaspractice

Open data that anyone can access, use, and share is increasingly used in teaching and learning not only in areas such as data-science but across a variety of disciplines. Real data collection can be time-consuming and otherwise impractical. With the increasing availability of open data, teachers can carry out research-based learning activities using real data, without having to leave the classroom.

For this activity, you will find an open data set that you could use in a course you teach or support. Once you identify a data set you will write a short assignment description.

To find an open-data set use one of the following data repositories below and search for a data-set related to your discipline or specialization area.

Figshare: Figshare is a global open data repository. You can find open data for a variety of fields and even visualize it.
Data BC: Data BC hosts the BC Data Catalog which includes data that is openly licensed with the BC Government Open Data license.

To Create an Activity

Find a data set that is relevant to your field or discipline
Determine how students could analyze or use the data
Write one paragraph describing the learning activity
To help guide you in creating an assignment think about some of the the "core, discipline-agnostic competencies that students can "acquire in the context of research-based learning activities based on open data-sets
1. Critical thinking
2. Data curation skills
3. Research skills
4. Statistical literacy
5. Teamwork skills
6. Global citizenship

For Example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  On Videotape by Mitchell Joyce  (CC by NC 2.0)

What can I use this open data for?

rienamba — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 18:46:09 +0000

Open data can be used in multiple ways - including using it for research or incorporating to teaching practice. Explore ways that you can use open data.

For this activity, you will:

Find Open Data that interests you. (Need help? Review this list of Data Repositories)
Take a look at the data you found. Using the comment below - Share the URL of the open data you found and tell us how you would use the data. It can be related to your research or teaching- or it can be something that it is personal.

For Example

You can go to City of Vancouver's Open Data set on Public Arts and find out list of locations that has Murals by filtering the row.

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  W.Rebel, BinaryData50, CC BY 3.0

Test

lucaspractice

Hello POSE participant

The Open Education unit has just opened. In this announcement we wanted to share some thoughts about the research unit and introduce the Open Education Unit.

We wanted to mention that we designed this course to be flexible. Regardless of where you are in the course, please don’t hesitate to join the discussions and attend the course synchronous events.

Looking back at the Open Research Unit

This module covered a lot of ground and we've seen some great discussion around the difference between transparent, reproducible and replicable workflows. The conversations have been engaging and stimulating and have highlighted several interesting, contentious and unresolved issues that are part of Open Research. This has included some engaged discussion relating to the fact that definitions between disciplines differ and that many of these definitions are still in a process of evolution. It's also been noted that while for researchers in STEM fields reproducibility and replicability are integral elements of the scientific process, this is perhaps less the case for those working in fields that have historically been less reliant on technology or are more discursive in their approaches to both research inputs and outputs.

The conversation has also critically highlighted some of the differences between transparency and reproducibility and the varying roles these play in different disciplines and environments; and the impact of those related practices on future scholars. In general, there was definitely a common resonance that regardless of disciplinary motivation, integrating best practices that help buffer against future loss of scholarship due to technical obsolescence is an increasingly important consideration, but one nuanced by disciplinary methods and idiosyncrasies. We hope that this has given everyone food for thought - it certainly has for us!"

Looking ahead to the Open Education Unit

During March, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Creative Commons licenses, exploring the “open” of open educational resources, and thinking about how open scholarship can be applied to the social practices of teaching and learning. Please don't hesitate to leave a comment in the discussion if you have any questions as you work through the content.

Also, a reminder to join us for our Open Chat on the nuances of open educational practices with Dr. Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. The Open Ed Open Chat will take place on March 31st at 10am. Registration details here.

The Open Education unit is the last content focused unit before we start putting things together in the capstone module, where we’ll be applying what we’ve been learning to an aspect of our own practice. We're looking forward to continuing the POSE journey and discussing and learning about different aspects of open education with you.

rienamba

POSE Open Resources

lucaspractice — Thu, 29 Apr 2021 02:07:58 +0000

POSE XML Export File

Join the Open UBC Working Group

efields — Mon, 17 May 2021 17:19:15 +0000

Are you looking to connect with others on campus who are doing similar work or are interested in similar topics?

Do you have a great idea or approach to openness that you’d love to pass on?

Are you interested in collaborating in hopes of making a greater change?

The Open UBC Working Group is a great way to share and learn from others on the UBC campus and beyond.

The Open UBC Working Group, which is comprised of faculty, students, and staff, has been meeting regularly to advise, communicate, and partner on the development of resources and strategiesLinks to an external site. for supporting open scholarship at UBC.

Collectively, the Open UBC Working Group is a place to discuss, share, and develop advocacy strategies for open scholarship at UBC. In addition to serving as a place of community for those interested in various areas of open, the working group reviews and approves applications to the OER Rapid Innovation Grant Program and works closely with representatives from the Library, CTLT and the AMS to operationalize institutional approaches to open scholarship.

Flexibility is a major benefit of the working group. Whether you are interested in actively contributing to discussions, agendas, and projects, or you choose to engage on the periphery, the working group is welcome to all levels of participation. Meetings are held on the last Monday of every month. A meeting agenda will be sent out to the listserv.

Additional information about the group and how to join can be found here: Open Education Working Group

Challenge Bank template

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 28 Feb 2020 22:53:07 +0000

Recent study developed by BC Campus found instructor cited OERs as the type of Open Educational resource they used most often in their courses. Video can involve considerable production time and expense and finding, adopting and and remixing openly licensed videos for a course can not only save time and money and allow you to include a variety of engaging content for your course or resource.

For this challenge you will find a Creative Commons Licensed on YouTube, remix it. When you are finished license and share the new YouTube video you have created on the challenge bank.

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. . Go to the YouTube Video editor https://www.youtube.com/editor

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this challenge

Challenge Image Credit: Add the Image Credit for featured image you used here. Use TASL format for  citing the image.

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 20:52:25 +0000

Recent study developed by BC Campus found instructor cited OERs as the type of Open Educational blah blah...

For this c,,,,

To find a CC Licensed video: Go to Youtube and search for a video. Once the results appear click on the Filter button and select Creative Commons. A list of videos that are C....w.

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. If you do not have an account use the credentials below. Go to the YouTube Video editor https://www.youtube.com/editor

YouTube.com
Login: lucasedxtest01@gmail.com
Password: openforlearning

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

Complete this challenge

After you do thisldfklsdkflsfdsf

Create a slide using a CC licensed image

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 04:00:05 +0000

A remix is a piece of media that has been altered from its original state by adding, removing, and/or changing pieces of the item. The only characteristic of a remix is that it appropriates and changes other materials to create something new… (Wikipedia)

Create a slide using Creative Commons licensed image. Share the URL to the slide using the comment below.

Find: Go to websites such as Creative Commons search or the Noun project (more for icons) to find Creative Commons license images.

Create: Create the slide using websites such as Google Slides, Slideshare .Don't forget to attribute the images that you used on the slide.

Share: Share the link to the slide using the comment below!

Consider

How easy (or challenging) is it to find the license associated with the materials I’d like to use?
Does the remix you’ve created change the original to create something new?
How might you use this in a class context?
Share your process and the links to the materials you used to create your remix.

