Digital Scholar Bytes: Happy World Book and Copyright Day!

Posted on April 23, 2026April 22, 2026 by Ben Cushing

Happy World Book and Copyright Day! This day is all about celebrating books and how books unite people from across a variety of backgrounds. Every year UNESCO selects a World Book Capital. This year UNESCO has selected Rabat in Morocco for this honor. Rabat was selected because of its dedication towards literary development, getting women and children to read, and working against illiteracy. In 2026 Rabat will be implementing initiatives that will provide better access to books as well as supporting their local publishers. (UNESCO, 2026)

Understanding Copyright

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives creators the legal right to their work and protections related to using and copying their work. Works not only include books, but also other literary works, sound recordings, artworks, and much more. For a work to be protected by copyright, it must meet two standards:

Must be original. For a work to be considered original, it needs to have at least a small piece of creativity that sets it apart from other copyrighted works. For example, simply copying another work will not provide copyright protection, but parodying an existing work with its own unique elements would receive copyright protection.
Must be fixed. For a work to be protected, it must be tangible or physical in some way. For instance, if you write a song, it must be written, recorded, or in another accessible format. If a musician simply performs a song, but does not have a recording of it, or the song in another medium, it cannot be protected by copyright. (U.S. Copyright Office, n.d.)

Copyright Battles in the News

Copyright infringement often comes up in the news. An issue related to internet providers and pirated music was recently ruled by the Supreme Court this March. The case involved music labels suing Cox Communications, a telecommunications company that provides internet to over 3.5 million subscribers, over whether Cox is required to pay damages to music companies if they do not terminate internet access to users who pirate music. The court opinion wrote companies were not on the hook for damages “merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyright.” While this case does not hold Cox responsible, the courts have not fully answered the question of whether internet providers can be held liable for piracy. Further highlighting the complexity was Justice Sotomayor’s separate opinion in response to the court opinion that warned with this decision companies will not be held liable “regardless of whether they take steps to address infringement on their networks and regardless of what they know about their users’ activity.” The differing Justices’ opinions highlight the complexity of enforcing copyright. (Marimow, 2026)

Copyright issues also arose with ice skating at the Winter Olympics in Italy. Figure skaters have been allowed to choose music with lyrics in all competitions since the 2014 Winter Olympics, but they must have legal permission to use it.. To make sure they can use music in their routines, skaters request the copyright holder’s permission, usually months in advance. One American skater, Amber Glenn, used the Canadian musician Seb McKinnon’s “The Return” in one of her routines, and was called out by the musician on social media for not getting their permission first. Fortunately they were able to come to a resolution. Petr Gumennik, a Russian figure skater, was not so lucky. They were unable to get clearance to use music from “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”, and had to use classical music instead. Copyright in these situations protects artists’ works being used without their consent. (Panja, 2026)

Celebrate World Book and Copyright Day by starting a new book, reading a favorite series, or checking out the below resources about copyright!

Ben Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America Libraries.

Resources

CUA Libraries: Copyright Basics

U.S. Copyright Office Copyright Guide

Cornell’s Copyright 101: Guide

Association of College and Research Libraries Fair Use Guide

References

Marimow, A. E. (2026). Supreme court sides with internet provider in copyright fight over pirated music. New York: New York Times. (Online) March 25, 2026.

Panja, T. (2026). Figure skaters try to master a new routine: Copyright compliance. New York: New York Times. (Online) Feb. 12, 2026.

UNESCO.org (n.d.). Delivering for people in crisis. UNESCO: Building Peace through Education, Science and Culture, communication and information.

Happy Earth Day!

Posted on April 22, 2026April 22, 2026 by Ben Cushing

Happy Earth Day! Earth Day has its origins in 1969 when Senator Gaylord Nelson announced a plan for a teach-in at college campuses about the air and water pollution, and got Pete McCloskey, a Republican, to be his co-chair. Nelson then enlisted a young activist, Denis Hayes, to help develop teach-ins across college campuses. They chose April 22nd, 1970 to help maximize college students’ participation. For the event, Hayes built a staff of over 85 people, changed the name to Earth Day, and transformed the teach-in idea into an event that would reach a broader audience. Over 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day, since then Earth Day has become an annual event and expanded its reach. To learn more, check out the Earth Day History page.

