#OABooks and the Guide to Creative Commons for Humanities and Social Science Authors

[Another belated post… trying to catch up…]

On the 1 and 2 July 2013, JISC Collections, and the OAPEN Foundation, held the Open Access Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences conference (#OAbooks). It was hosted at the British Library conference centre and was attended by over 250 international delegates from from all areas of scholarly communications.

If you click on the link you’ll find slides and videos from the main presentations.

The conference saw the launch of the Guide to Creative Commons for Humanities and Social Science Monograph Authors (2013) developed by the OAPEN-UK team: Ellen Collins, Caren Milloy and Graham Stone.

James Baker, Martin Paul Eve and I had the opportunity to work as editors of the guide. The editing process was a real joy as we followed open collaboration practices; we worked on a shared Google Document and held discussions in real time on the document itself, and as inserted comments and via email.

We worked with representatives of the publishing and legal sectors, and with experts from Creative Commons UK. Different opinions were considered and disagreements were solved in a professional manner, and in the end we showed online, open, horizontal, collaborative methods can have satisfactory results.

The Guide was distributed on print at the conferece in every delegate pack, and is also available to read online or to download as a PDF. Needless to say, the Guide is licensed with a Creative Commons- Attribution license.

I had the pleasure to give a brief introduction to the Guide on the second day of the conference, within the first strand, titled “How exactly do you get your monograph published in open access?”

For my presentation I showed the ISSUU version embedded on the JISC site for the Guide, here, contextualising the rationale for the Guide and its contents, giving the audience a personal ‘guided tour’ of the document, section by section.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, particularly the keynotes by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (view video) (view presentation) and Cameron Neylon  (view video) (view presentation).