Research Remix

Open Access is one of the major issues that we keep revisiting in this class. In honor of International Open Access Week (which spans from October 19-23, and is an “international movement that pushes for broad and free access to research findings and publicly funded studies”), I’m blogging about the Issue Lab and its Research Remix, which I discovered at the Open Access Week website.

IssueLab is an open access archive and online publishing forum that gathers and shares nonprofit research about social issues. The mission of IssueLab is to “more effectively archive, distribute and promote the extensive and diverse body of work being produced by the third sector.” IssueLab aims to make it easier for nonprofits to manage and share their research with others.

On Monday, coinciding perfectly with the beginning of Open Access Week, the Research Remix was announced. This is a contest issued by IssueLab that calls for contestants to creatively reuse nonprofit research data to make videos that provide commentary on social issues. The goal of the IssueLab’s Research Remix is to get interested people to “apply their skills for social good, to base their social commentary in fact, and to learn about legally remixing and re-purposing existing content.”

At the IssueLab website there are over 300 (I believe the current count to be 335) Creative Commons openly licensed research reports archived that contestants can use when making their videos; these reports all have openly licensed video footage, images and music for video-makers to repurpose. This video contest “aims to engage working artists and digital media students” while at the same time “encouraging nonprofits to make their research more broadly available and usable through open licensing.”

The deadline for this competition is December 31, and one of the requirements is that the submitted contest videos must be openly licensed, which I think is a great requirement because fair is fair; after all, it wouldn't be right to use someone else's openly available materials, and then not let anyone else remix your own. All final videos will be made available to the organizations whose research was used in remixing.

I love the idea of the Research Remix and I think it will be something fun that inventive video-making types can really get involved with; as evidenced by the growing numbers of fan-made videos at websites like YouTube, people love to remix and repurpose things. By using openly licensed material, the Research Remix is a great way for people to make a statement about social issues while creatively expressing themselves legally. Legally is the key word in that sentence; much of the fan video remixing that is found online is illegal because users repurpose copyrighted material. I’m not sure how much this contest is really going to be encouraging for nonprofits to make their research more openly accessible, but I like that the thought is there and that an effort is being made.

That being said, I hope everyone is having a happy International Open Access Week.