Our Power, Our Planet

For 2026 the theme is Our Power, Our Planet, which is focused on daily actions of individuals to make the world a cleaner place. Environmental change can be impacted by individuals and local organizations working on projects and initiatives in tangent with larger organizations and administrations. Check out the Earth Day Take Action page to see all the different activities you can do to help our climate.

Documentaries

The library offers a variety of documentaries that feature environmental topics. Here are some that the library has access to related to Earth Day and the environment:

Earth Days

Director Robert Stone (“Oswald’s Ghost,” “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst”) traces the origins of the modern environmental movement through the eyes of nine Americans who propelled the movement from its beginnings in the 1950s to its moment of triumph in 1970 with the original Earth Day and to its status as a major political force in America. Kanopy

A PBS documentary that captures the early environmentalist movement. It frames the participants’ lives around events that were happening through the 1950s and 1960s and how these events and individuals shaped environmentalism.

Plastic Earth

The first documentary feature film of its kind to cover the solutions and technologies being worked on in the world today to combat and eventually solve the plastic crisis that our world is facing. -Kanopy

This documentary follows Janice Overbeck who is a mother concerned about plastic waste. Overbeck, through interviews with experts, looks into developing technologies to handle the plastic problem.

Ken Burns: The National Parks America’s Best Idea

This 12-hour, six-part documentary series by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan tells the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.

From Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska, the series explores the stories of people, from every conceivable background, who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved, and in doing so, reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy. -Kanopy

Ken Burn’s The National Parks America’s Best Idea looks at the different national parks and at the individuals who helped bring this about and shaped them over the years.

Rachel Carson: The Woman Who Launched the Modern Environmental Movement

When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, the book became a phenomenon. A passionate and eloquent warning about the long-term dangers of pesticides, the book unleashed an extraordinary national debate and was greeted by vigorous attacks from the chemical industry. But it would also inspire President John F. Kennedy to launch the first-ever investigation into the public health effects of pesticides — an investigation that would eventually result in new laws governing the regulation of these deadly agents.

Featuring the voice of Mary-Louise Parker as the influential writer and scientist, Rachel Carson is an intimate portrait of the woman whose groundbreaking books revolutionized our relationship to the natural world. Drawn from Carson’s own writings, letters and recent scholarship, this film illuminates both the public and private life of the woman who launched the modern environmental movement and revolutionized how we understand our relationship with the natural world. -Kanopy

Want a movie more focused on an individual? Check out this Rachel Carson documentary. It provides a portrait of her life, and how her work, particularly Silent Spring, shaped the early environmental movement and shed li

ght on how some “green energy” can actually harm the environment.

Planet of the Humans

“PLANET OF THE HUMANS” dares to say what no one will—that we are losing the battle to stop ecological meltdown by following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road—selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. In the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids: too little, too late. This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way—before it’s too late. -Kanopy

Planet of the Humans looks at where the environmental movement has gone in recent years. It offers a less optimistic picture of green energy that is being developed and questions if these advances will be enough.

Getting involved and learning about Earth Day is a great way to learn more about how to help improve the environment. If you want help finding environmental sources, check out the Earth Day website, the resources below, or reach out to your liaison librarian.

Ben Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America Libraries.

References

EARTHDAY.ORG. (n.d.). Earth Day: The Official Site. https://www.earthday.org/

Earth Day Resources

Taking Action

Earth Day News and Stories

Fact Sheets

Research & Instruction: Historical Newspapers

Posted on March 6, 2026March 3, 2026 by Ben Cushing

Learning about past events through old newspapers is a great way to investigate historical topics and build your research. To assist with this, Catholic University Libraries provides access to the ProQuest Historical Newspaper databases for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. You can search each newspaper individually, all three, or a combination of the three by selecting the databases on the ProQuest database select webpage. These newspapers provide “genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time” (ProQuest, 2026). See the full list of newspapers available in our databases here. Let’s dive into the ProQuest Historical Newspaper databases.

Accessing Articles

This blog will be showcasing screenshots from the Historical New York Times, but all of the historical newspaper databases have the same interfaces and features. When first accessing these databases, you will see a simple search bar. Use this search bar if you have a general topic in mind, such as the moon landing. Put your search term(s) into the search box and click search. On the results page, click the title of an article you are interested in to read it. When you first open the article, you are in PDF view, which shows a scan of the article. Page view, found next to PDF view, shows where the article is in relation to that issue of the newspaper, and you can use the arrows to change pages within that issue. Next to the PDF and the Page View is the Details/Abstract tab. This tab provides data about the article, such as the title, author, and date of publication, as well as provides a brief summary of the article. Additionally, in the top right corner there are options to create a citation of the article, copy the URL, print, and an all options button with even more export options.

