Image courtesy of Paul Joseph / UBC Brand & Marketing / UBC Studios
My name is Leila Malkin, and I work as the Scholarly Communications Assistant in UBC Library’s Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office. My work connects with several teams across the Library, including cIRcle. Moving between different open scholarship workflows has shown me how many people and processes contribute to making UBC-created materials available to a wider community. The tasks are varied, but they all contribute to the broader goal of supporting open scholarship at the university.
Working in the Open
One thing I have learned is that working in the open involves more steps than many people expect. The idea of sharing work freely suggests a simple process, but there are varying permissions, policies, and technical requirements that need to be taken into account when deciding how to make the material available.
A significant portion of our work involves helping UBC faculty instructors and researchers understand these numerous pieces, so they can share their materials openly with confidence. For faculty getting started with open education, Open UBC provides examples, guides, and contacts to help with open teaching and OER development. For questions about open access and sharing research outputs, the Scholarly Communications Open Access page and the cIRcle FAQs offer guidance on author rights, permissions, and the cIRcle deposit process.
Supporting Green Open Access
For previously published work (such as journal articles), the support often begins with determining the permitted version and where it can be shared. This usually involves reviewing ownership and publisher policies. These policies outline what rights authors retain, which version of their article they can reuse, and where that version can legally be posted. We use resources like the UBC Library Author’s Guide to Self-Archiving, Publication Versions and Permissions to walk faculty through these conditions and help them identify the version that can be deposited into cIRcle.
I encounter this process regularly while doing cIRcle outreach and recruitment for initiatives such as Paper Pledge for the Planet. The outreach process involves reviewing articles that are behind a paywall, confirming through the journal’s policy whether a sharable version exists, and then reaching out to authors with the details. This work supports what is known as green open access.
Green open access involves depositing a version of a published work in a non-commercial repository so it can be read and used without a subscription. In many cases, authors are able to share an accepted or post-print version of their article even if the final published version remains behind a paywall. Figuring out the sharing options for a specific article ahead of time allows us to offer clear guidance and keep the cIRcle deposit process as straightforward as possible for the UBC faculty member. For more information on this process, see cIRcle’s previous post on Publishing grant-funded research articles in cIRcle : The Green Open Access Route.
Supporting Open Educational Resources (OER)
Work with open educational resources (OER) follows a different process because instructors often connect for support while materials are still being created or adapted. OER are teaching and learning materials that are free to use, adapt, and share. Rather than navigating publisher policies for already published work, OER development focuses on building teaching and learning materials that can be openly shared from the outset.
At UBC, support for OER development is coordinated through Open UBC, which brings together expertise from the Library and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT). The Open UBC site provides a starting point for instructors interested in open education, including examples of existing OER, guidance on licensing and attribution, and information about project planning and funding.
My role within this broader effort primarily focuses on supporting open textbooks and other teaching materials developed in Pressbooks. In practice, this means working with instructors as they shape their content into a polished, shareable resource. I help review materials they plan to reuse, such as images or diagrams, to confirm they can be shared openly, and support instructors in applying appropriate attribution. I also assist with structuring and formatting content in Pressbooks to improve clarity, accessibility, and long-term reuse. UBC instructors bring the subject expertise; I help with the practical setup that turns that expertise into a resource that is clear, accessible, and ready to share widely and openly.
If you’re interested in incorporating OER into your teaching, it can be helpful to connect early in the process. Get in touch through Open UBC for a consultation, whether you’re exploring existing OER to replace a paid textbook or developing your own materials. You can also browse the UBC OER Collection to explore existing OER for potential adoption and/or use.
Collaboration Across Units
Across both research and teaching projects, openness is highly reliant on collaboration. No single team handles every step. Different library units (along with partners such as the CTLT), contribute technical support, design expertise, rights guidance, preservation knowledge, and platform management.
Within this network of support, cIRcle plays an important role as UBC’s institutional repository. The cIRcle team helps connect UBC research and teaching materials to the broader open access ecosystem by ensuring they are shared openly, clearly described, and easy to find through repositories and discovery tools. This work helps preserve and promote UBC’s scholarly output so it can be used both within and beyond the university.
My role is one part of this larger network. I help connect people with the information and tools they need, and I make sure that the practical details of sharing are handled with care. When these pieces come together, the result is material that is easy to find, understand, and reuse.
If you’re ready to share your journal article or OER in cIRcle, check out the cIRcle Submissions page, or contact the cIRcle Office.