Resources

Alan Levine’s Making/Telling Stories That Matter

For Example

Short Introduction of Copyright and Creative Commons license

Complete this challenge

The Case of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 23:18:29 +0000

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing is a group of publishers banding together to address information sharing practices in ResearchGate, an online network platform for scientists and researchers to share, discover, and discuss research.

The coalition released an open letter to the Trump administration actively discouraging the consideration of putting a zero embargo which would allow for the open publication of federally funded research immediately upon completion.

Consider

For this activity, review the Coalition for Responsible Sharing and the open letter (PDF).

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, write a reflection of the documents. Consider:

What impacts does this kind of lobbying have on the intellectual property of content creators?
What impacts does this kind of lobbying have on the advancement of research and knowledge?
What interests are being served with this type of lobbying and how is it similar or different to your own interests?

Cover Image Credit: Publish by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 ImageCreator

Public Domain and Traditional Knowledge

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 23:35:06 +0000

"The treatment of traditional knowledge as merely an extension of the public domain has significant implications for the welfare and economic development opportunities of Indigenous groups. This view undermines treaties that already acknowledge or require protection for the rights of Indigenous groups and traditional knowledge holders, and it violates central tenets of the international IP framework, such as non-discrimination and protection for the non-economic interests (i.e., moral rights) associated with certain cultural goods." (Okediji, 2018, p. 2)

Watch the following video by the Centre for International Governance Innovation Senior Fellow Ruth Okediji discussing the issues with the public domain and its impact on traditional knowledge.

Read pg. 22-24 of Okediji, R. (2018) Traditional Knowledge and the Public Domain, CIGI Papers No. 176.

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, write a reflection on the video and to Dr. Okegiji's tiered approach to traditional knowledge and public domain

Watch this Video

https://youtu.be/RAX9vBEAIH4

Traditional Knowledge and the Public Domain by the Centre for International Governance Innovation Senior Fellow Ruth Okediji

Challenge Image Credit: Bibliotheca Buloviana (Ausschnitt) by Georg Daniel Heumann  licensed under Public Domain

Publisher Agreements and Knowing Your Rights

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 16:26:48 +0000

Before agreeing to publisher your with a subscription/for-profit publisher, it is important to understand how your copyright is protected and maintained. When publishing with traditional publishing bodies you will be asked to sign a publishing agreement, a legal contract that transfers the rights to your work to the publisher.

For this activity, review the two examples of publisher agreements below and consider the following:

As the author, what rights do you maintain to your work
As the publisher, what rights do they receive upon signing the agreement

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, write a brief insight into what you learned about the rights of the author and publisher. Are there any questions and thoughts you had about your own publishing practices as you reviewed the agreement?

Example Publisher Agreements

Challenge Cover Image Credit: FreeVector.com

Predatory Publishing

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 20:37:21 +0000

Bad faith publishers are a part of the academic publishing ecosystem. While many researchers feel confident that they can distinguish between a legitimate and illegitimate publisher, increasing sophistication and a continued presence in the marketplace suggests that these publishers are an ongoing issue.

For this activity, you are tasked with comparing two open access journals, one that you presume may be of low quality and another that has been vetted by the Directory of Open Access Journals and deemed legitimate.

Step 1

Identify a journal in your field that you have concerns over the quality of and conduct a review of the journal using the checklist provided at thinkchecksubmit.org.

Step 2

Select a journal in your field from the Directory of Open Access Journals and conduct a second review based again on the checklist provided at thinkchecksubmit.org

Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Think. Check. Submit.

Think. Check. Submit. helps researchers identify trusted journals and publishers for their research.

Complete this challenge

Having compared the two journals using the checklist, in the comments below write a brief insight outlining the main differences and similarities between. Reflect on your assumptions prior to investigating the journals and whether or not any of these assumptions were challenged. Also consider the audience for the two journals. Do you feel confident that readers and potential authors would easily be able to assess the quality of the journals and their publications? Why or why not?

Challenge Image Credit:  Open Story Telling by Marco Verch Professional Photographer licensed under CC BY 2.0

Innovation in Scholarly Communications

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 20:57:54 +0000

Academic publishing is in a transformative state and disruptors are working at every stage of the research life cycle to offer innovative solutions and upset traditional models of prestige and access.

One project that has attempted to capture and record the proliferation of emerging products and tools is Innovations in Scholarly Communications

For this challenge, review their crowdsourced list of over 400 innovations under the DATA tab and select one innovation to review.

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, write a brief insight outlining the value of this service or tool and consider how you might incorporate it into your own research practice in a useful way.

Innovations in Scholarly Communications

A project that analyzes the way information is created, shared, and processed in academia.

Challenge Image Credit: Idea from Pxfuel licensed free for commercial use.

Open Sharing - Share in cIRcle

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 19:32:43 +0000

cIRcle is the University of British Columbia's digital repository for research and teaching materials created by the UBC community and its partners. Materials in cIRcle are openly accessible to anyone on the web, and will be preserved for future generations.

For this activity, you will share a research or education item through UBC Library's institutional Repository cIRcle. The item can be a conference paper or presentation, video, report, pre-published research paper, etc.

Follow the general Submissions details to begin a deposit in cIRcle: https://circle.ubc.ca/submissions/

For Example

An example of a conference paper shared through UBC Library's institutional repository cIRcle.

Baker, D. (2011, December 16). Impotent numbers : Korean Confucian reactions to Jesuit mathematics [C]. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0041762

Complete this Activity

After you have completed your submission, share the link to your resource in the comments below.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image: Sharing by Markus Winkler (Public Domain)

Adapt an Image & Re-post

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 22:40:45 +0000

Adapting openly licensed content allows you to modify a useful resource to specifically fit your context. Modifying maps or images to draw attention to a particular quality is one example of this.

Find an openly licensed image and use Pixlr (or another image manipulation program of your choice) and share your creation for others to reuse.

To find a openly licensed image: You can find openly licensed images from the OER Guide from the UBC Library website.

Choose an image and download it. If it requires attribution, be sure to keep track of the attribution and license information. If the image is you are using is ND (No Derivatives), review the Creative Commons module to determine if the changes you are making to the image are not considered as adaptations and do not violate the terms of the ND license.

After you have downloaded the image, edit the image using image editing software. You can try using free software tools like Pixlr express to edit the image.

Share the revised image to your Flickr account, social media, blog or website for others to revise and reuse. Be sure to attribute the original properly, as explained in the Creative Commons module.

For Example

Highlighted region on a map.

Complete this challenge

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  Lawrence Lessig Remix Party by José Carlos Cortizo Pérez (CC by 2.0)

Reviewing OER for Adaption

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 20:10:20 +0000

Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning. Open Education ensures that teachers, learners and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine an American History textbook with the latest news from the run-up to the 2018 election, or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open. (SPARC, 2020)

For this activity, you will find an open educational resource in an open education repository and review the content, license, and file format for adaption.

Find an OER using a repository. The OER can be in any format or subject area that interests you.

Review the content. Using the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER evaluate the OER for reuse.

Review the license and file format. Identify if the OER license is compatible for adaption and under what conditions. Identify if the file format will make it easy to edit.

List of OER Repositories

Complete this Activity

Share in the comments what you learned from the process. For example, asnwer the following quesiotns:

Was it easy to find a resource in your area?
After you applied the Faculty Guide for Evaluating OER what areas was the resource lacking?
Was the license and format information easy to find?