Features

ProQuest Historical Newspapers offer a variety of filters to help narrow down your search results. On the search results page you will find the filters on the left-hand tool bar. At the top, you can choose how the results are sorted. ProQuest defaults to “relevance”, which has the database show you articles that best match your search terms in descending order. The other options are “Oldest first” and “Most recent first”, which sorts by when the article was published. Next is the limit to full text check box, when checked the database will only include articles that can be read in full. Under this is the publication date filter. Here you can use the bar graph to look for articles in a specific decade, year, month, and day. You can also put a date range (year-month-day) to get articles in a specific range. For example, for the “moon landing” search, placing the publication date filter to July 1969 finds articles that wrote about the moon landing as it was happening. Then you have the publication title, which lets you select any publication titles from the search results. Lastly is the document type filter, which includes articles, front page articles, ad displays, and more.

One last feature worth highlighting is ProQuest’s suggested search terms. These pop up underneath the search bar after you do a search, when clicked on, ProQuest runs a Boolean search with your original search term and the selected suggested search term. This is a great feature to further refine and narrow down your search.

Advanced Searching

In addition to the basic search, there is an advanced search feature. Use this when you have a more concrete idea in mind and want to have a more specific search. The advanced search allows you to create Boolean searches using AND, OR, and NOT to better refine your search. The drop down-boxes to the right allow you to change where in the database record it will search for the search term. Some options are:

Anywhere- Searches for the selected search term anywhere it appears in the record.
Document text- Search terms are searched within the articles’ text.
Document title- The selected search terms are looked for in the title of the articles.

Additionally, you can filter by document type and publication date. Once you have set up your search, click the search button to get your search results.

Conclusion

Searching the ProQuest Historical Newspapers is a great resource for finding content on historical events. Check out the ProQuest Historical Newspapers guide if you want to learn more about searching these databases. If you have any questions while accessing or using library resources, you can reach out to one of our liaison librarians who are happy to assist you!

Ben Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America University Libraries.

References

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Wall Street Journal. (n.d.). ProQuest. Retrieved February 27, 2026 from https://www.proquest.com/hnpwallstreetjournal/index?accountid=9940

Digital Scholar Bytes: Fair Use / Fair Dealing Week

Posted on February 23, 2026February 20, 2026 by Ben Cushing

Fair Use Week Logo Happy Fair Use / Fair Dealing Week! This year Fair Use Week runs from February 23rd to February 27th. Fair use permits limited use of copyrighted material without obtaining permission from the copyright holder when the use serves purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. By allowing for the use of copyrighted materials under fair use, contributions can be made in scientific, cultural, and other fields without being prevented by copyright law. Additionally, fair use protects the copyright holder by making sure there are limits to how others can use their copyright materials without their permission.

Fair Use Basics

Copyright in the United States is covered under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, specifically Title 17. When using a copyrighted item under fair use, certain criteria are considered. The four factors are outlined in Section 107 of the Copyright Act:

The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- This means that it is more likely to be considered fair use if you are using the copyrighted work to create something new and if the work is being utilized for educational or research purposes. Fair use will be harder to argue for when using it for commercial reasons.
The nature of the copyrighted work;
- Copyrighted works that provide factual information or have useful information for people are more likely to fall under fair use than fictional works.
- Fair use is more likely to apply to a published work than an unpublished work as copyright law protects a creator’s initial appearance of their work.
The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
- Using less of a copyrighted work is more likely to allow for fair use. However, if you are using the main part of the copyrighted work, it may not fall under fair use even if you are only utilizing a small portion of it.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
- Whether the use of a copyrighted work will prevent the copyrighted owner from making income from their work or prevent them from entering a new market for their work will impact whether it falls under fair use.

These are the four factors that a judge uses when trying to determine fair use. Please keep in mind that these are guidelines and how they are applied by a judge will depend on that particular case.

