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 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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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.