Open knowledge at the UOC

The UOC Executive Board approved the Institutional Open Knowledge Policy. Its mission is to establish the institutional framework that will allow the members of the university community to openly share and transfer the knowledge they create as a result of their research, teaching, innovation and institutional administration activities.

On Wednesday, 27 October, from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (CEST), the UOC is organizing a seminar for University staff aimed at dispelling the myths surrounding open access publishing. It will cover issues such as: open access publishing is more expensive; it does not further your academic career; there's data theft, or we can't guarantee proper use of the data.

The Government of Catalonia's Ministry for Foreign Action and Open Government is organizing a series of Annual Open Government Events to explain to the general public how open government helps improve public policies and democratic quality. 

There will be a session involving the UOC on Tuesday 26 October at 4 p.m.: an internet discussion panel on how to leverage Catalan Government open data to promote better communication in real time on what was happening with the pandemic, providing education on its evolution and the decision-making process for both public bodies and individual citizens. 

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The UOC is issuing a call for volunteers to add their voices in Catalan and help create open knowledge for apps based on artificial intelligence and language technology, including voice assistants, machine translation systems and chatbots. 

This initiative forms part of the Common Voice open platform promoted by Softcatalà.

The UOC is taking part in this campaign with the open access book Decálogo para la mejora de la docencia online. Propuestas para educar en contextos presenciales discontinuos (Ten proposals for improving online teaching. Ideas for educating in discontinuous face-to-face contexts), organized by the Spanish university publishers and libraries working group of the Unión de Editoriales Universitarias Españolas (UNE, Union of Spanish University Publishers) and the Red de Bibliotecas Universitarias Españolas (REBIUN, Network of Spanish University Libraries). 

International Open Access Week will see the sharing of books by participating institutions in this section and on social media under the tag #AbreTuLibro. A great opportunity for finding something new to read!

The UOC's O2 repository recently unveiled a new collection of final projects featuring gender studies-related content.

This new information graphic looks at the key points of the UOC's Open Knowledge Action Plan. The action plan was launched in 2018 with the aim of opening up the knowledge generated at the UOC in order to contribute to its globalization and raise the profile of the excellent research and teaching it carries out.

The UOC's Open Knowledge Action Plan is structured into six core areas for the promotion of open publications, open research data, open learning, open innovation, a university open to society and new research assessment models, in addition to a further three universal branches of work focused on training, communication and awareness raising in this area; open infrastructure development; and participation in leading forums with regard to this reality.

Infographics: Taking stock: results of the Open Knowledge Action Plan (2018-2020) link opens in a new window

To learn more about the open access movement and open science, we offer a short glossary with the definition of twenty frequent terms.

Infographics: #OpenUOC glossary link opens in a new window

The UOC's O2 repository preserves and disseminates nearly 14,000 contents produced as part of the UOC's academic and research activity.Since the Open Knowledge Action Plan was put in place, the number of scientific articles deposited in the O2 has increased significantly, rising from around 300 articles to over 2,000 in the last three years alone.

In the repository, you can also consult teaching and learning materials (final degree projects, continuous assessment activities and open learning resources), other research documents (data, book chapters, doctoral theses, conference papers and reports) and institutional documents.

Explore the UOC's O2 repository

The UOC's O2 repository preserves and disseminates nearly 14,000 contents produced as part of the UOC's academic and research activity.

 

Open educational resources (OERs) have been created to help usher in educational change. Unlike other materials, thanks to their licence, they promote use, reuse, redistribution, remix and sharing. We have prepared some materials for you to learn more about them:

Infographics: Open educational resources link opens in a new window

Infographics: Type of open educational resources link opens in a new window

Infographics: Les 5R dels recursos educatius oberts link opens in a new window

Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute.

Infographics: Most common resource licences link opens in a new window

Copyright, Creative Commons and Copyleft.

Infographics: Where to find open educational resources link opens in a new window

The purpose of the Open Access Observatory is to monitor the current status of open access publications in the three participating institutions: the University of Barcelona, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the UOC.

Every year the Observatory updates its information on scientific articles in open and closed access, using Web of Science and Scopus as sources. It is now possible to consult the percentages of articles published in gold, hybrid and green access over the last six years.

Data shows us that the majority of the open access publications from the UOC have been published using the gold route, in other words, articles published in open access journals. The second most popular route is green, whereby publications are self-archived in the UOC's institutional repository, O2.

This infographic tells you about the services the Library offers to help you publish your work in open access.

