Open access (OA) and open scholarship encompass a wide variety of supports and initiatives that endeavour to make research, information, and creative works more accessible, more transparent, and more equitable. Benefits can include: 

• lower educational costs 

• increased student participation in learning 

• improved accessibility 

• flexibility 

• ability to reach a larger audience 

Physiotherapy open access volume finds home on eScholarship 

Inviting Movements in Physiotherapy: An Anthology of Critical Scholarship is a research publication of the international Critical Physiotherapy Network (CPN), in collaboration with the College of Rehabilitation Sciences. Produced with the support of the UM Libraries, it is now hosted on eScholarship. 

“The Critical Physiotherapy Network… has deep commitments to sharing ideas and conversations freely. We chose to publish our newest anthology with eScholarship because we are fundamentally committed to open access scholarship,” says Patricia Thille, the lead editor of the anthology and associate professor in the College of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Manitoba.  

The book was assessed through an open-identities peer review process, which the CPN used for its earlier volumes published by Routledge and Cappelen Damm. 

The skill and commitment of the eScholarship team, led by OER Specialist Glenn Bergen, was essential to this new volume’s successful publication, Thille says. “Glenn walked through the steps while also working with us to think through future opportunities for this book.”  

Future opportunities include presentations, podcasts, or workshops that could be added to the eScholarship portal to live alongside the book, “creating a cohesive and robust collection of resources,” says Thille. “Book publishing isn’t where eScholarship’s content needs to end.” 

New open educational resources support engagement with learning 

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching resources available in a variety of formats that have an open copyright license, which allows anyone to use, adapt and share them at no cost.  

Resources include: 

• open textbooks 

• online teaching resources 

• interactive lab manuals 

• an open educational resource to support patient and public partners in health research 

Learn more 

UM Libraries has long been an advocate and supporter of the creation and use of open educational scholarship and resources. The Libraries two-year pilot funding project Advance Open Ed has now become a permanent part of the library’s open publishing support system, after having supported 21 OER projects that will impact approximately 7,300 students each year. 

Learn more about supports for open at the University of Manitoba at Open@UM

Browse publications and open teaching materials on eScholarship 

Submit a project proposal 

About the eScholarship platform 

eScholarship is a new site that aims to provide faculty and students with tools for creating and sharing research digitally. eScholarship is powered by the open-source Manifold publishing platform. 

Hosted by University of Manitoba Libraries, the eScholarship site provides readers access to a variety of different open publications, open educational resources and more. 

The platform makes it easy to incorporate multimedia elements into text-based publications, and provides secure, long-term storage for publications. 

What you can publish 

When UM history professor Adele Perry came across a blog post from two Canadian historians about their textbooks going out of print, she thought they would be a good fit for the eScholarship platform.  

UM Libraries was able to give the textbooks a new life by helping publish them on the eScholarship platform. Origins and Destinies by Canadian historians Robert Wardhaugh [PhD/95] and Alan MacEachern are now available for free online. 

Many different kinds of multimedia projects can be published with the eScholarship platform. Some of the projects published or in the process of being published on eScholarship include:  

• Open educational resources 

• A collection of honours thesis project posters 

• Texts with embedded audio files 

• Open-access editions of already published content 

• Research with interactive GIS maps from UM’s GIS hub  

Submit an open publishing project proposal 

Publish your work and research now on eScholarship.  

Submit a publishing project proposal now 

More support 

Contact OER Specialist, Glenn Bergen with questions. 

Other open publishing platforms the Libraries provides include Open Journal Systems (OJS), a scholarly journal platform, and MSpace, UM’s institutional repository.

Learn more about the Libraries open publishing platforms and services. 

Students can now read and interact with Pressbooks content and H5P interactive activities without ever needing to leave UM Learn. H5P activities, like quizzes, can also be incorporated into the UM Learn grading system so student results can automatically be added to their grade. 

Create or modify course content with Pressbooks 

UM instructors have access to the Pressbooks Author & Editing platform, with support from UM Libraries. Instructors can create new written or interactive content on Pressbooks or copy (“clone”) existing content to configure it for the UM Learn integration. Cloning existing content is easy, and configuring content for integration is as simple as checking a box. 

Add interactive activities to courses with H5P 

The H5P plugin aims to make it easy to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 content. Instructors can create many different activities with H5P, from multiple-choice quizzes to complex branching scenarios for virtual simulations.  

