[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Perry: Welcome to the University of Washington Libraries Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion podcast. This podcast is a companion piece to the Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program, or DSSI and is meant to give you a greater insight into the world of digital scholarship at the UW Libraries. In each episode, we interview a UW Libraries staff member whose work impacts or intersects with digital scholarship in some way. I’m Perry Yee, and I’m the Online Learning Support Manager for the UW Libraries.

Dovi: And I’m  Dovi Patiño, an Online Learning and Engagement Specialist for UW Libraries

Elliott: I’m Elliott Stevens, the English Studies Librarian and the Research Commons Librarian. And we are the teaching team for the DSSI Podcast Track. For the last three years, we have offered online digital storytelling workshops using video and podcasting formats. We thought this podcast would be a great way to introduce ourselves, introduce our colleagues, and give you an idea of the breadth of digital scholarship support at the Libraries. Our guest for today is: Liz Bedford. Liz is a Scholarly Publishing and Outreach Librarian and is from the Scholarly Communication and Publishing unit in the Libraries. Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz: Thanks so much for having me.

Elliott: So, Liz, we're going to start with some personal questions.

Liz: okay

Elliott: And our first one is, what is your favorite thing about the summer?

Liz: This is a tough one, but I think number one would have to be fruit, I adore fruit. And number two would have to be hiking because I try to do that every week.

Elliott: So maybe keeping fruit in mind, keeping hiking in mind, do you have any little stories to tell, specific stories, about a moment or a day or a trip?

Liz: I actually had rather an adventure the other weekend where I was driving to a particular hike that had a long and very bumpy road to the trail head, which always stresses me out because I'm not that relaxed a driver anyway. So we got to the trail head I was super stressed out and there were these insects that were probably flies, but they looked like wasps and that freaked me out. So it was just not a good situation in general. We had gone past the parking lot because it was full and I had to make a three-point turn to turn around and go back to it, so my husband got out of the car to direct me because it was one of those like super steep side banks kinds of things. I rolled down the window, so that I could actually hear what he was telling me to do and of course all of these flies started coming in and I just freaked out. In my defense, I did turn off the car, but I did not turn on the parking break or put it in park. And as soon as I got out, it just backed all the way off the road into the ditch, which was yeah, it was horrible. However, at that moment, there was a boy scout troop coming down and got to the trailhead after their weekend camping trip and the troop leader happened to have an enormous tow truck or a truck with a tow rig and was like a part-time mechanic, so they just went and towed us out of the side of the road and it was amazing. Probably one of the potentially worst situations I've ever been in and it was all fine.

[Elliott laughing]

Elliott: So by the time you got to the end of it, it was like, nothing bad had even happened.

Liz: I mean the adrenaline was certainly still there, but it was great that we could actually go on the hike and work it out, but yeah. We were so so lucky.

Elliott: That was a very specific story, that was fantastic [Elliott laughing]. So now we're going to move from personal stories about the summer and insect attacks to "what in the world do you do at the UW Libraries?" and "how would you describe your job?"

Liz: So, my overall job as I see it is to help researchers make their work um whether it be publications or data or new forms of research, make it as open as possible, in as responsible a way as possible. So helping them find venues to do that, helping them think through the copyright issues that surround that. I do that specifically with our electronic thesis and dissertation program, but that's kind of the foundation of what I'm trying to do for people.

Perry: And how does that all relate to digital scholarship?

Liz: It's interesting because digital scholarship is this new way of thinking about what the academic conversation actually looks like. Thinking about, one of the wonderful things in my opinion is that it's sort of by default openly available, that's the whole point of much of this. One of the biggest issues in traditional academic publishing is that it's usually subscription based, which means that the vast majority of the planet doesn't have access to that work. Helping folks think through ways in particular that they can make sure that not only is their digital scholarship open, but thinking about how to for example to put licenses on it to make sure that other people can re-use it if they want or making sure that the materials that they're using, if they're created by other people, that they are doing that in an appropriate way.

Perry: Why is it important to work openly, as a scholar, or why is it important to think through the licensing when you're thinking about publishing, from a scholarly or research perspective?

Liz: Well, so, in the United States, our copyright laws give the creator of whatever it is, the unique piece of intellectual content, the automatic, exclusive right to do a bunch of things. Things like copying, which is why it's called copyright, but also distributing the work, displaying the work, making derivatives of the work, and all of those are part of the publishing process. Some of those are essentially the definition of what the publishing process is, and so in order for a creator to have another person distribute it for them, you need to have some sort of legal mechanism in order for that other person to get that right. Now, that contract between the original creator and the person who is going to be doing the distribution, it can go a number of different ways and especially in the traditional academic journal world, the things have been set up such that publishers take substantially more of the rights than I think the creators even realize, which puts people in a terrible position, where if you've signed one of these contracts, it's called a "transfer of copyright." If you've transferred your copyright, you legally don't have the right to put a PDF of it on your website, or even email it to your friends, under U.S. law. I mean it's so fantastical to even think about that, that people don't, it's ridiculous that this is the state of most academic publishing. So making sure you understand the contracts you sign with distributors is crucial to any of this. But then the second piece of it is that we know that scholarship is really conversation. You want people to be taking your work and building on it and helping to move the conversation forward and again, according to copyright, creating a derivative work is one of the specific things that only the content creator has. So if you want people to be able to reuse your work, you need to have some sort of mechanism for allowing them to legally do that and that's either by responding individually to everybody's email saying "hey I want to do this" which would get super annoying after a while or there are tools that you can use and a particular set of licenses called Creative Commons licenses that will let you essentially tell the world how you want them to use your work. So, facilitating the re-use of your work in ways that are substantially faster and that really allow the scholarship to have substantially more impact as well.

