Style guide for an Open Access publishing workflow for academic books

OAR on January 24, 2020

The present style guide has been created as result of the research project Open-Access-Hochschulverlag ( Open Access University Press) at Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Germany.

The project was to develop a sustainable and adoptable workflow, which enables universities to publish their publications both as OA and printed books in a state-of-the-art publishing process and without any restrictions regarding the license, the variety of formats, print run etc.

The style guide was created to characterise the internal layout of OA books, which have been published by our university press. To enable low-threshold transfer of knowledge how to publish OA books, this style guide has been published under Creative Commons Licence CC BY.

Publishing monographs in a uniformly series design, the so house style, offers several advantages: it creates a recognition value for the user, so the publications are better remembered and the university press as a publisher becomes more visible as a brand. In addition, a uniform appearance ensures a consistent quality standard, as scientific publications can be highly structured and complex. Strict specifications facilitate the handling of those complex content and ensures the uniform appearance.

The house style of our project consist of general specifications such as the selection of book formats, the basic structure of the scientific publication, page layout, baseline grids, fonts, colors, pagination and running titles, as well as rules for hyphenation and Document Object Identifier (DOI). Furthermore, specifications for the content-specific elements, which may occur in scientific publication are defined, such as heading hierarchies, footnotes, subtitles, lists and numbering, indents, formulas, source code, info boxes, figures and tables. Finally, the guideline includes further specifications, e.g. cover design, directories, appendix and specifications for the electronic output formats of the publication.

Download (PDF): https://www.scienceopen.com/document?-1.ILinkListener-header-action~bar-read~button~so&vid=3bc68b3d-2242-4a08-a699-cf13a5024abb

Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians

OAR on December 13, 2019

The book, Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians, is now published under CC BY and offers an additional way to access the openly licensed CC Certificate content. It’s available in print at the ALA store, or it can be downloaded from our website!

Whether you’re a volunteer, professor, instructional designer, researcher, administrator or technologist—or simply looking for a great holiday gift—this book offers a background on copyright law, as well as a clear guide to open licensing and open advocacy. You can read this book on its own or while taking the CC Certificate course.

The ALA is the oldest and largest library association in the world, “providing leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”

After initial collaboration with the ALA on “Copytalk” webinars, we were delighted to partner with them for this project under the shared goal of increasing equitable access to information.

https://creativecommons.org/2019/12/06/cc-for-educators-and-librarians-is-available/

CC Search

OAR on December 17, 2018

Creative Commons’ “CC Search” project will develop and release an open online search and re-use tool that will allow high-quality content from the commons to surface in a more seamless and accessible way. Our beta relies on open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset and focuses on photos as its first media type. It is meant to elicit discussion and inform our development as we build out the full set of tools. “CC Search” will enable users to curate, tag, and remix that content. It will go beyond simple search to aggregate results from across the hundreds of public repositories into a single catalog, and also facilitate the use and re-use through tools like curated lists, saved searches, one- or no-click attribution, and provenance.

https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/

Short summary of the open licenses available

OAR on September 17, 2018

CC-BY
Attribution – This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

CC-BY-SA
Attribution Share Alike – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

CC-BY-ND
Attribution No Derivatives – This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

CC-BY-NC
Attribution Non-Commercial – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

CC-BY-NC-SA
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

CC-BY-NC-ND
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.