<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><p style="text-align:right">[Apologies for cross-posting]<b><a name="14c26362d15102ea_DAS"><br></a></b></p><p><font size="4"><b>UNESCO's Open Access Curricula for Young Researchers and Librarians</b></font></p>
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<i>by Anup Kumar Das</i></p><p><i>D-Lib Magazine</i>, Volume 21, Number 3/4, March/April 2015<br>Source: <a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html" target="_blank">http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html</a><i><br>
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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.
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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.
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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<sup><a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das3" target="_blank">3</a></sup>.
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.
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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<sup><a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das1" target="_blank">1</a></sup>.
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 <i>Development of Curriculum and Self-Directed Learning Tools for Open Access</i>, led by Dr. Sanjaya Mishra of COL as project director. Another research outcome of this project was a report titled <i>Situation Analysis and Capacity Building Needs for Open Access</i>, which influenced the preliminary structure of OA curricula<sup><a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das2" target="_blank">2</a></sup>.</p>
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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<sup><a href="http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march15/03inbrief.html#das3" target="_blank">3</a></sup>.
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<b>References:
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<a name="14c26362d15102ea_das1">1</a>. CEMCA (2013). <i><a href="http://open.cemca.org.in/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1" target="_blank">International Multi-stakeholder Meeting on Development of Curriculum and Self-Directed Learning Tools for Open Access</a></i>.</p>
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<a name="14c26362d15102ea_das2">2</a>. Das, AK (2013). <i><a href="http://cemca.org.in/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Anup_CEMCA_Report_Final_combined.pdf" target="_blank">Situation Analysis and Capacity Building Needs for Open Access</a></i>. New Delhi: Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia.
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<a name="14c26362d15102ea_das3">3</a>. UNESCO (2014). <i><a href="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" target="_blank">UNESCO Launches Open Access Curricula for Researchers and Librarians</a></i>.</p></div></div></div>