Perry: And where do the UW Libraries fit into all of this.

Liz: We cannot provide legal advice, but we really enjoy helping people walk through the documents that they're signing, think through the questions that they need to ask themselves about how they want the material to be used and just helping people get a better grasp of what is the language of what does it mean and what are the practical implications of using these kinds of contracts or Creative Commons Licenses, so that's one major thing that we can help people out with.

Perry: So a lot of the folks in this Podcast Track are thinking in terms of instruction and teaching and their own individual research, so how can someone integrate maybe an open access publishing or potentially the Creative Commons licensing. How could they integrate that into their own teaching, to assignments they're creating, and to their classroom, or even into their research?

Liz: Yeah, I mean one of the really wonderful trends that we're seeing is the acknowledgment of students as creators themselves of intellectual output and not just consumers of academic work. And so, helping students understand their rights to the materials that they create is really important, especially if they want to share that with others. The flipside of this is also around, if you're reusing other people's work, the original creator of that work, at least at the beginning, had the copyright to that work and so in order to reuse that material, you need to make sure that you have the copyright holder's permission. The safest way of doing it is making sure you have the copyright holder's permission. So helping people understand that and to reuse, to incorporate other people's work in a thoughtful way, is very important. There's another whole aspect of this, where if you don't want to contact to, or if you can't contact the original creator, there's a concept called "Fair Use" that is a very detailed and very complex set of criteria by which, under U.S. law, it's okay to use copyrighted material outside of the original creators. That conversation can basically be it's entire own course (Liz laughs), but introducing that idea to students, that they are using third-party created materials, and incorporating them into their own work, is definitely something, at least starting that conversation, and being aware that there are different options that you can use third-party content, is something that I would definitely recommend that instructors try and incorporate.

Perry: So we kind of explored a few different topics, Open, Open Access, Creative Commons Licensing, Fair Use, so say someone is listening to this podcast right now and they're like "that sounds amazing, I want to learn more, I want to do more, I want to become engaged with this community," where can they go?

Liz: Well, you can start with LibGuides, which if you go to the University of Washington Guides, there's one on Open Access that will essentially be the starting point for the information on a whole bunch of ways. The Open Access community is really broad and engaged and it's interesting how that happens at both the individual level and sort of wider national level groups. So, there are a lot of folks who are interested in "reproducibility" on campus, the E-Science Institute, has a Reproducibility Working Group for example, and they do some really interesting things and have in the past months have had some really interesting presentation speakers. The SPARC Coalition, that's a national organization, that's doing a lot of work in these areas. Open Access Week is coming up in the Fall and you should look for programming around that at the Libraries, but there's also a lot of online activity with that. And yeah, the Twiiterverse, looking into people discussing Open Access or OA, there's always a tremendous amount of chatter and conversation around it there.

Perry: So as one of our resident experts in all these things, where do you turn to, to learn more?

Liz: Frankly, my colleagues, a lot. I'm very fortunate to be a part of the department that has folks that are specifically focused on a number of these current issues. There are some really interesting blogs that I follow. The London School of Economics actually has a fantastic blog that deals with scholarly communications stuff. Roger Schonnfield, who blogs at the Scholarly Kitchen, interesting publishing blog, and yeah, Twitter, listservs, that sort of stuff.

Dovi: A question that I have for you is, how do you personally think that digital scholarship will evolve at UW?

Liz: Oh man, I hope that it keeps expanding and keeps becoming, taking its rightful place, as an established method of creating research here. I know that especially in the promotion and tenure process, often times things don't get quite as much weight as they should in comparison with the more traditional forms of scholarship, but there are a lot of people on campus that are really trying to change that and really trying to fight for the value of this work. So yeah, more of that, and in particular, what I'm very much hoping that the Libraries can do is figure out how to provide more of the infrastructure that will support this kind of work, especially when we're talking about online platforms. And we're making slow, but steady progress there, but that's definitely one of my big goals.

Dovi: That's awesome, thank you. And before we start to wrap-up, do you have any advice or newbies, experts, anyone in between when it comes to scholarly communications?

Liz: Read your contracts, don't just sign things. That's the number one thing that I always tell people.

Dovi: That's great advice, not even just for...

Liz: Indeed, for anything.

Dovi: Yes. And so we're about to wrap-up, is there anything else you'd like to mention?

Liz: I'm so excited to be doing this next week and meeting everyone and it's a place where we're all coming together to create this workshop.

Dovi: Thanks, Liz!

[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Dovi: That’s all the time we have for today. Check the show notes for a link to the transcript for today’s recording. And subscribe to the DSSI Podcast on iTunes and Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts Music for this episode is provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Their song, Peacoat, served as our intro and outro music. Check them out at www.sessions.blue for recordings that are Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial work. Thanks again to Liz for chatting with us. And a big thanks to you for listening to the DSSI Podcast. Catch you on the next episode.