Open Research

Al tema di Rebel Matters si lega una più generale riflessione sulla dimensione trasversale e aperta della ricerca, che,
in particolar modo negli anni delle avanguardie radicali, trova un terreno assai fertile. La presenza di una cultura umanistica ribelle si rintraccia nella cultura attuale e viene vista come
una possibilità di svolta dalla crisi contemporanea.

As a growing number of companies reject intellectual property (IP) monopoly-based business models to embrace libre product development of free and open source hardware and software, there is an urgent need to refurbish the instruments of university-corporate research partnerships. These partnerships generally use a proprietary standard research agreement (PSRA), which for historical reasons contains significant IP monopoly language and restrictions for both the company and the university. Such standard research agreements thus create an artificial barrier to innovation as both companies using a libre model and universities they wish to collaborate with must invest significantly to restructure the contracts. To solve this problem, this article provides a new Sponsored Libre Research Agreement (SLRA). The differences between the agreements are detailed. The advantages of using an SLRA are provided for any type of company and include: (1) minimizing research investments on reporting requirements; (2) reducing delays related to confidentiality and publication embargos; and (3) reducing both transaction and legal costs as well as research time losses associated with IP. Moving to libre agreements both speeds up and reduces costs for setting up collaborative research. Under the SLRA, university researchers can spend more time innovating for the same investment.

The overall objective of this report is to support collaboration between humanities researchers (literary and cultural studies, history, arts) on the one hand, and cultural heritage institutions on the other, by raising awareness about the possibilities for reusing heritage resources in academic settings and increasing the visibility of online heritage collections. This publication aims to provide both cultural heritage institutions and researchers with know-how, examples of good practice which will enable and strengthen collaboration between both sides, and enable a greater circulation and reuse of heritage resources within the academic field.

This document was prepared during a hands-on workshop for representatives of the European academic community and heritage professionals who are working to share their collections online in order to promote digital methods and the academic reuse of heritage content. We engaged humanities researchers who expressed an interest in exploring digitised cultural resources, and heritage professionals who create internal institutional policies for providing access and sharing resources online. The workshop took place at the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (Poland) on 19–20 June 2018. Invited experts included Natalie Harrower (Digital Repository of Ireland), Mark Sweetnam (Trinity College Dublin), David Brown (Trinity College Dublin), and Marcin Werla (Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center). Twelve participants from various European countries were recruited through an open call for contributors (they are listed as co-authors of this document). The workshop participants explored the main problems associated with heritage reuse in the context of their expertise and later translated those discussions into this document through a ‘book-sprint,’ which was facilitated by Kamil Śliwowski. The workshop and the preparation of the guidelines were funded by a DARIAH Theme 2017 grant, which was awarded for the project ‘Facilitating Cooperation Between Humanities Researchers and Cultural Heritage Institutions,’ jointly proposed by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, and Creative Commons Polska.

This website gathers a montage of the archival sources gathered during my PhD, some four years worth of research, about a thousand five hundred items and counting, some one, others hundreds of pages long, from twenty-six archives and research libraries. The sources trace amongst other things, the migrants and labourers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving along the intersections of the Spanish, British and French empires and through numerous societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Liberia, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century.

My PhD, "Touts and Despots: Recruiting Assemblages of Contract Labour in Fernando Pó and the Gulf of Guinea, 1858-1979" (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016) is available not only open-access but also open source. All the footnotes contain hyperlinks to the complete and "original" sources here (the sources are either transcribed, licensed for reproduction or are shared on a 'request access' via hyperlink). This is what is arranged here, the heterogeneous sources cited along all the footnotes of my entire PhD thesis and the sources that are, in turn, an internal reference to those that are cited – whatever I could get my hands on or happened to choose. It's mostly bureaucratic debris, selectively selected from dispersed state-run archives; excisions from longer correspondences, samples of serial court files and bureaucratic logging systems, dozens of military dispatches, batches of statistics, bits of the kaleidoscope of colonial laws, old passports, etc. But also the sources that seem to be the most worthwhile to share are the unique and inimitable ones, the handwritten testimony, an astounding letter, an explosive meeting or courtroom, a verbose and delicate petition, those documents located under “miscellaneous papers” uncategorized at the end of an administrative sequence, appendices, the serendipitous, confiscated pamphlets, a particularly brutal dispatch, the private notes of an unusual administrator, attempts at a village history by a missionary, a covert operation, a visiting scientific expedition, etc.

This essay argues there may be more value in thinking and ‘working through’ our scholarship online, in an 'open' environment that promotes and invites democratic, catholic, and convivial support, as well as the accidental tourist and silent voyuer, than there is in the traditional ‘finished product’ of a journal article or book. It pleads, further, for a better awareness of the fact that intellectual property is always co-extensive and communal.

