SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is the advocacy wing of the American Library Association. Their mission is to promote open access to research and scholarly publishing by lobbying Congress and government agencies to require the research they fund to be publicly available, encouraging scholars to upload their work to online research repositories, and suggesting pro-open access publishing and tenure policies at individual universities.
video
Sharon Terry, Patient Advocate from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.
André Brown, Grad Student from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.
Diane Graves, Librarian from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.
As a web and video contractor at SPARC during the fall of 2008, Matthew Agnello and I filmed and edited the Voices of Open Access viral video series for SPARC and PLoS. The video series featured different stakeholders in the open access debate talking about why open access to research was important to them. The videos were used by libraries around the world to celebrate the first annual Open Access Day in October 2008.
illustrations
While at SPARC, I suggested creating an animated video to explain open access to undergraduate students and others who weren’t already familiar with the issue from personal experience. I had seen the idea of open access explained eloquently many times on a personal basis, but there wasn’t a video or other visual document that we could point people to with such an explanation.*
I created a preliminary storyboard and showed it to Heather Joseph and Jennifer McLennan, who responded enthusiastically.
After numerous edits and revisions and hours of drawing and animating in Flash, Open Access 101 was released to the public in fall 2009.
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* While Open Access 101 was in revisions, webcomic Piled Higher and Deeper published this comic, which includes a flowchart rather similar to the one featured in the video. Scooped!