Image Credit: Is licensing really the most important question for OER? by opensource.com license under CC BY-SA 2.0

License your work with a Creative Commons license

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 23:06:29 +0000

Find a work that you have created (it can be a resource, powerpoint presentation, or image) add a Creative Commons license to it. Alternatively, you can also create a work from scratch and license it with a Creative Commons license.

When you are licensing your work with a Creative Commons license, consider the following:

Copyright: Do you own the copyright to give your work a Creative Commons License? Or, if you are using other works in your own work, are they openly licensed?
Choosing the license: Would you like to prevent other people from using your work for commercial purposes or prevent others from adapting your work? Review What are the different types of Creative Commons Licenses? section from the Creative Commons Module.
Reusability: If you decide not to license your work as ND (No Derivatives), consider how you share your work. Review Applying a CC license to and sharing one’s own work section from the Creative Commons Module.

For Example

Resources for UBC Inclusive Design Workshop by Josie Grey

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image: The license types logos, and the CC logo, are from the Creative Commons downloads web page, used under the CC Trademark Policy.

Transform a Traditional Assignment

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 23:15:41 +0000

Traditional assignments can often serve very well to encourage students to learn and apply information, gain research and other skills, engage in problem solving, and more. And if done well, they can show instructors the level of mastery students have achieved. However, they often do not provide any further value to the world after they’re completed.

For this activity, take five minutes and decide how you could transform one of the below assignments to be open. How would you change the assignment? What resources are needed? How does this shift change the nature of the activity/assignment? How do you assess the activity?

Write a 500 word summary of an academic topic related to the course theme. Please include at least three references to academic journal articles.
Complete the weekly multiple choice quiz based on the readings and lecture from this week.
Working with your group, explore the UBC Library collections and write a 12 page paper using archival material on the BC Gold Rush.
Take a 20 point calculus exam. Show your work.

Resources

Hendricks, C. (2017). "Open pedagogy: examples of class activities.You're the Teacher.
Wiley, D. (2016). Toward renewable assessments. Iterating Toward Openness.
Wiley, D., & Hilton III, J. L. (2018). Defining OER-enabled pedagogy. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning.

Complete this Activity

To complete this activity, please reflect on the questions above and write a short description of the new or changed assignment. Then, please share your ideas below so it can appear with other responses. If your response exists at a public viewable URL, you can add the information in the comment box.

Identify OER and build a learning activity around them

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 17:26:42 +0000

OER-enabled pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities.

For this activity, Identify one or more OER from OER collections or elsewhere, and build a simple learning activity around them.

As you build the activity, consider these questions from Wiley & Hilton:

Are students asked to create new artifacts or revise/remix existing OER?
Does the new artifact have value beyond supporting the learning of its author?
Are students invited to publicly share their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?
Are students invited to openly license their new artifacts or revised/remixed OER?

Then share a description of that activity as a response to this challenge.

For Example

"An open resources web page: Ecology Issues Project contains a suggestion on how to evaluate and grade student presentations. So I will adapt this assessment example to evaluate next semester presentations." - From a sample activity from the UDG Agora activity bank.

Complete this Activity

Attribution: This activity was adapted from one originally created by Brian Lamb for UdG Agora Challenge Bank, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Contribute to Wikipedia

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:11:55 +0000

Many different courses are asking their students to analyze and edit Wikipedia articles. Have you ever edited Wikipedia yourself?

For this activity, familiarize yourself with editing Wikipedia by finding a Wikipedia article in your discipline that has inadequate or wrong information. Write a one or two sentence revision that includes a citation to a reliable resource, then either:

Go to the discussion page and suggest your revision, or
Edit the page directly with your revision and citation.

Resources:

Complete this Activity

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 21:45:44 +0000

Open access mandates are an increasingly common element of funder agreements. In 2015 the Tri-Agencies harmonized their open access policies, requiring funding recipients to make their published research openly available.

For this activity, consult the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications and, given the policy elements, consider how you would comply. When reviewing the policy, look for information on:

What types of research outputs fall under the policy
Whether or not there is financial support to pay article processing charges
What embargo period is allowed
Acceptable venues for open access publication

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

This policy is relevant for all funding awarded from The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Complete this Activity

Having reviewed the policy, write a brief insight outlining possible routes to policy compliance via both the green and gold approach. When composing your insight, consider the following:

For a green open access approach, where would you deposit your work? Do the journals you publish in allow self-archiving within the time frame outlined in the policy?
For a gold open access approach, what journals would you consider? What, if any, publishing cost would there be? How would you cover it?

Challenge Image Credit:  Speedcurve Performance Analytics by Luke Chesser. Licensed under the Unsplash License.

Practice Activity Bank

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:12:28 +0000

You have completed the module sections on Creative Commons. To complete the module, apply what you have learned so far by picking one of the following activities from the Activity Blank and complete the module reflection on the next section: Module Reflection.

Activity Bank (Mandatory)

Pick one of the following activities from the Activity Bank to complete.

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Find an open online resource you can use

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 17:25:23 +0000

Open educational resources can be used to to supplement your course. Faculty and instructors can also replace publisher resources with open textbook and OER. Complete this activity if you would like to get started finding OER.

Use one of the suggested OER collections or open search tools at right, and identify some open educational resources that you might use in your teaching. You may want to identify textual content, images, videos or online media.

Once you have found a resource consider how you might integrate this in your course. Consider some of the following questions:

Are the OER ready for you to use already? If not, what would you need to do to use them?
In which part of your course would you use this OER?
Would the OER displace a current resource or would it be supplementary?

Find OER

Use one of the repositories and websites below to find an OER that you can use in your teaching practice.

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  Find Them by R Miller (CC by NC 2.0)

Adaption Required

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 22:01:54 +0000

Although as educators we may find an open textbook or open educational resources that we can use without adapting it, this is often not the case.

For this activity, you will identify a textbook or a resource that you could adopt for your course as a replacement for a current publisher resource and you will determine how you would need to adapt it for your context.

To find an open resource, navigate to one of the open textbook and open resource repositories listed on this page.

Search the repository for a text or a resource that you could use in a course your teach or support that would displace a current paid resources.

Explore how you would need to adapt this resource in order to use it in your context. To do this consider the examples of OER Adaption.

Diversity, Accessibility & Inclusive Design
Translation
Updating
Learning Design

You may want to consider other criteria such as contextualization or localization as well.

Find Open Text/Resources

BCcampus Open Textbook Collection

Open Stax Open Textbooks

Open Learn UK

Complete this Activity

After you do this assignment, please share it with the comment below so it can appear with other responses. Share what OER you selected and what adaptations would be required. If your response exists at a publicly viewable URL, you can add the information in the box below.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  Typo... by Jim Orsini (CC by NC 2.0)

How much does your reference list cost?

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 05:09:10 +0000

Those affiliated with academic institutions are among the privileged few who have unfettered access to knowledge. Because of this seamless availability, many are unfamiliar with the cost of individual access.

For this activity you will attempt to determine the cost of purchasing individual access to all of the articles referenced in a recent paper you have written or read.

Begin by selecting the academic paper you want to review.