Fair Use & AI in the News

With the rise of generative AI and other AI tools in the past few years, there are concerns about AI using copyrighted materials and whether that falls under fair use. A recent Reuters article by Blake Brittain outlined various legal battles in 2025, agreements between copyright holders and AI companies for the rights to use their materials in their AI platforms, and potential upcoming legal battles. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s ruling in San Francisco allowed for Anthropic’s use of books for AI training because they considered the AI training transformative, however, they found Anthropic libel for storing pirated books not used for training in their central library.

Although the lawsuit was resolved, additional cases against Anthropic and other AI companies remain pending. In November 2025, Koda—the Danish collecting society representing songwriters, composers, and music publishers—filed suit against Suno, an AI music generation service. The outcomes of these disputes will help determine the extent to which AI companies may use copyrighted works to train their models and incorporate protected materials into their platforms. Judicial interpretations of fair use in the context of AI will ultimately shape both the development of these tools and the ways in which end users are permitted to engage with them.

Events to Attend

Want to learn more about fair use and fair dealing? Check out these events happening during Fair Use / Fair Dealing Week:

Virtual Keynote Featuring Prof David Vaver Speaking On “User Rights Then and Now”

David Vaver is a leading copyright expert and Professor Emeritus at Oxford University and Osgoode Hall Law School. The title of his keynote is “User Rights Then and Now.” The event will take place online on Wednesday, February 25, 2026, from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM (Eastern Time). To participate, please use this registration form. Simultaneous interpretation to French will be available.

Fair Use Week Congressional Briefing Hosted by ARL and Re:Create

Join the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Re:Create Coalition on Wednesday, February 25 @ 11:30 am – 1:00 pm for a congressional staff briefing in Washington, DC, during Fair Use Week. The briefing will highlight perspectives on AI and fair use from legal and policy experts. Save the date and RSVP here!

More events can be found at the Fair Use Week site. To learn more about fair use check out the Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week Toolkit which provides a variety of infographics about fair use.

Engage on social media: @ARLnews; @FairUseWeek; #FairUseWeek; #FairDealingWeek; #FDWorks

Need a consultation on a copyright issue? Contact Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship, 202-319-5504, gunn@cua.edu.

Resources

Stim, Rich. (n.d.) Measuring Fair Use: The Four Factors. Stanford. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/.

U.S. Copyright Office. (2019, October 30). Fair Use [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/IFhF_tHrj4s?si=UoudTptpBd8XNTAq.

Benjamin Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America Libraries.

Research & Instruction: Teletherapy Skills in Video

Posted on November 10, 2025November 7, 2025 by Ben Cushing

Introduction

In recent years teletherapy has become a more common mode for therapy. Learning how to conduct teletherapy is an important skill for aspiring therapists and for researchers interested in this topic. The library database, Teletherapy Skills in Video, is a great resource for best practices for teletherapy. This collection provides videos on best practices of conducting teletherapy, which are designed to teach students how to identify mental health disorders and provide diagnoses that follow SAM-5 TR/ICD 10 criteria. Additionally, the videos highlight clients with different mental health conditions and backgrounds, providing examples for working with a wide variety of clients (Alexander Street, 2025).

Accessing Videos

Main page of Teletherapy Skills in Video with filters displayed.

Using the Teletherapy Skills in Video database is easy! The main page features all the videos, and you can scroll down to look at them. To filter and find more specific videos, click the filter tab at the top of the screen. This page lets you filter by subject such as Psychotherapy and Theoretical Approaches to Counseling. Additionally, there is a slide and drag bar to filter videos by length. So if you are looking for longer or shorter videos to watch, use the slider to filter by their run time. Watch the videos by selecting the one you want to watch and pressing the play icon.

Features

Teletherapy Skills in Videos offers a variety of features. When watching you can create clips to save parts of the video that are most important. Simply select the ellipses and click create clip. This opens up an editing display where you can name the clip, give it a description, and clip the part of the video you want to save. You can also choose to make the clip visible to only you, Catholic University members, or the public using the bottom drop down menu. Click save changes to save the clip to your account under My Clips.

Other features to utilize with videos are playlists, sharing, and cite tools. The add to playlist button allows you to create playlists to put videos on certain topics together. Similar to the clip tool, you need to name the playlist and can add a description and change the visibility. Videos can be shared using by clicking the share button on the play video screen. One option for sharing videos is to use the permalink, embed code, or Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) links that are provided for each video. Select the LTI link option if you are an instructor that wants to add a video into your Brightspace course. Users can also share to social media sites by clicking on the desired social media site’s logo. Lastly is the cite button. Using this tool allows you to create and copy a citation of a selected video or users can download an RIS file to export the citation into a citation manager such as RefWorks, Mendeley, or Zotero.

