Five University of Illinois at Chicago students won an international competition for a short video illustrating how online open-access publishing can spur innovation.
UIC Honors College students Danaya Panya, Jaymeni Patel, Sebastian
Rivera, Uriel Rotstein and Hemanth Sirandas produced “To Infinity and Beyond,” a one-minute video that can be viewed online.
The students produced the video for Communication in the Digital Age, a course taught by Nancy John, former interim university librarian, that explores issues in the movement to digitize information.
“We all learned about the importance of open access to information and have become open access supporters ourselves,” Rotstein said.
The Sparky Awards competition is organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries established 11 years ago with assistance from Mary Case, head of the UIC Library.
“The coalition advocates for cost-effective publishing systems and open access to publicly funded research,” Case said. “If authors can retain some of their copyrights and deposit their work in digital repositories, researchers will have open access to knowledge.”
Judges for the awards include university librarians, academics in cinema and cultural anthropology, a documentary filmmaker, and leadersof several national student associations. The winners will receive $1,000. Links to all of the award-winning videos are available on the SPARC Web site.