The Delhi Declaration on Open Access, pronounced on 14th February 2018, becomes another instance of solidarity of the researchers in Global South in making open access (OA) to scholarly literature a popular choice in the dissemination of the scientific research. The Open Access India (OAI), an open access advocacy group, was the main architect behind this Declaration. The Declaration had over 120 signatories from India and other countries in the Global South within first two weeks of its pronouncement.  This declaration is supported by the Knowledge Societies Division of UNESCO; IFLA RSCAO; Forum for Open Access in SAARC, etc. The signatories are not limited to the information professionals, journal editors, and research funders, but also the committed academic researchers who use and promote open access resources. The Declaration also marked the sixteenth anniversary of Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which is considered as the starting point in the shaping of the global open access movement. On the 15th anniversary of BOAI, the AgriXiv, a preprint self-archiving portal for agriculture and allied sciences was launched as an Open Access India’s community initiative.

The overall objective of this report is to support collaboration between humanities researchers (literary and cultural studies, history, arts) on the one hand, and cultural heritage institutions on the other, by raising awareness about the possibilities for reusing heritage resources in academic settings and increasing the visibility of online heritage collections. This publication aims to provide both cultural heritage institutions and researchers with know-how, examples of good practice which will enable and strengthen collaboration between both sides, and enable a greater circulation and reuse of heritage resources within the academic field. This document was prepared during a hands-on workshop for representatives of the European academic community and heritage professionals who are working to share their collections online in order to promote digital methods and the academic reuse of heritage content. We engaged humanities researchers who expressed an interest in exploring digit...

It is important to ensure and extend that education has modern, rational, scientific and democratic attributes at every level. An education programme has been developed in order to support personal, social and academic development of teachers and students in high schools. The programme had been carried out in Ümraniye and Gaziosmanpaşa districts of Istanbul by the Ministry of Education during 2011-2012 education term. The programme consists of series of education, seminar, workshop, culture and art activities for supporting personal, social and academic development of teachers. This study reveals if the programme caused any change on teachers. The aim of the study is to measure the effectiveness of the programme that has been carried on the teachers of two different districts and to assess the social, emotional and intellectual changes in teachers caused by the programme. According to the results of the study, emotional intelligence of teachers increased from 47% to 56% in Ümraniye and from 50% to 54% in Gaziosmanpaşa and leadership skills increased from 53% to 57% in Ümraniye and from 53% to 54% in Gaziosmanpaşa.

This paper describes the authors’ journeys from traditionally closed to open research. Using a narrative approach, the authors draw on their recent research experience to explore the influences on this shift and how it aligns with their increasing work in emergent learning. The shift has itself been an emergent process. Changes in both open research and open learning are based on ‘social software’, which changes the relationship between public and private space, and formal and informal forms of speech and writing. This creates a new hybrid, or ‘mashup’ between open research and open learning, which goes beyond ‘open scholarship’.

Cloud computing is a trend phenomenon in the online education world. It might advance learning and teaching techniques and methods with a creative collaborative virtual environment. It is a state of art internet technology that offers the user the availability of resources and services in a non spatio-temporal dependency which provides an access to large storage space and wide selection of services (Social Media, Email, Web Apps, Office suite…). Cloud computing has a prodigious potential for creating large accessible, flexible and interoperable networked environment that grants remarkable added value features to the Electronic Education (E-ducation). The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a semi-autonomous networked learning environment, distributed on the cloud, in which open resources were produced and shared by participants worldwide. This technology was the latest innovation in the last few years. Different platforms were developed by several non-profit providers (edX, Courser...

Cloud computing is a trend phenomenon in the online education world. It might advance learning and teaching techniques and methods with a creative collaborative virtual environment. It is a state of art internet technology that offers the user the availability of resources and services in a non spatio-temporal dependency which provides an access to large storage space and wide selection of services (Social Media, Email, Web Apps, Office suite…). Cloud computing has a prodigious potential for creating large accessible, flexible and interoperable networked environment that grants remarkable added value features to the Electronic Education (E-ducation). The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a semi-autonomous networked learning environment, distributed on the cloud, in which open resources were produced and shared by participants worldwide. This technology was the latest innovation in the last few years. Different platforms were developed by several non-profit providers (edX, Courser...

In this presentation, we will discuss findings from a series of online keyword searches carried out on UK university websites in 2015-2016. Using the most recently published Guardian University League Table (2014), searches were made on the websites of the top 10 and bottom 10 UK universities for the following keywords: “OER”, “Open Access”, “Open Content”, “MOOCs”, “Open Data” and “ Open Research” in order to find out whether there were any obvious institutional differences of awareness and promotion of these aspects of openness in higher education and research.

