How can access to important research and scholarship be available to all, not just “the one percent”? On Tuesday, February 28, at 12:00 PM in Columbia University’s Faculty House Presidential Rooms 2 & 3, join us for “Protests, Petitions and Publishing: Widening Access to Research in 2012” to discuss how Occupy Wall Street, the Research Works Act (RWA), the boycott of Elsevier journals by a growing number of academics, and other recent developments are informing the debate over access to research and scholarship. The event is free and open to the public. 

The Occupy movement resonated widely on college campuses in America and around the world when it began in Fall 2011 and reinvigorated discussion of socioeconomic inequality and increasing costs associated with higher education. Current debates about scholarly publishing have further echoed these themes. Two bills—the RWA, which seeks to end public-access policies to federally funded research, and the Federal Research Public Access Act, which seeks to expand the reach of these policies—are currently under consideration in Congress. In response, over 6,000 scholars have signed an online petition boycotting the scholarly journals published by the commercial publisher Elsevier, one of the major financial supporters of the sponsors of the RWA. Meanwhile, several societies have begun to address their membership’s concerns about publishing practices that may be seen to exclude scholars at all but the most wealthy institutions. Are scholars and publishers finally ready to change the process by which scholarship is distributed?

The speakers bring a variety of perspectives to the issue of access to research.

Allan Adler is Vice President for Legal and Governmental Affairs in the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), where he deals with intellectual property, freedom of speech, new technology, and other industry-related issues.

Gail Drakes is a doctoral candidate in the Program in American Studies at New York University and Associate Faculty at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her current teaching and research interests explore the ways in which copyright (and other forms of private ownership of information) serve to regulate access to the stories, sounds, and images that shape collective scholarly and public understandings of the past.

Alex Golub is assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research interests include kinship and identity, resource development, and political anthropology. He is a founder of the popular cultural anthropology blog “Savage Minds.”
 
Oona Schmid is the Director of Publishing at the American Anthropological Association. She is responsible for the daily oversight and long-term planning around a complex publishing program that includes more than 20 specialized anthropological journals.

Peter Woit is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University and author of the blog “Not Even Wrong.”

This is Columbia University’s Scholarly Communication Program’s third event this academic year in their speaker series, "Research Without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication."

Columbia is one of many universities and other groups representing researchers and research institutions that have submitted responses to the RFIs. Many publishers of scholarly journals are also expected to comment.

Read the CUL/IS response to the publications RFI and its response to the data RFI.

Answering these RFIs has been especially crucial in light of the recent introduction of the Research Works Act (RWA) in the House of Representatives. The RWA (HR 3699, co-sponsored by Congressman Darrell Issa and New York Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney), would prevent Federal agencies from adopting policies requiring that peer-reviewed journal articles reporting the results of Federally funded research be made publicly accessible without the prior consent of both the author and publisher of the article. The RWA would mean the end of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy and would prohibit other Federal agencies from adopting similar policies. The bill has been broadly criticized by researchers, librarians, and advocates of open access, open government, and open source software. Though the Association for American Publishers supports the bill, AAP members including MIT Press, ITHAKA, and Pennsylvania State University Press have denounced it.

Ask your questions about copyright, using copyrighted materials in your dissertation or thesis, and depositing your work in Academic Commons. Copyright Advisory Office director Kenneth Crews and Academic Commons manager Robert Hilliker will offer advice to Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students preparing their dissertations or theses for electronic filing. Bring specific questions!

Though the focus of this discussion will be on GSAS dissertations, all members of the Columbia community are welcome.

Ask your questions about copyright, using copyrighted materials in your dissertation or thesis, and depositing your work in Academic Commons. Copyright Advisory Office director Kenneth Crews and Academic Commons manager Robert Hilliker will offer advice to Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students preparing their dissertations or theses for electronic filing. Bring specific questions!

Though the focus of this discussion will be on GSAS dissertations, all members of the Columbia community are welcome.

The speakers illuminate the potential of the Semantic Web as a productive tool for scholarship and research while illustrating how semantic technologies are still in the beginning stages of development.

