Open Access Week 2024: Final Report

Posted on by Esther Jackson

Prepared by Gary Hausman, Esther Jackson, and Melanie Wacker

Introduction

Open Access Week took place October 21–27, 2024 with the continuation of last year’s theme, “Community over Commercialization.” In alignment with the intent of International Open Access Week 2024 the Columbia Libraries events prioritized approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.

At Columbia Libraries, 199 people registered for our Open Access week events, with roughly 100 people attending. 

Organizing team

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

  • Taylor Baker
  • Amanda Bielskas
  • Katherine Brooks
  • Tatiana Bryant
  • Gary Hausman
  • Esther Jackson
  • Roshnara Kissoon
  • Kathryn Pope
  • Melanie Wacker 
  • Benjamin Zweig

With support from:

  • Anne Cong-Huyen
  • Ava Kaplan
  • Abigail Lovell
  • Matthew Haugen
  • Nicholas Wolven

Events

open knowledge communities poster
community and the commons poster
managing risk poster
digitizing vietnam poster

The organizing team facilitated four events including one workshop, two presentations, and one panel discussion. 

  • Managing risk: Protect your work & yourself in an OA landscape (more info)
    • Presenters: Kathryn Brooks, Esther Jackson, and Kathryn Pope
    • This workshop provided attendees with information about strategies authors can use to select a mode of publication and publisher, respond to plagiarism, and protect themselves from doxxing.
  • What is the place of open knowledge communities in the development and use of AI? (more info)
    • Panelists: Matthew Gold (Grad Center, CUNY), Andrew Lih (Wikimedia and Open Content Strategist), Filipa Calado (Pratt School of Information)
    • Moderator: Benjamin Zweig
    • This panel explored the critical and evolving relationship between open access and open knowledge as it pertains to AI/LLMs and discussed the many possible costs of outsourcing open knowledge for profit. 
  • Community & the Commons: The ethics of crowd-sourced data reuse (more info)
    • Organized by the CUL Wikidata Group – Announcements were shared beyond Columbia on listservs and Wikidata-focused social media sites
    • Presenters: Madiha Zahrah Choksi (Columbia University Libraries), Zachary McDowell (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Matthew Vetter (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
    • Introduction: Melanie Wacker; Q&A: Taylor Baker and Esther Jackson
    • A recent survey conducted by the CUL Wikidata Group surfaced concerns of Wikidata contributors regarding reuse of their freely provided data by commercial entities. Open Access Week afforded the perfect opportunity to host an event addressing this topic. The session consisted of two presentations. Zachary McDowell and Matthew Vetter discussed in their talk ““No Rights Reserved – Wikidata and the Re-alienation of the Commons: The Ethics of Crowd-sourced Data Reuse” the consequences of Wikidata’s CC Zero license, which opens the door for large-scale reuse without attribution and the danger of alienating the Wikidata community members. Madiha Zahrah Choksi took a more historical view in her presentation “Emerging Artifacts of Centralized Open Code” which she followed up by a case study of three different tools all using commons based data.
      The event concluded with a very thoughtful and interesting discussion involving many of the attendees.
  • Digitizing Vietnam Project: Increasing Access to Vietnam Studies Materials (more info)
    • Presenters: 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)
    • Moderator: Gary Hausman
    • Digitizing Vietnam is a framework for an inter institutional network of digital humanities research. The intention is to build a digital hub for Vietnam studies that brings together computer science professionals and academics pursuing digital humanities research to jointly develop digital data repositories with digital tools for analysis built around those repositories. The project is dedicated to Open Access, long term archival maintenance with proper attribution, and multiple institutional partners. Components include a digital workbench and repository, Vietnam for educators related pedagogical resources, and tools such as digital dictionaries, indices, exhibition halls, and fully searchable texts. Faculty involved in the project are from Columbia University and Fulbright University Vietnam, including John Phan, Vũ Minh Hoáng, Lien-Hang Nguyen, and Nguyẽn Nam. The project grant provides for three positions: a Columbia digital curator (Tram Phuong Nguyen), a CU-FU digital designer (Van Nguyen Tuong Le), and a Fulbright Digital Librarian (Phuc Hoang Le). Current partners include SEADL and Cornell University, the Institute for Han-Nom Studies, Vietnam National University, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Computational Linguistics Center at University of Science of VNU.

Promotion & Press

Future directions

This year was notable in that there was collaboration between many different parts of the Columbia Libraries system. It would be great to see that collaboration continue. 

Moving forward, we recommend that the Open Access Task Force act as an incubator for OA Week planning, appointing a subcommittee to organize and support events. This will allow for there to be better support for these events in future years.

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