Turn your attention the list of references cited in the paper and attempt to locate copies of the articles online as if you were not affiliated with an academic institution and could not use the library as an access point.. You may need to locate these articles on publisher websites. In this case, note the cost of purchasing individual access to the article. Keep a running tally of costs you would need to pay in order to read all of the articles on the reference list you have selected.

Note that some (or all) of the articles cited may be available as open access content, either through publication in an open access journal, or archived in an online repository. So long as these copies appear to be legally posted, they do not contribute any dollar amount to the total cost.

Go Incognito

Note that even if you are not using a library website to search for articles, a publisher's website may be able to authenticate you based on your IP Address. In order to ensure you are not inadvertently accessing the articles via your institutional subscriptions, consider using an incognito browser window.

Complete this Activity

After you complete the activity and have determined what if any cost there would be to accessing the research please share the amount along with a brief insight outlining the process of locating the articles, their availability online, and if results aligned with your exceptions going into the activity.

Image Credit:  Official Receipt on White Paper by Michael Walter. Licensed under the Unsplash License

Format Plain Text with Markdown

rienamba — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 16:42:59 +0000

Plain text is the most open, accessible format you can choose to write in. At the end of the day, a plain text file can always be opened on a computer. However, plain text itself is not much fun to read. Enter markdown. In a plain text editor or dedicated markdown editor, you can mark up your text to indicate what should be a header, bold, italic etc. You can then send your plain text document to pdf, html and other document formats. You can even create presentation slides.

For this activity, use Dillinger, on online markdown editing application to create a markdown document.

Note Basic markdown syntax is that same across most editors, so most any guide you come across should work, but occasionally you'll see reference to particular platforms or flavours, like GitHub Flavoured Markdown.

Read a bit more about Markdown: https://www.markdownguide.org/getting-started/

Take a tutorial: https://www.markdowntutorial.com/

Keep a cheat sheet: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet

Dig deeper and read about Pandoc, the engine that fuels the conversion of document types https://pandoc.org/index.html

For Example

An example of a markdown text using Dillinger , which is an online markdown editor.

Complete this Activity

After you have completed this activity, please briefly share your experience with Dilinger and Markdown below. Thinking back to what you have learned in the Open Research unit, what do you think the benefits of markdown could be for your work?

Image Credit: Image used on featured image untitled by Markus Spiske (cc 0)

Test Out Latex

rienamba — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 18:40:57 +0000

Need some serious document formatting? A high-quality typesetting application that allows you to work in plain text and output beautiful documents. Latex is used in various platforms such as Presbooks, Webwork and UBC Wiki.

For this activity you will create a document using Latex. When you are finished share your work using the comment below.

Learn about Latex https://www.latex-project.org/
Go to Overleaf https://www.overleaf.com/ and create a Latex document. You will need to create an account.
Dig deeper and read about Pandoc, the engine that fuels the conversion of document types https://pandoc.org/index.html
Share the latex document that you have created. Follow the instructions to learn how to share a link to your project https://www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Sharing_a_project

For Example

An example of Latex document created using Overleaf

Sample Latex document

Complete this Activity

After you completed this activity, please share a public viewable URL to your Latex document below.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image: Latex example math referencing by Alessio Damato (CC by SA Unported 3.0)

Analyze text using Voyant

rienamba — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 19:13:35 +0000

An open source, web based graphical text analysis application. Upload a text, or find one online and start your analysis with things like word frequency lists, frequency distribution plots, and keywords in context. Built for the digital humanities, it’s applications can definitely reach further.

For this activity you will analyze a text using Voyant.

Find a text you want to analyze. If you don’t already have one, go to Project Gutenberg Canada and select a text. What the site lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in content!

Head over to Voyant Tools and plug in your text https://voyant-tools.org/ All you'll need is the url for the text, for example, either the html or the epub link from Project Gutenberg Canada.

Explore the results.

Get in depth guidance through the Voyant Tools help pages https://voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/start

For Example

A text analysis of the novel Crossed Swords by Alloway, Mary Wilson using Voyant Tools

See the text Analysis

Complete this Activity

To complete the activity, share the following:

Using the Export a URL (top right menu) function and copy and paste the URL in the comments.
Share some brief thoughts and ideas about the tool.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:Twitter wordcloud by JSutherland (WMF) (CC by SA 4.0)

Learning to use OSF

rienamba — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 19:55:22 +0000

OSF, formerly known as the Open Science Framework, is a workflow management web application that provides a central landing place for project components that may be scattered across many different digital workspaces and might be owned by different people. OSF provides a central place to bring together collaborators, project files, and to track versions of things.

For this activity, you will learn about OSF and engage in a few activities to become familiar with the tool. Choose from one of two activities to complete:

Attend a workshop on February 11 from 11am - 12pm on OSF
Or review the UBC OSF Workshop Documents to complete the following:
- Create a UBC affiliated OSF Institions account using your CWL credentials, or a generic account if you're with another institution.
- Explore some of the UBC affiliated content on OSF

For Example

See just what you can connect to OSF in this sample project using a mock research project.

Complete this Activity

To complete this activity, attend the workshop or complete the 5 tasks in the OSF Activity Worksheet. Share a link to your published OSF project in the comments below.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image: Open Science by kholmber. (Pixabay License)

Replicability - A Case Study

efields — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 17:49:30 +0000

Replicability for research means that the same workflow is used by different people for a research project using a new dataset yielding different but expected results. What happens to research that can't be replicated?

For this activity, you will read the case study of Liliana Mayes, a third-year doctoral student in developmental psychology who is dealing with an issue of replicability with her research.

As you are reading, take on the role of a fifth-year graduate student who is friendly with Liliana but uninvolved in her research program. She has described her situation to you and asks for your advice.

Case Study

Replicability - A Case Study was adapted from Lane, K. A., Urry, H. L., & Arnal, J. D. (2018, June 24). Replication in the Classroom - A Case Study. Retrieved from osf.io/xhbjw

Download Case Study

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, write a reflection on the following:

Should Liliana follow her advisor’s recommendation and publish the paper as soon as possible, or should she heed Dr. Hobson’s caution?
If she does not choose to publish the research, what should her next steps be?

Image Credit: Image used on featured image: Multicoloured brain illustration by Pxfuel free for commercial and personal use

Naming & Organizing Your Files

efields — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 20:09:42 +0000

As new files are created, regardless of whether they are for research or other projects, a carefully crafted naming convention needs to be developed that makes it easier for anyone to find things and also to understand what each file does or contains.

For this activity, you will review file names and organization for grouping of files all related to the same project. When reviewing, reflect on the following:

How do you currently organize your files? Consider the file hierarchy on your computer.
How have you recently used the naming and organization system for your files? What works and what doesn’t work? What do you like/don’t like about your system?
Who are you designing your organization system for? You? Collaborators? Think of all the people that will need to access the files. Is this system adequate for their needs?

File Conventions

Review the Best Practices for Organizing in the Open Workflows unit to help you strategize your own filing system.

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, share a strategy you could employ to name and organize your files based on the answers to the questions above.

Activity Credit: This activity was adapted from MIT Libraries Worksheet: Naming and Organizing your Files and Folders under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Visualize open data

rienamba — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 01:20:08 +0000

Visualizing data is powerful. It transforms the data into a format that is easily interpretable and it allows to reach out to wider audiences.

