On Prior Publication

Last week, we received two takedown notices for items deposited to CORE. They arrived at nearly the same time, and so we found ourselves thinking about them in connected ways, though their cases are very, very different.

The first came through AWS Abuse, who passed on a report to us that we were distributing copyright infringing content. Under DMCA Safe Harbor provisions, we are required to take down such potentially infringing material immediately, and can only afterward follow up with an investigation to determine whether it’s actually infringing or whether it should be restored. Agreeing to follow this process is important to the network’s survival, as it’s only through such adherence that we can prevent the Commons from being sued for instances of copyright infringement of which we’re unaware.

In this case, we took the item down. Looking at the document revealed that it was a scan of copyrighted material, so the complainant may have a case. We have, however, inquired with the depositor in case there are complicating circumstances that we should know about.

The second request came to us from a user, who asked us to remove one of their deposits. Generally speaking, we resist removing deposits unless there are very good reasons, given our concern for the continuity of the scholarly record. In this case, it turned out that the deposit was a conference paper that the depositor later submitted for publication by a journal. The journal was now demanding that the deposit be removed, as they have a policy against accepting material that has been published elsewhere.

We reached out to the journal to ask about this policy, noting that even the venerable PMLA would not consider a conference paper deposited in a repository to be a violation of its prior-publication rule.

The response we received was — well, let’s say it — rude. The managing editor ultimately made it clear that if we did not remove the deposit, the journal would rescind its offer of publication to the author.

We are not in the business of harming the careers of our users, and so we have removed the deposit, if reluctantly. But we want to use this incident to open a conversation about the differences between conference papers and published articles, as well as between preprints and publications. We believe that authors have the right to share and seek feedback on the early stages of work prior to submitting that work to publishers, and that the existence of such pre-prints online does not constitute prior publication. And we urge our users to seek venues for publication that do not limit their rights over the ways they share their own work.

What issues have you run into in the relationship between sharing work online and publishing it in more formal venues? How would you encourage us to respond to situations like this? And how might we work together to create a more open, less extractive, and completely non-punitive scholarly communication ecosystem?

CORE is transitioning to FAST metadata subject headings

Humanities CORE launched as a full-featured beta in May 2015 on MLA Commons. In 2016 it was released to the wider community with the launch of Humanities Commons. A white paper detailing the original project can be found in CORE if you’d like to know more about the history. In the six years since its launch we’ve made improvements to the interface and moved the server to a new home at Michigan State University. We’re now making a major improvement to the metadata associated with CORE deposits.

Subject categorization is a big part of findability. The original list of CORE subjects were derived from the MLA Bibliography subject headings, and focused entirely on the humanities. As the platform has grown and more scholars are doing interdisciplinary work collaborating with STEM and social science partners, we’re implementing FAST metadata subject headings:

FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) is derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), one of the library domain’s most widely used subject terminology schemas. The development of FAST has been a collaboration of OCLC Research and the Library of Congress.

FAST is the standard for many repositories, including those hosted by libraries and museums. It provides eight facets: chronological, corporate names, events, form/genre, geographic names, personal names, titles, and topics. These facets have millions of possible combinations but function a bit differently than our legacy subjects. Here’s a few examples:

  • “Medieval Spanish History” becomes “Spain” [geographic], “History” [topical], and “Middle Ages” [topical]
  • “18th-century English literature” becomes “English Literature” [topical] and “Eighteenth Century [topical]
  • “Compositional improvisation” becomes “Improvisation (Music)” [topical] and “Composition (Music)” [topical]
  • “Shakespeare” becomes “Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616” [personal]

[Note: While you will see the facet (topical, personal, etc.) when choosing subjects, once deposited only the subject itself will be displayed.] You can try searching for subjects and keywords using the SearchFAST website. More information about FAST can be found on the OCLC website.

What does this mean to the community?