Judging by the evidence of the 20 university websites surveyed, by far the biggest impact of openness in the UK HE sector has been Open Access, showing the importance of government agencies in promoting accessible research (Mulder, 2009; Finch Group, 2012). However, the evidence also suggests that the impact of OER, and more recently, MOOCs, on UK HE institutions is a great deal less than it really should be. Indeed searches for “MOOCs” returned some amusing results at two London universities (“Your search didn’t return any results. Please try again. Did you mean: books?”), and (“No results found. Did you mean moots?”). Of the 20 universities whose websites we examined, Imperial College London was the only one which publicly promotes MOOCs run by other universities as a form of supplementary learning for their own students. Somebody at Imperial has clearly spotted the potential of MOOCs to encourage undergraduates to keep studying during the Long Vacation, a period in which the gains of the previous academic year can well be lost, as it promotes “5 great MOOCs for the summer”. One of the bottom 10 universities, London Metropolitan, also recommends MOOCs in one of its postgraduate research handbooks. It takes a rather more pragmatic view than Imperial College and urges researchers to take MOOCs “while they are still free”.

There is, however, sufficient optimism in the evidence so far to suggest that openness is here to stay, and that the impact on HE in the UK will gather momentum as more and more institutions realise the strategic advantage of openness in providing high-quality OERs and MOOCs to attract students and funding. The online searches also revealed that there are many dedicated individuals in some of the less OER-aware universities at both the top and bottom end of the Guardian University League table: faculty members, PhD candidates and other researchers, and technology specialists; all of whom are either deeply involved with OER or, at the very least, publicly profess an interest in OER in their web profiles.

As Smith and Casserly (2006) point out, “It takes a hardy and callous soul to reject the United Nations’ goal of education for all. We argue that one important step toward this goal is to provide high-quality digitized, free educational materials to everyone in the world.” Nevertheless, the results from this study show that there are clearly some hardy and callous souls in UK universities, some souls who are indifferent, and also, one suspects, a large number of lost souls, potential beneficiaries of OER who are currently unaware that it exists. Against this background, however, some large and many small-scale projects involving OER are in various stages of implementation across the UK’s HE sector and are in the process of being expanded.

La tendencia hacía la participación ciudadana en los procesos de investigación científica ha llegado para quedarse. La involucración de personas y colectivos vinculados a las temáticas de estudio permite el acceso a información privilegiada a nuevas fuentes primarias; puede llegar incluso a modificar los objetivos y la metodología de un proyecto, marcando el rumbo en el desarrollo de las actividades. Estos factores se incrementan cuando hablamos de proyectos en ciencias humanas y se potencian todavía más a través del uso de las tecnológicas digitales, plataformas web, aplicaciones y redes sociales, que recortan las distancias y amplían las herramientas a disposición del investigador.

Open science is understood as one of the manifestations of the movement of free access to information, which has been gaining acceptance in the scientific community. It is a consequence of the development of the Internet and its mask from the beginnings of the 21st century and the powerful attractiveness of access to data and information that result from academic research. One more step towards the socialization of science. This article outlines the modalities and open access routes to information. Also, describe the payment system for the publication developed by commercial publishers.

PhD in Neuroscience, I've lead several research projects in neuroscience in great world-class laboratories. I've been also teaching in universities  for ten years.
Co-founder of the NGO "Collectif PAPERA" (2008) to provide supports, information and advices to PhD students, PhDs and other casual workers in Higher Education and public research in France.
Throughout these two rich experiences, I've founded my company, Tree of Science, which provides consulting, training, and coaching in digital research tools (science 2,0 and collaborative works), digital strategy (networking, personal branding, online presence), professional and scientific social networks for all researchers (from PhD students, academic PhDs to R&D researchers).

WorkingWiki is a software extension for the popular MediaWiki platform that makes a wiki into a powerful environment for collaborating on publication-quality manuscripts and software projects. Developed in Jonathan Dushoff’s theoretical biology lab at McMaster University and available as free software, it allows wiki users to work together on anything that can be done by using UNIX commands to transform textual “source code” into output. Researchers can use it to collaborate on programs written in R, python, C, or any other language, and there are special features to support easy work on LaTeX documents. It develops the potential of the wiki medium to serve as a combination collaborative text editor, development environment, revision control system, and publishing platform. Its potential uses are open-ended — its processing is controlled by makefiles that are straightforward to customize — and its modular design is intended to allow parts of it to be adapted to other purposes.