6-17 September 2021, 9am-6pm

What if the results from publicly funded research were freely available to everyone? Open Access represents this vision of unrestricted access and use of scholarly publications and further research materials freely available worldwide without any legal, technical or financial barriers. Germany supports this idea at both the federal and state levels. Numerous research and higher education institutions have already issued open access policies and guidelines. Together with their libraries, they engage in open access advocacy activities and offer consultancy on issues related to open access to students and researchers. They build open access repositories and manage publication funds to cover open access publication costs. The project open-access.network collects data on individual institutions at federal state level as well as strategic political activities to showcase best practices and provide an overview of the open access activities.

The Summer School will focus on visualizing open access in Germany (Open Access Bundesländer-Atlas) and beyond to raise awareness of this transformation in academic publishing. This Summer School aims at providing students with an introduction to principles and methods of information visualization combined with an opportunity to apply general principles to specific visualization designs to exemplary use cases such as Open Access Bundesländer-Atlas. Lectures with experts from the fields of human-computer interaction, information science, and interface design from the cooperating institutions cover the topics of the fundamentals of information visualization e.g. mapping data to visual variables, and techniques for visualizing multidimensional, relational and textual data as well as an introduction to the concept of open access.

Students will closely collaborate in small, interdisciplinary teams. The hands-on session tutorials complement the inputs during the lectures with practical activities and assignments directed towards a visual representation of the data.

The Summer School is a cooperation between Fachhochschule Potsdam, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin and the Open-Access-Büro Berlin acting on behalf of the BMBF funded project open-access.network. Furthermore, the project “Kompetenzentwicklung Open Access Brandenburg” will also be involved in the Summer School.

Please note: The Summer School will be given in English. It is targeted at advanced students enrolled in design, information science, or computer science at Fachhochschule Potsdam,  Freie Universität Berlin_ and Humboldt University of Berlin. The overall number of students is limited to 25. Your participation benefits from basic knowledge of data structures and algorithms._