When you deposit to CORE you’ll search for subject headings using the FAST facets. We’ve included all eight facets except chronological. This might seem tricky at first, but there are millions of combinations across all disciplines to choose from. Just start typing, and the page will begin to show you the subject headings available. Pick the ones that best fit what your deposit is about, and if there are more specific terms you’d like that are not part of FAST, put those in the tags field. You can pick up to ten subjects and ten tags for each deposit.

If you’ve already made a deposit, your subjects will be converted. We’ve gone through three rounds of review and cataloging with our Michigan State University Library metadata librarians, and had a final team review. As shown in the examples above, the specific terms may be slightly different from the original deposit, but should combine to convey the same concept. Some subject headings do not have good equivalents in FAST, and there are some terms that are so new they are not yet present. All of these subjects will move to tags. Examples:

  • “Art History” becomes “Art” [topical] and “History” [topical]
  • “Digital pedagogy” becomes “Education–Computer-assisted instruction” [topical], but the original subject heading will move to a tag for searchability
  • “Narratology” does not map to FAST and will be moved to a tag

Post-conversion, if you do see a subject that you don’t feel quite fits your deposit, let us know. Users who have subjects moved to tags will receive an email listing those deposits.

The benefits of FAST

FAST subject headings are a standardized vocabulary based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). It is one of the most widely used subject vocabularies in the world and has been translated into multiple languages. When you deposit to CORE your deposits are not just preserved but the metadata is indexed by Google, Google Scholar, SHARE, Altmetric, and BASE-OA, which fuels open-access initiatives such as the OA Button and OA DOI. Using recognized subjects that are both human and machine-readable improves findability and allows for easier translation.

FAST subject headings are an ever-growing list, and as new headings are added, our search will include them. As the Commons continues to grow, using FAST allows us to accept deposits across disciplines and facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration. Our goal is for CORE to provide a home for all scholars as they develop new projects, new fields, and new forms of knowledge.

CORE Migration Winter 2022

The Humanities Commons CORE repository will be undergoing maintenance starting on Friday January 28, 2022, 9am EDT. We will be migrating content to a new server, and in order to ensure all content is transferred deposits will be suspended until that migration is complete. We will update everyone when depositing can resume.

During migration deposits will be available for searching and download. Links to your deposits will remain the same. 

If you have any questions, or encounter any issues with your deposits, please contact us at hello[at]hcommons.org.

Watch Online Communities & Social Justice on YouTube

If you missed our first CORE deposit party fear not, we’ve uploaded it to YouTube. Again, a huge thanks to all of our participants!

Held on March 30, 2021, Online Communities and Transformative Justice was an opportunity to discuss the potential for online communities to engage in anti-racist praxis, transformative justice, and ethical community engagement.

Keynote: “Harnessing Good Intentions: Online Communities and Sustained Commitment to Racial Equity & Diversity,” delivered by Dr. Jan Miyake, Associate Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College.

Lightning Talks:

“Virtual & Digital Speaker Series: Life Saving Knowledges and Critical Frameworks to Disrupt Heteronormativity,” Ruby Mendoza, Michigan State University

“Re/Building and Recovering Comics Communities Through Wikidata @ Michigan State University,” Justin Wigard, Michigan State University

“Introspective Videos as Antiracist Praxis,” Nick Sanders, Michigan State University

Welcome: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University

Introducing the Online Communities and Transformative Justice Panelists

The Commons is pleased to announce the panelists for our CORE Deposit Party, Online Communities and Transformative Justice, on March 30th from 12 to 1:30pm EDT. The event will be an opportunity to discuss the potential for online communities to engage in anti-racist praxis, transformative justice, and ethical community engagement.

The event will start with three 5-7 minute lightning talks:

“Virtual & Digital Speaker Series: Life Saving Knowledges and Critical Frameworks to Disrupt Heteronormativity,” Ruby Mendoza (they/them)

This presentation explores the initiative within the MSU Writing Center, through the efforts of their Liaison to the LGBT Resource Center, to develop a digital/virtual speaker series titled “Life Saving Knowledges: Critical Frameworks to Disrupt Heteronormativity.” This speaker series utilized and centered graduate students’ intellectual knowledges and experiences to convey complex theoretical frameworks into a simplified manner for LGBTQ+ youth. In many ways, this speaker series worked in a multitude of ways, including providing students with life-saving knowledge to utilize in both academia and activism, and within their own communities outside of an educational institution. Therefore, this presentation addresses the need to understand digital community engagement as a method to empower and support emerging intersectional adults, as well as providing life saving discourses and frameworks to navigate their lives in and outside of the academy.