Conclusion

Now you are ready to access, browse, watch, and use tools that the Teletherapy Skills in Video database offers. If you have any questions while accessing or using library resources, you can reach out to one of our liaison librarians who are happy to assist you!

Ben Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America University Libraries.

Reference

Alexander Street Video. (2025, November 6). Teletherapy Skills in Video: A Symptom Media Collection. https://video.alexanderstreet.com/channel/teletherapy-skills-in-video

Title	Author	Status
An inside job: a novel	Silva, Daniel
Project mind control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the tragedy of MKULTRA	Lisle, John
The homemade god: a novel	Joyce, Rachel
I’ll be right here: a novel	Bloom, Amy
The story of ABBA: melancholy undercover	Gradvall, Jan, 1963- author.; Sundberg, Sarah Clyne, translator.
American mythology: a novel	Cromley, Giano
Archive of unknown universes: a novel	Reyes, Ruben, Jr.
The bewitching	Moreno-Garcia, Silvia
Daikon: a novel	Hawley, Samuel Jay
Fools for love: stories	Schulman, Helen
House of Beth: a novel	Cullen, Kerry
One yellow eye	Radford, Leigh
Wayward girls: a novel	Wiggs, Susan
Algospeak: how social media is transforming the future of language	Aleksic, Adam
How we grow up: understanding adolescence	Richtel, Matt
The mission: the CIA in the 21st century	Weiner, Tim
On her game: Caitlin Clark and the revolution in women’s sports	Brennan, Christine
Black Cherokee: a novel	Downing, Antonio Michael
History lessons	Wallbrook, Zoe B.
Mississippi blue 42	Cranor, Eli
Stillwater: a thriller	Scott, Tanya
The Black family who built America: the McKissacks, two centuries of daring pioneers	Cheryl McKissack Daniel & Nick Chiles
The road that made America: a modern pilgrim’s journey on the great wagon road	Dodson, James
Bury our bones in the midnight soil	Schwab, Victoria
The last illusion of Paige White: a novel	McCausland, Vanessa
The disenlightenment: politics, horror, and entertainment	Mamet, David
Lincoln’s lady spymaster: the untold story of the abolitionist Southern belle who helped win the Civil War	Willis, Gerri

Title	Author	Status
Take to the trees: a story of hope, science, and self-discovery in America’s imperiled forests	Holloway, Marguerite
Antisemitism in America: a warning	Charles E. Schumer & Josh Molofsky
The haunting of room 904: a novel	Wurth, Erika T.
Close to home: the wonders of nature just outside your door	Hanson, Thor
When the Earth was green: plants, animals, and evolution’s greatest romance	Black, Riley
The boy from the sea	Carr, Garrett
The fact checker: a novel	Kelley, Austin
Murder machine	Graham, Heather
America, América: a new history of the New World	Grandin, Greg
Change the recipe: because you can’t build a better world without breaking some eggs	José Andrés & Richard Wolffe
Dear writer: pep talks & practical advice for the creative life	Smith, Maggie
The illegals: Russia’s most audacious spies and their century-long mission to infiltrate the West	Walker, Shaun
Medicine River: a story of survival and the legacy of Indian boarding schools	Pember, Mary Annette
Miracles and wonder: the historical mystery of Jesus	Pagels, Elaine H.
The ocean’s menagerie: how earth’s strangest creatures reshape the rules of life	Harvell, C. Drew
The book of records: a novel	Thien, Madeleine
The dark maestro: a novel	Slocumb, Brendan
Fever beach: a novel	Hiaasen, Carl
Food person: a novel	Roberts, Adam D.
Immaculate conception: a novel	Huang, Ling Ling
Julie Chan is dead: a novel	Zhang, Liann
A sharp endless need: a novel	Crane, Marisa
The art of winning: lessons from my life in football	Belichick, Bill
Freedom ship: the uncharted history of escaping slavery by sea	Rediker, Marcus
Lessons from my teachers: from preschool to the present	Ruhl, Sarah
The peepshow: the murders at Rillington Place	Summerscale, Kate
We all want to change the world: my journey through social justice movements from the 1960s to today	Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem
An ethical guide to murder	Morris, Jenny
Detained	D. Esperanza, D. & Gerardo Iván Morales
Murderland: crime and bloodlust in the time of serial killers	Fraser, Caroline
The optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the race to invent the future	Hagey, Keach
The director: a novel	Kehlmann, Danie

