SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the winners of the first SPARKY Awards. The 2007 contest called on entrants to imaginatively illustrate in a short video the value of sharing ideas and information of all kinds.
The three winning entries offer a glimpse of student views on the importance of access to information, and feature an animated look at the most basic benefits of sharing, a film noir-style crime investigation using the Internet, and a tongue-in-cheek documentary on Open Access. The winners are:
First Place, “Share” Written and directed by Habib Yazdi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
First Runner Up, “Pri Vetai: Private Eye” Directed by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, Carleton College
Second Runner Up, “An Open Access Manifesto” Written and directed by Romel Espinel and Josh Hadro, Pratt Institute
“I decided to participate in the contest because I strongly believe in the value of sharing – especially with regard to information,” said Habib Yazdi, who is a senior communication studies major. “Through sharing what we have learned we can improve the lives of those who are less privileged. Being on a college campus, I have really come to appreciate how many students are willing to share knowledge with others.”
"Tommy and I had a lot of fun working on our film,” said Max Silver, a freshman. Being able to access information for free has vastly changed society, especially in the lives of students. It is important to realize this, and to keep moving in the same direction – to give as many people as much information as possible."
Josh Hadro, a student of library science, added, “While the focus of our class was academic librarianship, Open Access was a frequently recurring theme in our discussions, and one to which nearly all of the students in our small seminar-style class were sympathetic. Romel and I especially agreed with this idea of the inevitable progress of the Open Access movement, and used the opening of the video to highlight this. We enjoyed the thought of the Ken Burns-esque look back at a time before Open Access was a given.” Their film was made as a final project for a course in scholarly communication....
Each of the winning entries is available under a Creative Commons use license, which enables creators to easily mark their work with the freedoms they want it to carry and tells users what rights they have beyond those under copyright.
PS: Congratulations to Yazdi, McCauley, Silver, Espinel, and Hadro.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/22/2008 08:36:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