“Re/Building and Recovering Comics Communities Through Wikidata @ Michigan State University,” Justin Wigard (he/him)

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Comics@MSU community sought ways to not only support existing connections within the greater comics community, but build new ones virtually by making transformative use of the MSU Libraries Comics Collection. To this end, in Fall 2020 the MSU Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop hosted a two-day virtual Wikidata Edit-a-thon, using bibliographic metadata to add missing comics publishers and authors from 1929-1956 to Wikidata. This lightning talk will discuss the planning that went into the events, along with a reporting-out of both our first event in Fall 2020 and our follow-up event to be held in Spring 2021. The event brought together 50-55 participants from MSU and across the US (even some folks from Canada & the UK) into an online community. During the event, participants  worked against WikiData and Wikipedia bias, the latter being historically implicated in racial and gendered erasure other forms of bias. This lightning talk will demonstrate how, participants worked  to a) connect MSU’s comics metadata to Wikidata, b) recover PoC and women comics creators’ narratives that may have been absent from Wikidata, and c) reflect their contributions in Wikidata or correcting misattributed entries therein, thereby contributing to the Digital Humanities@MSU community.

“Introspective Videos as Antiracist Praxis,” Nick Sanders (he/him)

Guided by critical antiracist (Baker-Bell; Johnson) and feminist pedagogies (Omolade; Friere), anti-deficit frameworks (Mejia et al.), and multimodal writing pedagogies (Shipka; Arola), this talk describes a reflective video assignment sequence that can support critical un/learning around whiteness and white supremacy. These video sequences story students’ identities and values and name the social forces which shape them at different points in the course. Consistent with critical race theory tenets of story and critique, these videos allow students to position themselves as embodied learners and use story as a tool of knowledge-making. This talk will also offer an assignment that invites students to draw on these reflective videos toward a larger end to track their learning goals throughout a course and to map new goals for un/learning. Ultimately, this talk will demonstrate the ways in which  introspective video sequencing might support deep critical introspection consistent with antiracist and critical whiteness pedagogies, challenges performativity in written assignments, and provides maps for students to understand their learning and development in the context of a course.

Following the panel discussions there will be a keynote, “Harnessing Good Intentions: Online Communities and Sustained Commitment to Racial Equity & Diversity,” delivered by Dr. Jan Miyake, Associate Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College. After the program the panel will be available to answer questions and meeting attendees will be encouraged to deposit work of their own into CORE. Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, is a library-quality, noncommercial repository that provides members with a permanent, open access storage facility for sharing, discovering, retrieving, and archiving scholarly output. A short video on CORE can be found on the Commons YouTube channel. Syllabi, learning materials, handouts, articles, and other works on this topic or others are welcome to be deposited.

To register visit https://forms.gle/3HdZHp8YFTeBi53W6.

Online Communities and Transformative Justice, a conversation and CORE deposit party

Join MSU Commons on March 30th from 12 to 1:30pm EDT for Online Communities and Transformative Justice, an opportunity to discuss the potential for online communities to engage in anti-racist praxis, transformative justice, and ethical community engagement. There will be a panel discussion with a series of 5-7 minute lightning talks around the subject, followed by a keynote, “Harnessing Good Intentions: Online Communities and Sustained Commitment to Racial Equity & Diversity,” delivered by Dr. Jan Miyake, Associate Professor of Music Theory at Oberlin College. 

The Humanities Commons network, of which MSU Commons is a part, is a free and open online community with an expanding reach. With over 25,000 members, Humanities Commons has become a visible place for members to share their scholarly work and connect with one another regardless of field, language, institutional affiliation, or form of employment. MSU Commons is the first institutional node on the Commons network, and is due to roll out to the full campus later this year. Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Project Director of Humanities Commons, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University will give opening remarks.

