Workshop «Open Access and Audiovisual Sources», 22 and 23 November 2019

Open Scholarship, Open Access and Citizen Science are currently placed high on the academic agenda. Digital technologies enable the publication of research in new formats and, as a result, Open Access is fundamentally changing academic research and publishing. The imminent movement towards Open Access in academia requires us to develop new strategies in order to respond to the switch to open, a result of the ever-changing ways of production and distribution of knowledge. For example, third-party funded projects are increasingly mandating to have Open Access to research results (ERC or SNF).

For researchers in the humanities working with audiovisual sources, this recent development poses a number of problematic issues and new challenges. Although there are occasional initiatives within the humanities in this regard, such as the open-access journal NECSUS which was founded in 2012, most journals and publishers in the humanities do not immediately make scientific publications accessible in open access.

We invited Jeroen Sondervan to discuss this issue. He is a former editor of Amsterdam University Press, and together with NECS he founded NECSUS. He is currently employed as a publishing consultant at the Utrecht University Library. Together with Jefferson Pooley he maintains the website Open Access in Media Studies. In addition, he recently started MediArXiv for film and media studies, a new digital archive for edited articles, pre-prints, post-prints and published manuscripts.

Another interesting development made possible with digital technologies is the publication of research-related audiovisual materials online. Examples include sites such as Monoskop, UbuWeb, Film Studies for Free, Timeline of Historical Film Colors, and Europeana. Central issues originating in this form of academic research, are the selection of archival holdings, which are digitized and made accessible online, copyright, and the quality of digital copies.

As archive and copyright specialist Claudy Op den Kamp will discuss the important issues concerning copyrights, accessibility and digitization. In addition, she will present the new website Copyright Cortex, dedicated to copyright and digital heritage. During the workshop for doctoral students and postdocs she will zoom in on re-use of archival material in relation to copyright issues.

Another important area in this context is Citizen Science, where scholars and “citizens” (intended as non-professional researchers) jointly contribute to the research effort. Such collaborations may confront issues of storage space, image quality, standardization, and comparability of the results. Also, they highlight ethics and privacy as crucial aspects of digital technologies.

Together, UZH and the ETHZ support Citizen Science developments through the Competence Center Citizen Science. Rosy Mondardini, who is leading this effort, will present a selection of projects that make use of the power of the crowd with the help of video and other visuals.

Last but not least, digital media enable new presentation formats for the publication of research results. A very interesting development in this area is the 'video essay' that has developed in the field of media science in recent years. There is an increasing amount of opportunities to publish in the form of these video essays, either as an appendix to online journals or as open access journal such as NECSUS and MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism. But there are also specialized online platforms such as Audiovisualcy, and [in] Transition. Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Images Studies, that host this type of academic output.

John Gibbs of the University of Reading has been working with video essays for several years. He combines his work in film analysis with the historical context of production, generating new perspectives on the subject. He will talk about his work and discuss the practical side of video essays in his workshop for doctoral students and postdocs.

Organisation: Bregt Lameris (Department of Film Studies), Daniel Ursprung (Department of History), Stella Castelli (English Department)
With financial support of the Graduate Campus