Title	Author	Status
Show don’t tell: stories	Sittenfeld, Curtis
Long live: the definitive guide to the folklore and fandom of Taylor Swift	Pomarico, Nicole
The sun won’t come out tomorrow: the dark history of American orphanhood	Martin, Kristen
Genesis: artificial intelligence, hope, and the human spirit	Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie, & Eric Schmidt
Deep cuts: a novel	Brickley, Holly
The sable cloak	Grant, Gail Milissa
The mask of fear	Freed, Alexander
Count my lies: a novel	Stava, Sophie
Hot air	Dermansky, Marcy
Malinalli: a novel	Chapa, Veronica
Stone angels: a novel	Rho, Helena
Bad law: ten popular laws that are ruining America	Mystal, Elie
In praise of floods: the untamed river and the life it brings	Scott, James C.
Notorious: portraits of stars from Hollywood, fashion, culture, and tech	Dowd, Maureen

Digital Scholar Bytes: Open Science and Reproducibility

Posted on March 6, 2025March 27, 2025 by Ben Cushing

Every two years, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) publishes in College & Research Libraries News an article on the top trends and issues affecting academic libraries and the change our institutions are experiencing. We are highlighting some of these trends through blog posts over this academic year, including: supporting student well-being post-pandemic; open access and equitable publishing; AI and AI literacy; open science and reproducibility; open pedagogy and instructional design; and disrupting and reconceiving collection practices.

Happy Open Education Week! To celebrate the occasion, let us take a look at open science and reproducibility, and how libraries and organizations are working on advancing it.

Values and principles mobilised by the UNESCO recommendation on Open Science. Source: UNESCO (2021).

Open science is “a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole” (UNESCO). For researchers to make their work open science, they need to plan, conduct, and publish their research with an intent for it to be openly available. When considering how to make scholarship align with open science, consider the UNESCO graphic on values and principles of open science, pictured on the right. The graphic mentions values and principles like equity and fairness and transparency, scrutiny, critique, and reproducibility. Thinking about the relevant values and principles of open science throughout the research process will ensure that your research is available to communities.

In addition to ensuring research is accessible to all through an open science approach, it is essential that the research can be reproduced by others in the field. Reproducibility “refers to the ability of a researcher to duplicate the results of a prior study using the same materials and procedures as were used by the original investigator” (Bollen et al., 2015, p. 3). This means that information that is published using an open science model should also include relevant information that will allow researchers to match the results of the original study. To ensure this can happen, researchers need to make sure that all the materials and procedures used to conduct their study are available to other researchers that want to replicate the study.

Open Science and Libraries

Libraries have been partnering with other libraries and organizations to produce resources and scholarship that fosters open science. One such partnership is the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS), which came about from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. This group consists of more than 60 American colleges and universities, which work together to support open scholarship. Based on this work, HELIOS assisted the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on a workshop that introduced an open science toolkit. The workshop proceedings and the toolkit was published as Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices: Proceedings of a Workshop (2021). This workshop investigated what was needed to build up open science and how to meet those needs. The elements discussed to promote open science are:

Open Science Imperative.
Open Science Signaling Language Template and Rubric.
Good Practices Primers. These concise guides offer policy makers a high-level overview of open sharing.
Open Science by the Numbers Infographic.
Open Science Success Stories Database.
Reimagining Outputs Worksheet.
LIBER Open Science Skills Visualization 2020.

This toolkit is useful at the administration level of institutions for helping promote open science practices in their communities.

Another organization is LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries. LIBER has prioritized developing open science, and has resources that can help people get started with open science. One LIBER working group, Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group, created a few resources on visualizing open science skills. The image on the right was created by this working group, and provides five major skills needed to practice open science. Each of the five skills lists what needs to be done to achieve them. For example, the skill ‘research integrity’ asks for information and data literacy and digital content creation as two ways to ensure research integrity. When considering how to make your research open, the LIBER Open Science Skills graphic can guide researchers on the different parts needed.