• Publish in the UOC's institutional repository, O2
• Data management support
• Open access publishing support
• Open access publication of doctoral theses
• Support service for academic journals

Infographics: Open acces support services link opens in a new window

The objective of the course is to know the benefits that open access can provide and to learn how to publish both publications and research data openly. In short, to make understand why open access, public commitment and scientific education are important in strengthening the role of science in society and in culture.

You can download the learning resource available in the O2 UOC Repository: http://hdl.handle.net/10609/101366  

From 22-10-2018  to 26-10-2018 

• 10:00 catalan version
• 12:00 english version

This free Twitter course, running for a second time, will be given this year in Catalan and English. Simply follow the @moocmicro account and the #OAMOOC hashtag - #OAMOOC18 for English - where content will be published every day.

22-10-2018 12:00 UOC's Open Knowledge Action Plan

Sala d'actes, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Avinguda Tibidabo

The UOC is launching its Open Knowledge Action Plan, the general idea of which is to open up the University and to co-create and share knowledge. This drive aims to contribute to the University's globalization and raise the UOC's profile of excellence in research and education.

Pla d'Acció de Coneixement Obert | UOC

One of the Open Knowledge Action Plan's cornerstones is open access to scientific publications. To ensure that the knowledge generated at the UOC is open and to highlight the UOC's commitment to open science, it’s necessary to boost UOC institutional repository, O2, to disseminate it and make it visible.

 

24-10-2018 17:00, Cinemes Girona

Register

A free screening of the documentary Paywall will take place at Cinemes Girona. Paywall, produced and directed by Jason Schmitt, is a critique of the current scientific publications system, and offers ideas for future improvements

This is an initiative led by Julio Meneses, professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, and David Masip, director of the Doctoral School, and jointly organized with the University of Barcelona. After the screening there will be a debate with Professor Alexandre López from the Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences, and Brian Russell, activist and volunteer with Collaction.org, a Dutch NGO devoted to finding solutions to collective action issues, including open science.

The Observatory of Open Access aims to monitor the state of open access in participating universities. Currently there are data from the University of Barcelona, the UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) and the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). 

The open scientific production of these institutions is measured and shown, and the costs and habits of the researchers are analyzed when publishing openly.

The observatory shows, for each year since 2011, the scientific articles of each university published in open and closed access. The sources of information used are Web of Science and Scopus. The information is updated annually.

Article 14 of Royal Decree 99/2011 regulating official doctoral studies came into force on 10 February 2012. This article stipulates that “once the doctoral thesis has been approved, the university has to archive it in open electronic format in an institutional repository and send a copy of it and any complementary information necessary, in electronic format, to the Ministry of Education”.

The Ministry of Education database holding the doctoral theses defended in Spain is TESEO.

In turn, the Consell Interuniversitari de Catalunya (Catalan Interuniversity Board, CIC) agreed to carry out a number of activities to promote open access to research in Catalonia. It commissioned the General University Policy Board to introduce and monitor these activities. The Action Plan for Open Access in Catalonia, approved in CIC’s general meeting on 22 June 2009, marks 2012 as a key date when “only those publications held in an open-access repository will be taken into account for research project assessment, faculty accreditation, (six-year period) research assessment or internal promotion”.

Since 2001, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) has participated in the Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa (Doctoral Theses on the Web, TDX) project. TDX’s mission is to provide online open access to the full text of the doctoral theses defended at the pubic universities in Catalonia, disseminating and safeguarding the results of this university research around the world through the MetaArchive Cooperative. This initiative involving leading institutions from around the world has an information exchange network that ensures that other institutions have a copy of the digital content to be preserved. This preservation is carried out using LOCKSS software that constantly compares the different copies so as to provide warnings and automatically restore copies if any changes are made.

Article 10.3 of the Academic Regulations for Doctoral Studies approved by the UOC’s Executive Management Board in November 2011 stipulates that “once the doctoral thesis has been approved, the UOC takes responsibility for ensuring open access to it and for storing it in electronic format in the corresponding institutional repository, and sends an electronic copy of the thesis and complementary information to the competent bodies. In addition, it will undertake the procedures to include the doctoral thesis in the online catalogue of doctoral theses.”

The UOC’s Open-Access Policy was approved by the Governing Council on 6 October 2010. It requires that UOC staff deposit their work in the UOC’s O2 institutional open-access repository. The definitive aim is to bring together all the scientific and teaching work produced within the University and make it accessible to everyone, freely and for free, in order to spread knowledge throughout the scientific community so that society, in general, and science, in particular, can progress.