For this activity you will use the sample dataset and visualize the data using DataWrapper or a data visualization tool such as Google Chart or Tableau Public.

Download the Labour Force Survey, 2020 sample dataset (CSV file on Google Drive, 72MB).

Alternatively, you might want to search for open data from one of the sources below:

To Create Visualization:

Download the prepared Labour Force Survey dataset of one your choice in csv format.
Go to DataWrapper. Create a new chart and Import the csv file that you have exported in step 1. You can also create data visualization with your choice of data visualization tool such as Google Chart or Tableau Public.
Share the visualized data you have created in the comment below

For Example

Link to the data visualization

An example of a data visualization created using DataWrapper. The data is taken from Statistics Canada.

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  Martin Grandjean, Social Network Analysis Visualization, CC BY-SA 3.0

Is this Open Data?

rienamba — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:56:08 +0000

When the data is accessible by public- sometimes you automatically assume that the data is "open". That is not always the case.

For this activity you will find data that is accessible by public, and analyze if the data is considered as "Open Data" or not.

In the comment below:

Find the data from a data repository, data publication or open data portal - and share the URL of the data. Use the OAD to get started: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Data_repositories.
- You might also want to choose from one of these options:
Tell us if the data you found is "Open Data" - why or why not.

For Example

The data set from City of Vancouver is considered as open data because according to their open data license page - the data allows you to :

adapt and re-use the data
use it for commercial purpose
data is accessible by public.

Hint: If you're unsure if the data is open or not- review "What is Open Data" in the Open Data module.

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image: JohnsonGoh, Data, CC0 1.0

Scraping data from a PDF

lucaspractice — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:38:24 +0000

While the PDF format is a convenient replacement for paper with complex permissions and security options, it can present barriers for accessing and manipulating data. An example of this is the in the report How COVID is Changing the World, A Statistical Perspective, although the document is licensed CC-BY, all of the data tables are 'trapped' in the PDF format. Rather than manually entering the data tables into a spreadsheet, in this activity you will scrape data tables into a PDF format.

For this activity, you will be freeing data tables from PDFs and creating a CSV or an Excel sheet with the data. We will be

Find a PDF: Find a PDF online that is openly licensed but is in PDF form. If you cannot find a PDF you are interested in use How COVID is Changing the World

Download Tabula:

Download the version of Tabula for your operating system:
- Windows: tabula-win.zip
- Mac OS X: tabula-mac.zip
- Linux/Other: tabula-jar.zip, view README.txt inside for instructions
Extract the zip file. (Instructions: Windows, Mac)
Go into the folder you just extracted. Run the "Tabula" program inside.
A web browser will open. If it doesn't, open your web browser, and go to http://localhost:8080. There's Tabula!
Upload the PDF and extract the the data

Resources

Tabula: Scrape Data Tables from PDFs

School of Data Tutorial: Using Tabula to Scrap Data

Complete this Activity

After you do this assignment, please either export, and import it into Google Sheets and share the link to the original PDF and the sheet in the comment box below. Or simply copy and paste one of the data tables in the comment box below.

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  On Videotape by Mitchell Joyce  (CC by NC 2.0)

Preregistration Review!

wikiadm — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 20:40:08 +0000

Preregistration can improve research by providing transparency for around data collection methods, analysis plans, and rules for data exclusion. This can help reduce biases that occur once the data are in front of you.

When research is preregistered, the researchers are describing their plans in advance of their study and submitting it to a registry. For this activity you will find and review a preregistration for a study in your discipline.

To find a preregistration: Go to the OSF Registries and browse the registrations. Search for something in your discipline or that interests you and read the preregistration. You may also wish to explore the OSF Preregistration Outreach Packet, which includes examples.

To Review: Select a preregistration and read it. While reading it, think about the following questions:

Does the preregistration have complete metadata, such as title, authors, license, etc?
Does the preregistration clearly describe the study's hypotheses, variables, and analyses? Is there an outline of the study design. Can you tell what are independent and and dependant variables?
Does the preregistration include information about how any data will be collected?

Complete this Activity

After reading the preregistration, please link to the preregistration and share your thoughts about it in the comment section below. Do you feel like you have enough information to evaluate the research question and study design? Why or why not.

Image Credit: Preregistration badge from the Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices project by Blohowiak, Benjamin B et al, CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

Welcome to POSE

lucaspractice — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 23:47:30 +0000

Thank you for signing up for POSE - the Program for Open Scholarship and Educators. We are really excited to learn and explore open scholarship with you all in the next four months. In this message we will guide you through getting started in the course and share some key information with you. We have outlined 3 steps to get you going in POSE.

Please make sure that before we meet on January 13th you have familiarized yourself with the program structure and have started going through the Getting Started Unit. We have included more details below:

Step 1: Accessing the Course Spaces

We have set up this course using two platforms, WordPress to share content and some interactive activities and the Canvas learning management system for tracking your progress and for course discussions. You do not need to log into the WordPress site, it is completely open, however; you will need to self-enroll in the Canvas course.

Accessing the POSE WordPress Site

The POSE WordPress site is open with no login required. In order to access this site click https://pose.open.ubc.ca/. Make sure to bookmark this as you will be accessing the course content and learning activities.

Enrolling in the POSE Canvas site for UBC Staff, Faculty and Students

For UBC staff and students, to enroll in the Canvas course please click the following self-enroll link and you will be enrolled in the course as a students

Enrolling in the POSE Canvas site for non-UBC Staff, Faculty and Students

For non-UBC, Faculty Staff and students you will need to create a UBC Basic CWL and then self-enroll in the course.

Create a Basic CWL Account

To create a Basic CWL you will need to sign up for one. To do this please go to the CWL page and scroll down to the accordion tab that reads Basic. Follow the instructions there for creating and activating a Basic CWL.

Self-enroll in the course

Once you have your basic CWL click on the following self-enroll link and when promoted log in with your Basic CWL

Step 2: Add the Synchronous Sessions to your Calendar

There are two required synchronous sessions for the course and a number of optional sessions. Spend a moment and make sure that you have added these to your calendar and registered for them.

Kick Off Session: January 13th, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Register* You will receive the Zoom link once you have registered

Program Wrap-Up: April 29th. 10:00 - 11:30 am Register* You will receive the Zoom link once you have registered

Step 3: Orient yourself to the course and get started on the first unit

Spend some time and familiarize yourself with the POSE website. Work through the Getting Started content before moving on to the first unit, Open Access. . This will provide you information about course completion, how to move through the course, and course communication. We have also included a short video guiding you through the course structure.

For the month of January we will be delving into Open Access.

We look forward to meeting and kicking off the program on January 13th at 10am! If you have any questions about the POSE program, please contact open.ubc@ubc.ca

Thanks,

Your POSE facilitators

POSE Kick-Off Session - Zoom Details

efields — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 21:15:59 +0000

For our POSE Kick-Off Session tomorrow, January 13 at 10am, the Zoom link can be found in the Canvas course Zoom menu: https://canvas.ubc.ca/courses/46809/external_tools/15408A

All POSE sessions will use the same link from the Zoom menu. For those who have registered through the registration system, an email reminder will be sent to you tomorrow 30 minutes before the session with all the details.

