[Open-access] Fwd: [EIFL-OA] D-Lib Magazine Brief "UNESCO's Open Access Curricula for Young Researchers and Librarians"

Tue Mar 17 12:28:26 UTC 2015

For anyone who has missed the announcement about the UNESCO OA Curriculum.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[EIFL-OA] D-Lib Magazine Brief "UNESCO's Open Access Curricula 
for Young Researchers and Librarians"
Date: 	Tue, 17 Mar 2015 10:43:27 +0200
From: 	Iryna Kuchma <iryna.kuchma at eifl.net>
To: 	marieke.guy at okfn.org
CC: 	EIFL - Open Access program announcement and discussion list 
<eifloa at lists.eifl.net>

UNESCOâ??s Open Access (OA) Curriculum for Researchers and Library 
Schools is now online
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/news-and-in-focus-articles/all-news/news/unescos_open_access_oa_curriculum_is_now_online#.VQfaeOFqJ3N

See below an overview of this Curriculum in D-Lib Magazine

*UNESCO's Open Access Curricula for Young Researchers and Librarians*

/by Anup Kumar Das/

/D-Lib Magazine/, Volume 21, Number 3/4, March/April 2015
Source: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html/
/

Open Access (OA) to scholarly knowledge has reached a great height in 
recent years, due to overwhelming supports from the scholarly 
communities and national funding agencies. However, there is constant 
need of capacity development of graduating and early-career researchers, 
who later will be engaged with OA contents as user, reviewer and 
creator. The research lifecycle has an important phase, i.e., 
dissemination of research findings, which now embraces OA channels in 
many countries. Many for-profit publishers are offering avenues of 
disseminating research papers through hybrid journals, i.e., publishing 
in both subscription-based and OA contents. Here an author may need to 
pay a publishing fee/article processing charge (APC) for publishing an 
OA article in a hybrid journal, while rest of the articles may not be 
accessible to researchers in non-subscriber institutions. Recently, 
collectively consensus has arrived with authors to resist transfer of 
copyright to publishers. Instead they wish to retain copyright and a 
Licence to Publish (LTP) agreement is given to publishers for publishing 
research papers. The SPARC Authors' Addendum is one such instrument to 
establish LTP agreements between authors and publishers, and for 
retaining copyright by the authors. Authors who retain copyright with 
themselves have much more flexible ways to disseminate their published 
works through their institutional repositories, subject repositories and 
academic social networks. On the other hand, Creative Commons (CC) 
licenses are commonly used in disseminating OA contents both in online 
and offline modes.

All these aspects are very new to graduating young scholars, 
particularly those who are based in developing countries or the Global 
South. They need to be made aware and sensitized of these developments 
in scholarly communications spheres and processes. With the arrival of 
OA journals and knowledge repositories, researchers have far more 
choices of disseminating their research findings and also getting 
immediate global attention or recognition. OA research, similar to other 
published research, can be measured through citation counts, 
article-level metrics or altmetrics. Young researchers also need to know 
about predatory OA journals and publishers, which try to enter into the 
OA ecosystem compromising quality of research.

With this situation, UNESCO in association with the Commonwealth 
Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) of the Commonwealth of 
Learning (COL), launched a set of open access curricula and 
self-directional learning (SDL) modules for researchers, librarians and 
library schools^3 <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das3> 
. The OA curricula is produced for two distinct target groups, namely, 
(I) Open Access for Researchers, and (II) Open Access for Library 
Schools. The researchers' curricula is an elaborative exploration of 
scholarly communication processes, concepts of openness and open access, 
intellectual property rights and research evaluation metrics, while the 
library schools' curricula has more insights on how library and 
information professionals would deal with advocating OA scholarly 
communications and managing OA resources in their institutions. The 
researchers' curricula consist of five modules whereas library schools' 
curricula consist of four modules.

The initial structure of OA Curricula was prepared jointly by the 
project director and UNESCO experts. An international multi-stakeholder 
experts' meeting on development of curriculum and self-directed learning 
tools for OA was held on 4-6 September 2013 at New Delhi, where 23 
experts participated to finalize the curriculum^1 
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das1> . Two 
supplementary online consultations were also held to substantiate the 
expert meeting, which helped UNESCO to outline the content for each of 
the curriculum and provided a framework to develop modules. The OA 
Curricula was prepared as an outcome of the project titled /Development 
of Curriculum and Self-Directed Learning Tools for Open Access/, led by 
Dr. Sanjaya Mishra of COL as project director. Another research outcome 
of this project was a report titled /Situation Analysis and Capacity 
Building Needs for Open Access/, which influenced the preliminary 
structure of OA curricula^2 
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das2> .

Presently available in print format, UNESCO is planning to make these OA 
Curricula and SDL Modules available online with a CC license 
downloadable from the UNESCO website^3 
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das3> .

*References: *

1. CEMCA (2013). /International Multi-stakeholder Meeting on Development 
of Curriculum and Self-Directed Learning Tools for Open Access 
<http://open.cemca.org.in/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1>/.

2. Das, AK (2013). /Situation Analysis and Capacity Building Needs for 
Open Access 
<http://cemca.org.in/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Anup_CEMCA_Report_Final_combined.pdf>/. 
New Delhi: Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia.

3. UNESCO (2014). /UNESCO Launches Open Access Curricula for Researchers 
and Librarians 
<http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/news-and-in-focus-articles/all-news/news/unesco_launches_open_access_curricula_for_researchers_and_librarians/#.VP86tinbkh0>/.

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