Find content for your courses 

To find existing Pressbooks with or without H5P, explore the Pressbooks directory or other open educational resource directories for content authored on Pressbooks. 

Support for Pressbooks 

Learn more about Pressbooks or contact your subject librarian with questions. 

Contact the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning for support with developing teaching materials.  

There are numerous benefits to publishing research open access, including increased exposure and impact. Open publishing is also a requirement of many research funders, including the Canadian tri-agency funding bodies. However, UM researchers who publish their research in peer-reviewed, open access journals often bear the cost of Article Processing Charges (APCs). These charges average over $2000 per article and are dictated by the publishers.  

UM Libraries is often able to reduce APC costs by 15 to 20% and, in some cases, have the entire APC cost waived, which can save researchers thousands of dollars per article. By working with library consortia such as the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, UM Libraries has acquired APC discounts or waivers for over 9000 open access journals.  

Faculty and researchers can now search for this APC discount and waiver information using the library’s new database. In addition to searching by journal title, researchers can also use this new tool to filter the list of journals by subject area and by discount or waiver amount.  

Browse the UM Libraries APC Discount & Waiver Database. 

The promotion and support of open scholarship are essential to UM’s realization of its commitments to research excellence. UM Libraries supports faculty in publishing scholarly articles openly, making research data available, creating or adopting open education resources (OER), and in open journal publishing. 

Explore Open@UM to learn more about open access and open scholarship at UM. 

Letters from the North American-Icelandic Children’s Newspaper Sólskin, is an open-access e-book collecting transcriptions and original English translations of a group of letters written by North American-Icelandic children and published in Sólskin (meaning “Sunshine”), an Icelandic-language children’s newspaper. 

Sólskin was published out of Winnipeg, Manitoba as a part of the larger newspaper Lögberg. It was designed to be clipped out and folded once to form a miniature four-page paper. Letters from the North American-Icelandic Children’s Newspaper Sólskin includes 155 individual letters published in Sólskin between October 1915 and April 1918.

Christopher Crocker, creator of the e-book and Icelandic language and literature sessional instructor at UM, became aware of Sólskin when he was working on an article about Icelandic novelist and Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness. “The letters provide rare and remarkable insight into the lives and perspectives of children in the North American-Icelandic community in the early 20th century in their own words.” He collected and translated the letters to make them more accessible.

Christopher explained his choice of making his work freely and publicly accessible. “I’m a strong believer in open access initiatives and feel that researchers should always look for opportunities to make their work as accessible as possible, especially when their research receives public funding.” The e-book was supported in part by the Manitoba Heritage Grants Program.

Using Pressbooks or any other online publishing software for the first time, Christopher was impressed with the accessible interface, the flexibility of Pressbooks, and the support provided by UM Libraries and UM Copyright Office. “Katrin Nielsdottir first directed me toward Pressbooks and put me in touch with Janice Winkler who was very helpful in setting me up on the platform,” he said.

Join us to celebrate the release of Letters from the North American-Icelandic Children’s Newspaper Sólskin:

• February 15, 2023 (Wednesday)
• Iceland Boardroom, 3rd Floor, Elizabeth Dafoe Library, University of Manitoba
• 4:30 p.m. Reception
• 5:00 p.m. Presentation by Christopher Crocker, Icelandic language and literature sessional instructor at UM
• Refreshments will be served

Contact Katrin Nielsdottir for any questions.

This new agreement with Wiley publishing has been made in partnership with the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). The Canadian Science Publishers (CSP) agreement through CRKN has also been renewed for a three-year term to include a fee waiver for five titles in addition to a 25% discount on CSP’s other hybrid titles.

Hybrid titles are those journals that are available as a subscription and in which some of the articles are open access.

Advantages

There are several advantages to these types of agreements, the primary ones being:

• Cost savings for UM researchers
• UM research is made more accessible – discoverable worldwide in perpetuity

Details of this discount information, together with other discounts and waivers, can be found on the Libraries Open Access services website.

UM Libraries supports both open access and publishing as part of its scholarly communication suite of services. Learn more about these and related services for Open Scholarship at UM.

We will be scheduling presentations to faculty/departmental members in the Spring. Please contact Andrea Szwajcer, Research Services Librarian, if you wish to arrange a session for your faculty/department.