See you tomorrow!

Open Events for January

efields — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:40:13 +0000

As promised, here is a list of upcoming events related to open for January! For a full calendar of all events, webinars, and workshops in Open Scholarship, go to the Open Scholarship Calendar. The events are open to anyone interested.

We will send monthly reminders.

Open Chat with Mark Turin

Join Mark Turin, Associate Professor, UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies & Department of Anthropology. Author of Ownership, Control, Access & Possession in Open Access Humanities Publishing, in a discussion of the challenges related to open access.

Date:Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Time:12:00pm - 1:00pm
Register: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3588527

Copyright and Licensing in Open Educational Resources

Does your project include work created by others? Do you have questions about Creative Commons licenses and how to incorporate licensed works into your project? This session will introduce you to copyright basics for your OER project and take you through licensing considerations to ensure that your work is reusable by others. Importantly it will also provide you with a simple workflow to help you identify and respect Creative Commons licensed works.

Date:Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Time:1:00pm - 2:00pm
Register: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3593451

Kick off Session Resources

lucaspractice — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 18:56:57 +0000

Hi everyone,

It was exciting to see so many of you in the POSE Virtual Kick-Off session on Wednesday. We are really looking forward to learning with all of you this term.

We have put together an archive of the synchronous session. On the archive page you can find a recording of the session, the session slides, and the Padlet used for sharing our locations. We have also organized the notes that you took during the breakout room and added a line describing the links to open projects that you shared.

If you were unable to attend the Kick Off session, please make sure to go through the session recording, the slides and add your location to the Padlet.

Link to the session resources

Sincerely,

The POSE Facilitation Team

POSE Updates: Looking back at Open Access and Looking Ahead to Open Research

lucaspractice — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:05:33 +0000

Greetings POSE participants,

We hope this term is going as well as possible for you. This is the second of our POSE bi-weekly announcements. In this announcement we will look back at what we have been all doing in the Open Access unit and look ahead to the Open Research unit.

Looking back

For the last three weeks we have been learning together about open access in open scholarship. It has been inspiring to see the different ways that you are thinking about open access in your disciplinary context. We encourage you to contribute to the open access discussion and complete open access activities before the Open Research unit starts next week. If you haven’t had a chance to read through the discussions or activities for this month, they are full of incredible nuggets of wisdom and ideas from a variety of institutional perspectives. Highlights included:

For one of the Open Access activities the cohort shared some really useful reviews of innovative products and tools used in scholarly communication.
For another Open Access activity there was an interesting discussion about Traditional Knowledge, Open Access and the public domain.
The monthly discussion delved into critical perspectives about open access

During the monthly open chat Mark Turin, Associate Professor, UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies & Department of Anthropology led a discussion about challenges in open access. You can view a recording of the session in the Media Gallery in Canvas We are coming to the end of the Open Access unit this week. Please take some time and finish off the discussions and activities that you haven’t had a chance to do yet. The unit will stay open for the remainder of the course.

Looking ahead

Next Monday February 1st we will be starting to explore Open Research together. In this unit, we will examine issues related to transparency, reproducibility, open research, and open data.

We are excited that Aled Edwards, Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium, Professor of Medical Genetics and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, will be leading a discussion about Open Research on Wed, February 10 from 11:00 - 12:00 pm PST. Please make sure to register to join this session.

Finally, we are also excited that Maha Bali, PhD, Associate Professor of Practice, Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, will be exploring the nuances of open educational practices at the POSE open chat on March 31st at 10am PST. Please register to join.

We are excited to continue exploring open scholarship with all of you!

See you online,

POSE Course Facilitators

REMINDER - Aled Edwards Open Chat on Feb 10

efields — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 17:57:54 +0000

Hi All,

Just a reminder about our Open Chat this week with Aled Edwards.

Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Time:11:00am - 12:00pm
Register - https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3589543Links to an external site.

Dr. Aled Edwards is fthe ounder and Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), a research organization celebrated for being a pioneer of open science, particularly as it applies to protein science, chemical biology and drug discovery.

Aled leads the six SGC laboratories from the SGC headquarters in Canada.

Aled is a Professor at the University of Toronto, Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and Adjunct Professor at McGill University. He has published over 200 papers and his teams have contributed over 4,000 structures into the Protein Data Bank, as of 2019. Aled has also founded many companies, including Affinium Pharmaceuticals, which developed a novel antibiotic currently in late-stage clinical trials, and M4K Pharma, the first pharmaceutical company formed explicitly to invent new, and affordably-priced, medicines.

A link to the online session will be sent 24 hours before the event.

Reflecting on Critical Perspectives

wikiadm — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 19:46:36 +0000

Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education is an open text that represents a starting point towards curating and centring marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education, an attempt at critical pluriversalism. It is a curated collection of 38 blog posts, lectures, talks, articles, and other informal works contributed by 43 diverse authors/co-authors that offer a perspective on open education that can be considered marginal and that challenges the dominant hegemony.

In the introduction to Open at the Margins: Critical Perspectives on Open Education, the editors state:

"Open education agendas are not simply being “openwashed” as has been observed by many; our concern is that that they have become watered down. It is clear that questions about equity and social justice need to be reasserted at this time. It is also a moment to question power relations within broader open education networks...therefore, we are cautious about rhetoric concerning equity, diversity, and inclusion, asserting that these only have meaning when concomitant processes are genuinely embraced to avoid further marginalizing the marginalized. In this book, voices from the margins are made central, voices that ask important questions, such as…

Is the open education movement even a single movement?
If so, what binds it together?
What does it mean for something to be open?
Who gets to decide what is “open” enough?
Or for whom it is open? Can one use closed means to achieve open ends?
...and more.

For this assignment, please choose and read at least one essay/chapter from this text. As you read it, please reflect upon the following questions and add your thoughts below:

Which chapter did you select? Who wrote it?
What drew your attention to that specific essay?
How does the essay critique open education?
What are your thoughts on the essay or critique?
How does the critique resonate with your own experiences or practices?

Complete this Activity

After you do this assignment, please share a brief reflection about what you read via a comment below it can appear with other responses. If your response exists at a public viewable URL, you can also add the information directly to this site.

 Open at the Margins was edited by Maha Bali, Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Robin DeRosa, and Rajiv Jhangiani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.  Text cover photo by Michele Caliani on Unsplash

POSE Update: Open Research Unit, Midpoint

lucaspractice — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Hello POSE participants, It is incredible how quickly the winter term is flying by. We are just over half-way through the open research unit. In this announcement we wanted to share with you about what has been happening in the last couple weeks and what is coming up.

Looking Back

On Feb 1st we opened the Open Research unit. This unit focuses on open workflows, open software and open data. So far it looks like most of you have been working on completing the activities for the unit. The Open Research unit activities include a number of really interesting visual and tool focused activities. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at the activities for this unit yet, we have pointed you to some highlights below.

Analyze text using Voyant

Quite a few of you have been using the open-source Voyant tool to analyze text. The variety of texts that you chose to analyze included the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a lecture by George Bernard Shaw, Recommendations On Open Educational Resources by UNESCO, the info page from a PhD program.

Test Out Latex

A number of you tested out using Latex. Latex is a system for high quality textual typesetting that is also used for writing equations online.

