Course Chairs: Nicky Agate, PhD, Assistant Director of Scholarly Communication and Projects, Columbia University Libraries
Instructor: Nicky Agate, PhD, Assistant Director of Scholarly Communication and Projects, Columbia University Libraries.
Erin Rose Glass, Digital Humanities Coordinator, UC San Diego Library will contribute to the course.
This course will serve as an introduction to the tenets, tools and techniques of open scholarly communication for humanists and social scientists. Covering the full scholarly communications life cycle in humanities and social sciences, the course will begin with a discussion of working in the open, from creating a professional identity to building openly available reading and reference lists, and from blogging early-stage work to offering up one’s work for open peer review.
There will be five half-day sessions combining discussion of readings, board-game playing (The Publishing Trap), in-class exercises, and hands-on interaction. Guest scholars and practitioners from across the scholarly communications ecosystem will help facilitate our work.
We will delve into disciplinary and other communities, and the various platforms that host them. We will cover Open Access (OA) venues and platforms for a wide variety of research outputs, including OA journals, new OA digital platforms from scholarly presses, different scholarly commons for research and teaching, and institutional and disciplinary repositories and preprint servers. We will get deep into the why and the how of working in the open: arguments for (and against); Creative Commons licensing and fair use; finding a publisher; negotiating open-author contracts; and getting started with open educational resources.
We will discuss newer forms of scholarly communication beyond the article and monograph: public & digital humanities work, podcasts, video, cartoons. We will learn about metrics and altmetrics, as well as other ways of gauging the interest in and impact of your work.