Reproducibility

Alongside open science is the need for reproducibility. Libraries need to consider how they can support reproducibility. Librarians should work with stakeholders to build a community that works towards reproducibility, develops and improves research infrastructure, and promotes reproducibility and the skills needed to implement it (Schmidt et al., 2023, p. 12). This means building meaningful relationships with partners that work with the library and its resources, and providing services that support reproducibility.

Many libraries already support some reproducibility, whether they explicitly state this. Mark MacEachern, librarian at Taubman Health Sciences Library, and Sara Samuel, University of Michigan, interviewed 11 medical and health sciences librarians. They noted that the librarians rarely described services using research reproducibility vocabulary, but they describe a ton of research reproducibility resources concepts. Some resources and concepts that are mentioned include:

Data catalogs
Data Repositories
Open Access
R
Tableau

These are not all the resources and concepts that MacEachern and Samuel mention. However, these examples illustrate how librarians’ assistance to patrons often help to ensure reproducibility. While not using vocabulary related to reproducibility, librarians still support it through a variety of ways including data collection and providing access to software.

Screenshot of an entry of influenza b organism in one of the RRID Portal virtual databases.

The Oregon Health & Science University Library has played a significant role in promoting reproducibility by contributing to the Resource Identification Initiative, which helps researchers cite key resources in biomedical research through the creation of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs). RRIDs “are ID numbers assigned to help researchers cite key resources (antibodies, model organisms and software projects) in the biomedical literature to improve transparency of research methods.” To the right is an example of an RRID identifier for an influenza B virus organism in the RRID Portal. It provides an ID number, links to metadata about the organism, and allows users to copy a citation of the RRID. By creating these unique identifiers for resources, it makes it easier for scientists to cite their work, and when researchers are trying to find important resources related to a project, the RRIDs will make it easier to find the relevant information. When other researchers go to replicate a study, they can use the RRID portal to help compile relevant sources to recreate the study. Thus making it easier to replicate the original study’s results.

Conclusion

Continuing to push scholarship towards open science and reproducibility will accelerate research and allow for more information and breakthroughs to occur. Libraries are useful in providing the tools and services needed to build research with open science in mind. Libraries already supply many tools that assist reproducibility, such as data repositories. When developing your research, check in with your library to see what resources they have to support open science and reproducibility.

Benjamin Cushing is a Research and Instruction Librarian at The Catholic University of America Libraries.

References

Arrison, T., Saunders, J., & Kameyama, E. (2021). Developing a Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices. The National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26308/chapter/1

Bollen, Kenneth, et al. (2015). Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science. Report of the Subcommittee on Replicability in Science Advisory Committee to the National Science Foundation Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

Gainey, M. A., Griego, C., & Scotti, K. (2024). From the lab to librarianship: Advancing open science. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 108.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Policy and Global Affairs; Committee on Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Public Policy, et al. (2019). Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US). May 7.

UNESCO. UNESCO Open Science. Accessed February 28, 2025.

Title	Author	Status
Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the race that will change the world	Olson, Parmy
Feeding the machine: the hidden human labor powering A.I.	James Muldoon, Mark Graham, & Callum Cant
How to let things go: 99 tips from a Zen Buddhist monk to relinquish control and free yourself up for what matters	Masuno, Shunmyō
The city in glass	Vo, Nghi
Alter ego: a novel	Segura, Alex
Knife skills for beginners	Murrin, Orlando
The resurrectionist	Dunlap, A. Rae
What it’s like in words: a novel	Moss, Eliza
The favorites: a novel	Fargo, Layne
The life of Herod the Great: a novel	Hurston, Zora Neale
Mask of the deer woman	Dove, Laurie L.
More or less Maddy: a novel	Genova, Lisa
An African history of Africa: from the dawn of humanity to independence	Badawi, Zeinab
Defy: the power of no in a world that demands yes	Sah, Sunita
The DOSE effect: optimize your brain and body by boosting your dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins	Power, Tj
The forgotten sense: the new science of smell–and the extraordinary power of the nose	Olofsson, Jonas
A history of Ancient Rome in twelve coins	Harney, Gareth
Booster shots: the urgent lessons of measles and the uncertain future of children’s health	Ratner, Adam J.
Hope: the autobiography	Pope Francis and Carlo Musso
The vanishing point: stories	Theroux, Paul
Source code: my beginnings	Gates, Bill
Superbloom: how technologies of connection tear us apart	Carr, Nicholas G.

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Author: Ben Cushing

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