February Open Chat

The open chat this month took place on February 10th. During this session Aled Edwards Chief Executive of the Structural Genomics Consortium, Professor of Medical Genetics and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, Visiting Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Professor at McGill University discussed how the practice of open in drug development can both expedite discovery and reduce the social and economic costs of these research endeavours. The conversation had particular resonance in the context of COVID If you missed this session and are interested you can view the recording in the Canvas course media gallery.

Looking Ahead

We have two more weeks to go in the Open Research unit. It looks like many of you have completed the unit activities. We have ensured that the POSE program is flexible. With this said, you may want to start contributing to the unit discussion in the next little while. We have tried to create discussions that synthesize some of your understandings of the unit. We also wanted to highlight an optional open education set of events coming up. The Honouring Indigenous Writers on Wikipedia events will be starting on February 24th. Read more about how you can learn about and contribute to Wikipedia. We are excited to learn with you for the remainder of the Open Research unit. The POSE program is flying by and the final course topic Open Education is just around the corner. Sincerely, The POSE Facilitation Team

Open Education Week Events

efields — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 16:47:15 +0000

See what UBC has planned for Open Education Week 2021 (Mar 1-5).

Moving Your Open Education Resource Project Forward

Date: Monday, March 1st
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online
Register: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3589509Links to an external site.

Have an idea for creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) with no idea how to start? Have you started an OER project and have stopped making progress? Feeling overwhelmed at the size of the OER project that you have begun? Whether you are considering developing an OER project, or about to embark on one, this session will introduce you to the various supports provided by UBC to help you move your OER forward at any stage of your project.

Open Education 101

Date: Tuesday, March 2nd
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Online
Registration: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3595047Links to an external site.

Would you like to learn more about open education and open educational resources but don’t know where to start? This introductory workshop is for you. This session will provide an overview of the open education movement including what it is and why it matters.

Open Education Lightning Talks and Panel

Date: Tuesday, March 2nd
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm
Location: Online
Registration: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3595057Links to an external site.

Want to learn more about what working on an Open Education or OER project actually looks like from the instructor’s perspective? Join us for a series Lightning Talks and Panel session with instructors who will share their experiences moving their teaching into the open.Participants will include:

Stuart McKinnon (Earth and Environmental Sciences, UBC-O)
Suzanne Campbell (School of Nursing, UBC-V)
Siobhan McElduff (CNERS, UBC-V)
Firas Moosvi (Computer Science, UBC-O)

OER and Creative Commons

Date: Wednesday, March 3rd
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online
Registration: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3595049Links to an external site.

Does your project include work created by others? Do you have questions about Creative Commons licenses and how to incorporate licensed works into your project? This session will introduce you to copyright basics for your OER project and take you through licensing considerations to insure that your work is reusable by others. Importantly it will also provide you with a simple workflow to help you identify and respect Creative Commons licensed works.

Sharing and Discoverability – Making an Impact with Your Open Educational Resource

Date: Thursday, March 4th
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online
Registration: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3589510Links to an external site.

Unlike traditional publishing models, where marketing and promotion are completed for authors, engaging in open education activities requires some effort from practitioners in getting the word out there about their resources. This session will introduce you to workflows for making your resource discoverable, streamlining impact data collection, and marketing and promotion processes to showcase the reach of your open educational resource.

Open Education Lightning Talks and Panel, Part 2

Date: Friday, March 5th
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online
Registration: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3595060Links to an external site.

Tiffany Timbers (Statistics, UBC-V)
Fernanda Tomaselli (Forestry, UBC-V)
Matthew Mitchell (Land and Food Systems, UBC-V)
Derrick Wirtz (Psychology, UBC-O)

POSE Update: Open Education

lucaspractice — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:12:00 +0000

Hello POSE participant

The Open Education unit has just opened. In this announcement we wanted to share some thoughts about the Open Research unit and introduce the Open Education unit.

We wanted to mention that we designed this course to be flexible. Regardless of where you are in the course, please don’t hesitate to join the discussions and attend the course synchronous events.

Looking back at the Open Research Unit

Looking ahead to the Open Education Unit

Sincerely,

The POSE facilitation team

Custom CSS

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 18:18:12 +0000

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Scenario (Convert to regular block before using it)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 18:48:24 +0000

Scenario – Publishing a Journal Article

Scenario Quiz (convert to regular block before use)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 19:59:02 +0000

Test your knowledge

[gravityform id="put the gravity form id here" title="false" description="false"]

Back and Continue Button (Convert to regular block before use)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 21:57:50 +0000

Back

Continue

Activity Bank (Convert to regular block before use)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 20:42:15 +0000

A recent study developed by BC Campus found instructor cited OERs as the type of Open Educational resource they used most often in their courses. Video can involve considerable production time and expense and finding, adopting and remixing openly licensed videos for a course can not only save time and money and allow you to include a variety of engaging content for your course or resource.

For this activity you will find a Creative Commons Licensed on YouTube, remix it. When you are finished license and share the new YouTube video using the comment below

To Remix the video: Sign into your YouTube account. If you do not have an account use the credentials below. See the instruction to here to learn how to edit the video directly in YouTube.

For Example

An example of a simple remix created using the YouTube editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDwE0XOXODQ&feature=emb_title

Complete this Activity

Image Credit: Image used on featured image:  On Videotape by Mitchell Joyce  (CC by NC 2.0)

Dig Deeper (convert to usable block)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 17:15:52 +0000

Dig Deeper

Link to Activity Bank (convert to regular block after use)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 17:45:18 +0000

Activity Bank

Apply what you have learned so far! Choose one of the following challenges:

Module Structure - Reflections

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 16:40:15 +0000

Reflections are questions and ideas posed to participants to critically think about key issues related to the module.

Module Structure - Scenario/Test Knowledge

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 16:40:43 +0000

Scenarios are case studies or examples of the key issues in the module in practice through the perspective of a persona.

Test Your Knowledge provides participants with an opportunity to answer multiple-choice questions on key areas to ensure an understanding of core facts.

Module Structure - Dig Deeper

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 16:41:11 +0000

Dig Deeper are additional resources facilitators have identified to further your learning on a specific topic within the module. Participants can use this content to “dig deeper” into the content.

Module Structure - Activity Bank

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 16:41:30 +0000

Activity Bank are assignments given throughout the module and require completing an activity. The activities will vary and may require analyzing content, engaging with a tool, or both. The completed activities are openly shared in the Activity Bank section of the site.

Activity bank 2

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 21:17:05 +0000

Go to the Activity Bank , and complete any three of the Open Access related activities

Activity Bank

Module Reflection (convert to usable bock)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 16:05:02 +0000

You have completed the module sections on author rights. To complete the module write a module reflection in the Forum.

Write a Module Reflection

Reflecting on the entire author rights module, take a moment to write a reflection that answer some of the following questions:

What did you learn that was new to you about author rights?
What questions does the module raise for you?
What would you like to learn more about author rights, intellectual property, etc.?
How do author rights related to open scholarship?
What would you like to share about the topic with people?

Add Reflection to the Forum

Reflections (convert to a regular block to edit)

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 16:30:10 +0000

Reflections

Think about your own academic publishing practices. What influences your decision to publish your work with a particular publication? Does the maintenance of your copyrights influence your final decision to publish?