Check out this and other videos of events on the Past Events page.

Our speakers are all involved in innovative initiatives using the Semantic Web. Micki McGee is an assistant professor of Sociology at Fordham University and is project director of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Compatible Data Initiative, a project aiming to generate standards for shared, interoperable data sets for humanities‑based network analysis projects. Benno Blumenthal is Data Library Manager at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University. He is currently interested in using semantic technologies to facilitate the distribution of Earth science data for public use, and he is the author of the IRI/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Climate Data Library, which offers freely accessible climate data via the Web. Cristina Pattuelli is an assistant professor at the Pratt School of Library and Information Science. Her research focuses on information organization and the knowledge representation methods and tools applied to information systems, with a current emphasis on using semantic technologies in cultural heritage resources. The discussion will be moderated by Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature doctoral candidate Graham Sack.

If you can't attend the discussion, follow it on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/ScholarlyComm/. See the Past Events page for videos  of other Research Without Borders events.

The first deposit party will be hosted by the Digital Humanities Center (Room 305 in Butler Library), and will run from 3:30 to 5:00 PM. The target audience is graduate and undergraduate students, particularly those who take part in the previous day’s workshop on copyright and other issues in filing electronic theses and dissertations. Refreshments will be served.

The second, which begins at 5:00 PM, is being hosted by the Monell Engineering Library as part of the monthly “Cordial," an event where librarians mingle with faculty and enjoy wine, cheese, and other refreshments.

Participants in either event should come prepared: whether you bring a flash drive crammed to the gills with your articles, presentation slides, and other work, or simply a copy of your CV that can be used to track down digital copies of your work on the Web, you will need to have your files to hand in order to deposit them.

If you have any questions about Academic Commons in general, or the deposit parties in particular, please direct them to Robert Hilliker, the Digital Repository Manager, at rhilliker [at] columbia.edu.

Along with the template, on this page you will find links to:

• frequently asked questions about the policy and about open access;
• information about open access policies at peer institutions;
• related resources.

And if your Columbia department or school approves an open access policy, be sure to let us know! The Libraries/Information Services will support implementation of your policy and help make complying with the policy easy for faculty and staff. We will also introduce you to Columbia's digital repository, Academic Commons, and the services it provides to scholars and researchers at Columbia.

Columbia Events

Your Dissertation: What You Need to Know About Copyright and Electronic Filing

For Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students, but open to all Columbia students. Find out how to make filing your dissertation a breeze. Learn about copyright issues and the opportunities presented by depositing your dissertation in Columbia's digital repository. View details

Beyond the Copyright Wars: Fair Use, Free Speech, and Reframing the Policy Debate

American University Professor Patricia Aufderheide discusses her new book with Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. View details

Introduction to New Digital Humanities Center & Academic Commons Deposit Party

Graduate students can check out the revamped Digital Humanities Center and bring USB drives with materials to deposit into Academic Commons, Columbia's open access digital repository. Refreshments will be served. 

Open Access Library Cordial & Academic Commons Deposit Party

Chat with colleagues, learn about open access, and bring your work on a USB drive to upload to Academic Commons. View details

Learn More

• Read an open access FAQ
• View information on the Columbia Open Access Publication Fund
• Check out the open access policies that have been passed by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Columbia University Libraries / Information Services.

The speakers all have extensive experience with data management issues and we look forward to an informative discussion. The panel includes: Victoria Stodden, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Columbia University and a member of the NSF's Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure; Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University, and Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Data Conservancy; and Kerstin Lehnert, Senior Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Integrated Earth Data Applications data facility.

Anyone interested in these issues is welcome to attend this first Research Without Borders event for the 2011-12 academic year. It will be held on Columbia's Morningside campus in Faculty House, Presidential Rooms 2 & 3.

You can also follow a live summary of the discussion at http://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. If you would like to presubmit questions for the speakers, please email them to kp2002 [at] columbia.edu or send a direct message on Twitter to @scholarlycomm by the end of the day on Friday, September 23.