[KMDG-L] D-Lib Magazine Brief "UNESCO's Open Access Curricula for Young Researchers and Librarians"

[Apologies for cross-posting]

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 schools³. 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 curriculum¹. 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 curricula².

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 website³.

References:

1. CEMCA (2013). International Multi-stakeholder Meeting on Development of Curriculum and Self-Directed Learning Tools for Open Access.

2. Das, AK (2013). Situation Analysis and Capacity Building Needs for Open Access. New Delhi: Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia.

3. UNESCO (2014). UNESCO Launches Open Access Curricula for Researchers and Librarians.