All posts by Wendy W Fok

Open Access – Team Update

Midterm review/ What we did
The midterm review was productive in introducing various topics of discussions for our team to move forward with the Open Access project. Through the suggestions of the various groups, the Open Access team is working on the DASH opinions from various Harvard departments, and analyzing the data we are receiving to move forward on a method to best attack the next steps of instating the Open Access project.

What went well
Our team learnt that a possible solution on getting faculty members with published materials to participate within the program is to communicate with their assistants, and work with an online system that enables faculty members to submit their published papers through a departmental electronic system. A similar system is being used at the Berkman Center for fellows and scholars, whereby it is required before an article is submitted for review, that there is an online check-box system for scholars to tick off, and agree to their rights of file to be reviewed and submitted to the DASH system.

Another suggestion was to contact and develop relationships with publishing houses, who would like to cooperate with the DASH system and move forward with donating their published papers within the DASH system. Whereby the open access team could monitor and bring access to the Harvard University community.

What was challenging
The challenge that we foresee is for a 80% or more implementation rate of open access throughout the University level. As most publishing houses would like for their publications to be in closed rights. We are also foreseeing difficulties with faculty members remembering to submit their papers to the DASH system, and/or ensuring their participation within the check-box system.

What’s up next
Several members of the open access team are still in the stage of survey within their respective departments, and will be offering other suggestions and comments soon after they receive more feedback.

Updated: 4 November 2014 – Wendy W Fok

Open Access – Team Update

Our team was very excited to have participated at the Mid-Term Reviews. Presented by our Team Lead, Wendy W Fok, our Open Access team received many helpful feedback and responses from Prof Chris Bavitz, Prof Jim Waldo, and Prof Urs Grasser.

Most importantly, we would like to announce an exciting approval of the Open Access Policy by Berkman Center:

The Berkman Center announces Open Access Policy
With this policy, approved on October 9, 2014, the Berkman Center’s faculty directors and staff join the action of the nine School faculties: granting the University nonexclusive rights on all new scholarly work relating to the purview of research at the Berkman Center. The policy ensures that the “fruits of [Berkman’s] research and scholarship” will be distributed as widely as possible. (Click here for Read More)

Updated on 29 October, 2014 – Wendy W Fok

Open Access – Team Update

This week our team at Open Access has been productively researching and moving forward with the survey, which asks faculty members questions about how they currently submit research and what they know about DASH. It sounds like goals for our next meeting are a) to take the paper survey and transform it into a digital one and b) for each of us to pass the digital version along to faculty we know and gather some data that will inform our suggestions around nudges to encourage DASH use.

Updated: 21 October 2014 – Wendy W Fok

Open Access – Team Update

During last week’s meeting, the Open Access Team’s discussions circled around the implicit and explicit ways as efforts of gathering Open Access Data. The entire team is looking at ways to contact student groups, student governments so forward the cause, and leveraging word-of-mouth discussions to get the knowledge of how important contributing to the Open Access DASH would assist in the future development of a sharing economy.

Loren and Alexandra pulled together a survey over the past week (DASH Survey). They would love to get your thoughts on a) whether we, as a group, find a survey for faculty useful and b) any changes to the format / questions. The results will assist on the development of the next steps of the Open Access group.

Additionally, Alexandra touched based with two HBS professors and one HKS professor, while Wendy also tried to reach out to the Dean of the GSD and the Communications department at the GSD, on expanding on the deposit.

The entire team is working on deliverables and next steps for the project, and developing strategies on moving forward.

Updated: 16 October 2014 – Wendy W Fok

Open Access – Team Update

DPSI – Open Access Team Update:

This week at the Open Access Team, we have been playing catch-up with the rest of the team members and mentors, while organizing the structure of the team.

Our team is commencing on adapting to the three DPSI means of communication for the project, through the DPSI blog, a Google Drive folder, and a Trello instance. The team has also been communicating and updating each other on the progress through email.

Loren Newman (HKS) is getting up to speed on the current situation and evaluating current submission frameworks while thinking about creative solutions.

Alexandra Nicholson (HBS) is starting to pull together a list of schools at the university, divide them among the team, and then have each member gather information on the current article submission process for their set of schools. It sounds like the processes are pretty unique for each school, but it would be great to understand if there are similarities between them that we could leverage in building our set of solutions.

While, Wendy W Fok (GSD), has is working on communicating with the Graduate School of Design’s communications department to suggest and gain more insight on the possibility of implementing the attack method determined by the team last week.

Updated: 1 October 2014 – Wendy W Fok

DPSI – Open Access Project

Project Introduction:
Open access : Even though Harvard’s open-access policies are widely supported by the community, implementation depends on the cooperation of authors who tend to be overstretched and preoccupied. This team will work towards designing a system of defaults, which ‘nudge’ and encourage faculty to deposit their new scholarly articles in DASH, Harvard’s open-access repository.

Mentors:
Peter Suber / Colin Lukens (Office of Scholarly Communication)

Team Members:
Wendy W Fok (Team Leader) – Harvard Graduate School of Design
Loren D Newman – Harvard Kennedy School
Alexandra M Nicholson – Harvard Business School
Kojin Oshiba – Harvard College

What we worked on
Our team discussed the potentials of social engineering of enabling the entire Harvard University community (Faculty and scholars) to be more proactive into implementing open access policy.

What went well
Our team actively promotes academic freedom and the digital access of scholarly publications within Harvard, and thus would like to seek behavioral encouragement on increasing the deposit range of 10 – 20% (current) rate, to potentially reaching an 80% deposit rate of scholarly publications into the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) system.

What was challenging
The current Open Access system at the University level does not have a reminder, or automated system, to allow faculty and scholars to deposit their works into DASH, upon the publication of their works. Therefore, it has been a difficult task to aggregate the materials from the entire University community. The potentials are to implement various time saving devices and options for faculty and scholars to approach the Open Access more easily.

What’s up next
Various participants of the team members will brainstorm of potential opportunities to encourage and “nudge” their respective Schools, and engage on a larger plan on how to further the potentials of implementing a streamlined Open Access system — whether it be a socially engineered, application based, analogue, and/or coded system.

Updated: 24 September, 2014 – Wendy W Fok