Podcasts and Video Tutorials on Scholarly Publishing & Copyright
Podcasts:
The MIT Libraries have launched a podcast series with episodes that address various aspects of scholarly publishing & copyright [with newest appearing first]:
In “Professor JoAnne Yates on Making MIT Sloan Teaching Materials Openly Available,” Professor Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Deputy Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, speaks about the new MIT Sloan website that offers case studies, teaching videos, and other innovative instructional resources openly to anyone with access to the internet.
Professor Yates explains why MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is an open access site, what is innovative about its approach and content, and why it matters for business education. She reflects on the decision-making that went into offering the content openly, commenting that “the notion of giving it away to the world seemed to us the right notion,” even though some people at other business schools “wanted to know whether we were crazy” for giving this content away when other schools charge for it.
Professor Yates links the decision to make the content open access to MIT’s culture of openness and experience with OpenCourseWare. She says “I’m very proud of the fact that MIT makes all this material open to the world and that we started that [OpenCourseWare] movement… MIT… understands it owes something to the world and it tries to give back to the world. That’s something that makes many of us who work here very proud. It’s easy to want to follow in these footsteps.”
Download the audio file. (20:56 minutes; 19MB)
Posted March 16, 2009
In “MacKenzie Smith on Endnote vs. Zotero: the Business End of Citation Management Software,” MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology in the MIT Libraries. MacKenzie discusses the lawsuit that Thomson Reuters, owner of the proprietary bibliographic management software EndNote, has pursued against George Mason University and the Commonwealth of Virginia in relation to their open-source tool, Zotero. She provides an overview of the details of the claims in the case, and shares her views on the implications of the lawsuit for universities and scholars.Download the audio file. (9:12 minutes; 8.4MB)Posted November 6, 2008For more information, see MacKenzie’s blog story on this same topic.
In “Gari Clifford on Choosing Open Publication Models that Support Authors and Readers,” Dr. Clifford explores themes related to author rights and open access that have emerged in his experience with scholarly publishing. In particular, he explains why he prefers to publish in open access journals, what problems he sees with the journal publishing system, and his view that the choice of journal is “as important as the research itself.”
Download the audio file. (18:58 minutes; 17 MB) Posted 9/26/08
In “Professor Dan Ariely on his book “Predictably Irrational” and Scholarly Publishing,” Dan Ariely, who recently published the best-selling book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, discusses his research showing that emotions, context, social norms, and related factors drive our decisions, and applies that research to scholarly publishing, reflecting particularly on how market and social norms intersect in that realm, including reward systems, the importance of building an accessible community of knowledge, and the need to lower barriers for information sharing.
Download the audio file. (20:02 minutes; 18.4 MB) Posted July 22, 2008
In “Professor George Stiny on the “copy” in copyright,” Professor Stiny explains the significance of copying in the design process from his unusual perspective – a perspective that blends art and design with calculating. Professor Stiny, who is Professor of Computation in the Department of Architecture, invented shape grammars – the idea of identifying and quantifying a set of rules that can generate an infinite range of designs, much the way rules of grammar in language can generate an infinite range of sentences.
Download the audio file. (14:42 minutes; 13.5 MB)
Posted May 6, 2008
In “Hal Abelson on Supporting Our Intellectual Commons,” Professor Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, reflects on the origins and impacts of his wide-ranging efforts to foster educational technology initiatives such as OpenCourseWare and DSpace, his role as a founding director of Creative Commons, his reasons for remaining committed to more open access to research, and the concerns he has about the future.
Download the audio file. (22:53 minutes; 21 MB)
Posted April 2, 2008
In “Professor John H. Lienhard V on making his text book open access,” MIT Professor of Mechanical Engineering speaks about making the 3rd edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook openly available on the web, with no charge to readers. Professor Lienhard, whose goal was to “explore the impact that free textbooks could have on higher education,” reflects on how the project came about and what it has meant to those who have downloaded the text, as well as to him.
Download the audio file. (15:10 minutes; 11.1 MB)
Posted February 25, 2008
In “John Wilbanks on Barriers to the Flow of Scientific Knowledge,” the Executive Director of Science Commons discusses how and why Science Commons is working to improve the flow of scientific knowledge so that complex scientific, technical, and medical problems can be solved more quickly.
Download the audio file (14:35 minutes; 13.9MB)
Posted February 5, 2008
In “Tracy Gabridge on Assessing the Vulnerability of Conference Proceedings,” Tracy Gabridge, Associate Head of the Barker Engineering Library (as well as a graduate of MIT), speaks about a project she is leading in which a group of librarians is determining which conferences MIT Engineering faculty publish in, whether the MIT Libraries have access to the proceedings from these conferences, and whether the digital access appears to be vulnerable.
Download the audio file. (14:35 minutes; 10.2MB)
Posted January 22, 2008
In “Professor Kai von Fintel on the Launch of a New Open Access Journal in Linguistics,” we hear from Professor Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, who discusses the launch of a new open access journal, Semantics and Pragmatics. The podcast was recorded at a critical moment in the journal’s history, a few weeks after its website was launched and opened for submissions, and a few months before the first papers are expected to appear there, in early 2008.
Download the Audio File (11:11 minutes; 10.3MB)
Posted December 21, 2007
In “Professor Eric von Hippel on Openness, Innovation, and Scholarly Publishing,”, Professor von Hippel, who is T Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, speaks about his experiment with making two of his books openly available on his website at no cost to the reader, and about the broader issue of how the economics of innovation are increasingly favoring open, unrestricted internet access, including in scholarly publishing.
Download the audio file. (8:33 minutes)
Posted October 30, 2007
In “Making a Difference: Pushing Back on DRM at MIT,” Anna Gold, Head of the Engineering and Science Libraries, tells the story of MIT’s rejection of Digital Rights Management technology when it was being imposed by a scholarly society for use of its technical papers here at MIT.
Download the audio file. (8:18 minutes, 7.7 Mb)
Posted September 18, 2007
In “Transforming Scientific Communication,” Steve Gass, Head of Public Services, describes some problems with the existing model for scholarly publishing and offers his vision of positive changes that could be made.
Download the audio file. (6:27 minutes, 6 Mb)
Posted September 18, 2007
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Online Videos and Tutorials:
Publishing Smart
Geared for graduate students, addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements are discussed. (51:41 minutes)
An MIT Libraries’ tutorial “Scholarly Publication and Copyright: Retaining Rights & Increasing the Impact of Research” is available online.
Download part 1 (5:38 minutes)
Download Part 2 (9:47 minutes)
Download Part 3 (8:55 minutes)
Together, these three parts are intended to explain how copyright relates to publication agreements for research articles, and how authors can increase the impact of their work by negotiating to retain rights to post their articles on the web or reuse them in other ways.