[GOAL] Open Letter(s) on Open Access project plan released as a Working Paper.

[John G. Dove]

Dear Advocates for Open Access,


Any of you that I've met at a conference these past three years may have
had the experience of my chewing your ear off about the idea of using articles
cited in newly published works as a way to systematically message authors
of the cited articles about how they could better share their works [aka
'green path'].  A comment from Erin McKean on my first blog post on this
topic back in June of 2015 proposed the creation of a public list of the
most-cited articles in Wikipedia that could have been shared (as evidenced
in sherpa/romeo) but had not been---the idea was to shine a public-light to
an audience of authors about effective sharing of their scholarly works.

Earlier this summer a PhD student from University of Chicago, Ingrid
Becker, approached me and Sam Klein (of Wikipedia fame, associate of the
Berkman Klein Center on the Internet and Society at Harvard, and a
co-founder of Pattern Labs) to see if we would be willing to advise her on
a project that we ended up calling "Open Letter(s) on Open Access".  The
idea was to take this suggestion about 'most-cited sources in Wikipedia'
and generalize it to "any list of sources that for some audience of
academics a strong sentiment might exist that these sources ought to be
openly accessible to the world."   Ingrid obtained a "Graduate Global
Impact" grant to be the project lead on this project.  And it fit the
mission of Pattern Labs which is to support projects which can quickly
become a model that an expanding group of people could implement in order
to accelerate some important social change.

Ingrid shared our project plan yesterday on ScholComm.  Soon she will share
some "working draft" versions of a couple of the Open Letters.  We are
eager to receive feedback and suggestions, as well as indications that
others could see doing similar types of communications.  We found the
process of coming up with a good half-dozen potential examples of lists to
analyze was really easy. We hope this means that others will be easily able
to pick different, even better examples of lists to provide commentary on.
We developed a process for doing the analysis which we are sure can be
improved--but it allowed us to quickly complete the first phase of this
project without undertaking any particular technical risks.

Particularly helpful to us was working out how the Open Access Button could
provide us with a way to communicate with authors of articles whose sharing
choices we are commenting on in our Open Letters. This greatly simplified a
whole number of issues we'd otherwise have to have designed for ourselves
and lived up to a principle we wanted to follow--to make a reasonable
effort to reach out to authors personally before we comment on their
sharing strategies publicly.

Our aim in this project is, of course, that communications to academics
about their sharing choices is increased significantly in quantity and
effectiveness.

To comment on this project, please look at the project plan linked to in
Ingrid Becker's message below and add your comments there.

Sincerely,

John Dove

_________________
John G. Dove, personal e-mail
JohnGDove at gmail.com

PS: Want to see what I call an "Open Web Smart-Link"? Check out my article
in *Learned Publishing:* "Full Discovery: What is the publisher's role?".
Since it was one of the dozen most-downloaded articles in *Learned
Publishing*, Wiley provided me with a link to a version that can be read
without hitting the usual paywall: http://rdcu.be/QFCO.


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ingrid Becker <scholcomm at lists.ala.org>
Date: Wed, Oct 3, 2018 at 4:04 PM
Subject: [SCHOLCOMM] Grad Student Project - Open Letter(s) on Open Access
To: <scholcomm at lists.ala.org>


Dear All,


I’m a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of
Chicago. I’m writing to share the first fruits of a summer project, for
which I received funding from a UChicago Graduate Global Impact grant. “Open
Letter(s) on Open Access,” conceived in tandem with OA Advocate John Dove
and Pattern Labs co-founder Sam Klein, aims to raise awareness about Open
Access among academics and encourage authors to take advantage of the
sustainable OA channels available to them.


As the gesture towards the plural in the project title indicates, our work
is designed as a pilot that lays out processes for similar research and
outreach that we invite interested people to adopt, adapt, appropriate, and
re-apply. In a similar spirit of continual improvement, we hope to obtain
as much feedback as possible from scholarly communications experts on what
we’ve done so far.


We invite you to take a look at a copy of our project plan--available here
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1unWpSj2ZqBbbGzgOT3ELu26hqDypKtcp_bh_slqfCQA/edit?usp=sharing>--in
the case that it’s useful for any of your own initiatives. And if you want
to offer any kind of comments, inputs, and insights, we’d appreciate it!
Just as the complex digital world of scholarship, publication, and
distribution is constantly shifting, this plan is always in-progress.


Finally, we’ll soon be releasing our first letter on Alzheimer’s research
and taking funded OA to the next level. Keep an eye out for #OALetters on
twitter to see more.


If you have any other inquiries, feel free to email myself and the project
team at oloa at googlegroups.com.


Thanks & Best,


Ingrid


-- 
Ingrid Becker
Doctoral Candidate
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
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