We are excited for Open Access Week 2024!

This year our OA Week planning team included Libraries staff from Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers College.

October 21–27, 2024

International Open Access Week 2024 will continue the call to put “Community over Commercialization” and prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.

Events from OCEAN

Open Copyright Education Advisory Network

• Author and Artist Contracts: AI and Licensing Terms
  • Friday, October 18, 2024 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
  • Register here
• Will AI replace me?
  • Friday, October 25, 2024 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
  • Register here

Event Descriptions

Managing risk: Protect your work & yourself in an OA landscape

For those who must “publish or perish,” risk calculation and risk management are often lesser-discussed concerns within the context of scholarly publishing. However, every author or creator is vulnerable to the theft of their work, and those working in controversial subject areas or expressing polarizing professional opinions may also need to take additional precautions to protect their personal privacy and safety. 

This presentation outlines critical decision-points for academics concerned with managing their risk. It will address strategies authors can use to select a mode of publication and publisher, respond to plagiarism, and protect themselves from doxxing. This presentation is appropriate for researchers at any level who are publishing or otherwise sharing their work publicly.

What is the place of open knowledge communities in the development and use of AI?

Panelists: Matthew Gold (Grad Center, CUNY), Andrew Lih (Wikimedia Foundation), Filipa Calado (Pratt School of Information)

Moderator: Benjamin Zweig (Columbia University Libraries)

There is an inherent contradiction in the name of one of the world’s largest AI companies: OpenAI. OpenAI is neither “open” in its business practices nor in the way it uses open access data to train its models. But it is no secret that closed models are built upon open knowledge.

This panel explores the critical and evolving relationship between open access and open knowledge as it pertains to AI/LLMs. The panel will discuss the many possible costs – financially, communally, scholarly – of outsourcing open knowledge for profit. For example, are open knowledge communities, such as the Wikimedia community, being forced to rethink their contributions or the terms of their work? How can the open knowledge community and critical practitioners, from faculty to students, challenge what the author James Bridle calls in New Dark Age the danger of “automation bias” in the use of LLMs?

Community & the Commons: The ethics of crowd-sourced data reuse

This Open Access Week event centers on the ethics of reuse of community-based labor, including for AI projects and products. Madiha Zahrah Choksi (Columbia University Libraries) takes a historical approach, and contextualizes LLMs as tools produced through community-based labor, and compares mainstream AI technologies to historical tools that have long performed similar functions. Zachary McDowell (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Matthew Vetter (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) explore the “re-alienation of the commons” and the labor dynamics within Wikimedia projects, including ethical implications and historical context of community-driven knowledge production.

Digitizing Vietnam Project: Increasing Access to Vietnam Studies Materials

Digitizing Vietnam (DV) is the first joint web platform project established under the Columbia University—Fulbright University Vietnam partnership. The DV web platform is a free and publicly accessible digital Vietnam Studies platform designed to serve as a well-integrated hub for digital humanities research. It aims to be an open-access digital humanities resource for communities.

In this presentation, we will cover several aspects of our project: the rationale behind it, the types of content we provide for open access online, a technical discussion regarding the project, and a brief overview of the collaboration among various universities and institutions involved in the Digitizing Vietnam initiative.

There will also be a Q&A session for those interested in learning more about the Digitizing Vietnam project.

Featuring:

Hoang Minh Vu, Ph.D. (Faculty member, History and Vietnam Studies, Fulbright University Vietnam); Phuong Tram Nguyen, Ph.D.  (Digital Curator, Digitizing Vietnam Project, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University); Van Le Nguyen Tuong, MA (Digital Humanities Librarian, Digitizing Vietnam Project, Vietnam Studies Center, Fulbright University Vietnam); Phuc Hoang Le, BA (Digital Architect, Digitizing Vietnam Project, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

Author and Artist Contracts: AI and Licensing Terms

OCEAN event

Join a compelling panel of experts that will examine the kinds of terms and conditions we’re seeing in licensing agreements that address various issues concerning AI, whether from artists and authors perspective or from institutional perspective.

Will AI replace me?

OCEAN event

Are you working on an AI project in your library, archive or museum?  Do your projects touch upon rights issues? Join our panelists to hear about their projects, their potential outcomes and whether AI has the authority and the power to actually replace those of us and what the rights issues may be in their development.

Image courtesy of armin-rimoldi