Global Javascript Editor

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 17:09:20 +0000

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" ); $( ".wiki-embed object" ).wrap( "

" ); $(".wiki-embed .wikitable").css("width", "100%"); /*Copyright License footer*/ jQuery(document).ready(function ($) { $(".copyright-footer").insertAfter("#ubc7-unit-address"); });

Resources for Challenge Bank

ctltinstructionaldesignersteam — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 18:51:59 +0000

Go to Activity Bank

rienamba — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 22:42:02 +0000

Activity Bank

Apply what you have learned so far. Choose any three of the Open Access related activities from the Activity Bank.

Complete the activity

REMINDER: Register for the Maha Bali Open Chat - Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices

efields — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 16:27:18 +0000

Join Dr. Maha Bali for this Open Chat titled, "Exploring Nuances of Open Educational Practices.

In this session, participants will explore diverse understandings of open educational practices, and have opportunities to analyze different practices along three continua: content/process centricity, teacher/student centricity and pedagogical/social justice focus. Participants will dig deeper into certain practices and consider how a practice can work well in one context but not another, and how to imagine redesigning it to better promote social justice along three social justice dimensions: economic, cultural and political.

The session will build upon the article listed below. No pre-reading is necessary for this event.

Bali, M., Cronin, C., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2020). Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education.2020 (1), p. 10. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565 (Links to an external site.)

Date: Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Time: 10:00am - 11:00am (PDT)

POSE Update: Capstone Unit

lucaspractice — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 18:36:13 +0000

Dear POSE participants,

I hope that you have managed to find some time to enjoy the spring weather. In this update, we will share information about the final POSE capstone unit and the final open project.

Looking Back

On March 31st we had the incredible opportunity of joining Maha Bali for the monthly Open Chat. During this session, Maha discussed open education and some of the ways that we can continue to emphasize social justice in our open practice. You can view the recording in the POSE Canvas course.

We have now finished up the Open Education unit and are moving on to the final Capstone unit. While many of you have completed the open education learning activities, we are noticing that some of you are finishing up this unit. All of the units will stay open for completion until the POSE course ends on April 29th and we encourage those of you who have not completed learning activities from the previous units to jump back in and complete them. A quick reminder that those of you who have completed all of the required program elements will receive a certificate of completion at the end of the POSE program.

Looking Ahead

For the final unit, you will be applying what you have learned to complete a capstone project for the program that is focused on open access, open research, or open education. The capstone project can take a wide variety of forms and will depend on what you would like to accomplish. The project can range from a small simple project to a more complex one. This is an opportunity for you to develop an open project and receive feedback and support as you develop it.

We have described the project in detail in the Capstone unit. As a first step, please spend some time going through the Capstone unit, where you will find a description of the project, examples, and a project template.

To support you develop the project we have set up a series of Learning Lounges. Join these lounges to receive support for your project from our facilitators. The Learning Lounges are optional, but they are a great opportunity to get feedback and guidance on your approach and project.

The project is due by the Capstone session on April 29th. Please make sure to share your project in the Capstone discussion topic by that time. We would also like to offer you the opportunity to share the project you have developed as part Lighting Talks we have for the final session. Please contact us directly if this interests you open.ubc@ubc.ca

Sincerely,

The POSE Facilitation Team

Wrap-up Session and Capstone Project Reminders

wikiadm — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 18:03:37 +0000

Hi Everyone:

Just a quick reminder that the POSE Program Wrap-Up Session will be on this Thursday, April 29th at 10am. The session will include a course recap, lightning talks from POSE participants, and a chance to connect with your fellow open scholars and educators. The details are:

Date: Thursday, April 29th, 2021
Time: 10am to 11:30
Register: https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3588508Links to an external site.

If you register for the event, a Zoom link will be emailed 24-hours before the session. You can also access the zoom link by clicking on “Zoom” in the menu in the Canvas POSE course shell.

It’s been great to see all of the amazing capstone projects that have already been submitted. If you are looking for inspiration for your own project, or are curious about what other people are working on, please be sure to check out the Capstone Project discussion.

Just a reminder that Capstone Projects do not have to be complex or exhaustive; however, if you are still working on yours and need extra time, no worries! We will be keeping the course and certificate processes open until May 31st. Certificates of completion for everyone who finished all required course activities and submitted a capstone project will be emailed out after the end of May.

Thank you to all the amazing POSE participants and we hope to see you on Thursday at 10am.

Best,

The POSE Facilitation Team

Back Grey Button

efields — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 20:55:53 +0000

Back

Untitled Reusable Block

efields — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 18:54:28 +0000

Dig Deeper:

Get Started Button

lucaspractice — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:16:16 +0000

Available March 1, 2021

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efields — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 18:06:46 +0000

Wrap Up

efields — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:16:10 +0000

In this module we have explored what open data is, how to implement it in your research and how it can be used.

Key Takeaways

Open data is defined as structured data that is machine-readable, freely shared, used, and built on without restrictions.
The FAIR Data Principles are a set of guiding principles in order to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable
Not all data can or should be open, what type of data and privacy are important considerations
Open data is valuable for research and data reproducibility, public service transformation, innovation, impact, and research discovery
One approach to implementing open data is to plan your data management, describe your open data, and preserve and share your open data.
Open data is used in open government to improve transparency
In teaching and learning open data can help students develop critical thinking, statistical and data literacy, and global citizenship

Back

Continue

Wrap Up

efields — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:19:16 +0000

In this module we have explored what TBD

Key Takeaways

Back

Continue

blue box

rienamba — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 17:04:56 +0000

The activity bank has activities that you will complete as part the POSE modules but we also welcome anyone who is not in the course and interested to complete the activities. Role up your sleeves and make some stuff! The concept behind the activity bank is to learn by doing. This bank is adapted from the D106 Assignment Bank and the Agora Challenge Bank.

Untitled Reusable Block

lucaspractice — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:58:08 +0000

Key Takeaways

The current publication ecosystem and academic promotion processes prioritize metrics and rankings of publications, such as Journal Impact Factors and H-Index, as a measure of the quality of value which has negative impacts on academic work.
The advent of the internet and open access was seen as a potential game-changer to wrestle control of academic publications back from publishers and into the hands of the academy; however, this has not occurred as publishers find ways to monetize open access options.
Consolidation of publishers has negatively impacted the costs of academic outputs but, of greater potential harm is the impact private industry has on what is and is not published (i.e. greater focus on positive results and novel studies).
Publishers have expanded to offer research analytic tools as a means of monetizing research performance and benchmarks causing further questions around how value and quality are conflated with quantitative measurement.

Untitled Reusable Block

rienamba — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 16:44:45 +0000

Watch the following video by the Centre for International Governance Innovation Senior Fellow Ruth Okediji discussing the issues with the public domain and its impact on traditional knowledge.

Read pg. 22-24 of Okediji, R. (2018) Traditional Knowledge and the Public Domain, CIGI Papers No. 176.

Complete this Activity

In the comments below, write a reflection on the video and to Dr. Okegiji's tiered approach to traditional knowledge and public domain

Watch this Video

https://youtu.be/RAX9vBEAIH4

Traditional Knowledge and the Public Domain by the Centre for International Governance Innovation Senior Fellow Ruth Okediji