Presenting our work on the legal integration of the JVMG knowledge graph at POSSP 2021

In December we had the pleasure of presenting our work on the legal integration of the JVMG knowledge graph at POSSP 2021: Putting Open Social Scholarship Into Practice: An Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership & Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) Online Event.

Providing a unified open licence for the JVMG knowledge graph that extends to all the data it contains has been a chief priority for us, in order to be able to open up the knowledge graph to researchers outside the project. We worked on this problem together with Dr Simone Schroff from the University of Plymouth, as well as corresponding with the concerned online enthusiast communities. In the end we settled on using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License, with all communities that had incompatible licenses or no license in place providing us with individual license agreements to support the legal integration of the knowledge graph (see details here).

POSSP 2021 proved to be an excellent venue to present our work on these legal aspects of the JVMG project (see slides and video below). The talks at the event engaged with all the various issues that our project is also built around, not only the creation and sharing of open scholarly resources, but also engaging with communities beyond academia (for example Kelsey Dufresne and Micah Vandegrift‘s delightful talk “The Digital, the Multimodal, & the Fermentable: Public Knowledge Sharing with Fermentology”, see the project here). Library and information science was also well represented at the event, and the question of how best to work with linked open data came up in several talks (taking center stage in Susan Brown‘s “The Evolution of a Linked Data Ecosystem for Canada” panel presentation).

Furthermore, the values of inclusivity and encouragement espoused by open scholarship were not only the subject of some of the talks (for example John Maxwell‘s thought-provoking “The Care-ful Reviewer: Peer Review as if People Mattered”), but were also integral to the whole event, which made it a super welcoming venue even for us international scholars coming from beyond Canadian and Australian academia. The format of the event, featuring lightning talks for both the live panels and the prerecorded sessions also provided for a refreshing online conference experience, with a fast paced rhythm always keeping things interesting and lots of engagement between the panelists and presenters as well as the audience.

We would once again like to thank Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens and the whole POSSP organizational team for this wonderful event. We are very much looking forward to continuing this dialogue at upcoming events and in the various reaches of the wider open scholarship universe.

POSSP_2021_Pfeffer_et_al_slides