After the program the panel will be available to answer questions and meeting attendees will be encouraged to deposit work of their own into CORE. Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, is a library-quality, noncommercial repository that provides members with a permanent, open access storage facility for sharing, discovering, retrieving, and archiving scholarly output. A short video on CORE can be found on the Commons YouTube channel. Syllabi, learning materials, handouts, articles, and other works on this topic or others are welcome to be deposited. 

To register visit https://forms.gle/3HdZHp8YFTeBi53W6

More information:

Jan Miyake is associate professor of music theory at Oberlin College & Conservatory, where she chairs the music theory division and leads the curriculum and pedagogy subcommittee of the presidential initiative on racial equity and diversity. She publishes on the topics of corpus studies, Haydn’s instrumental works, Formenlehre, linear analysis, and inclusive pedagogy. After being elected Treasurer of the Society for Music Theory (2015-19), Miyake was recently appointed chair of its Committee on the Status of Women (2021-23). She is a founding member of the Composers of Color Resource Project, which uses Humanities Commons to store, organize, and publicize its resources.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming this role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association. She is author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), as well as Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press, 2011) and The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). She is project director of Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 26,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities.

Top CORE Deposits of October 2019

a gloomily lit forest

The most downloaded CORE deposits in October 2019 included books, articles, and five syllabi—on topics ranging from American horror films to women’s medical writing:

  1. James Gifford, Modernism. Syllabus.
  2. Caitlin Duffy, EGL 194: Intro to Film. Syllabus.
  3. Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. Book.
  4. Ilana Gershon, “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Article.
  5. Ayesha Majid, “Marketing strategy of Lenovo laptops.” Report.
  6. Anastasia Salter, Introduction to Texts & Technology. Syllabus.
  7. Titus Stahl, “What is Immanent Critique?” Article.
  8. Rebecca Ruth Gould, Theorising Violence: Colonial Encounters and Anticolonial Reactions. Syllabus.
  9. Oscar Martinez-Peñate, El Salvador Sociología General. Book.
  10. Krista Roberts, Women Medical Writers/Writing Women’s Medicine. Syllabus.

Most Downloaded CORE Deposits in September 2019

close up of typewriter letters

The most downloaded work in CORE last month:

  1. Oscar Martinez-Peñate, El Salvador Sociología General. Book.
  2. Titus Stahl, “What is Immanent Critique?” Article.
  3. Ayesha Majid, “Marketing strategy of Lenovo laptops.” Report.
  4. Ilana Gershon, “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Article.
  5. Hanna de Vries, “Collective nouns.” Book chapter.
  6. Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. Book.
  7. Anastasia Salter, Introduction to Texts & Technology. Syllabus.
  8. David Bawden and Lyn Robinson, “Library and Information Science.” Encyclopaedia article.
  9. James Gifford, Modernism. Syllabus.
  10. James E. Dobson, ENGL64.05: Cultural Analytics. Syllabus.

August 2019’s Most Downloaded CORE Deposits

rows of bricks

The most downloaded works in CORE in August 2019:

  1. Oscar Martinez-Peñate, El Salvador Sociología General. Book.
  2. Matthew Kirschenbaum, ENGL 479P: BookLab. Syllabus.
  3. Titus Stahl, “What is Immanent Critique?” Article.
  4. Ilana Gershon, “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Article.
  5. Hanna de Vries, “Collective nouns.” Book chapter.
  6. Ayesha Majid, “Marketing strategy of Lenovo laptops.” Report.
  7. Shawn Graham, EX FIGLINIS: The Network Dynamics of the Tiber Valley Brick Industry in the Hinterland of Rome. Book.
  8. Cameron Neylon, “Research excellence is a neo-colonial agenda (and what might be done about it).” Book chapter.
  9. Brigitte Fielder, “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism.” Article.
  10. Johann-Mattis List, Pragmatics of Language Evolution. Book.