The great benefit of making items open access is that, supposedly, anyone with access to the internet can read them. However, many open access advocates don't always think about people different from them, especially those who are not always able to read or hear what is online. Too often the items we put online that are either open access or promote open access are not made to work with these needs.
I put together this website to try to address one small area of this problem - online videos promoting open access and other open topics - through the power of crowd sourcing. The problem The vast majority of videos out there designed to promote and educate others about open access have no closed captions or have closed captions in desperate need of editing (seriously, turn the CC on and watch for yourself). While I would love to edit them all, I don't have the time. I doubt anyone does. The solution I'm inviting basically anyone who can hear the audio on these videos to help edit their closed captions. Visit my playlist of videos in need of editing (you will need a YouTube account to do this), pick one, click the "Contribute" button to the right of it and get to it. Never edited closed captions before? Don't worry, it's really easy and intuitive. I picked it up almost immediately. My biggest tip: Use shift+space bar to quickly pause and play the videos. I'm also not grading on anyone's grammar/spelling. The better it is, of course, the better for those relying on the text. But my main goal is to make sure that those people can understand what's being said. I don't see a need to get into a throwdown over the Oxford comma. A lot of these OA videos can be long, and editing the CC takes even longer. I get that you might not have the time/desire to edit one entire video. That's cool. Just start at the beginning and then note in the comments to the video the time mark where you stopped. Also, when you submit your revisions, please check to allow others to keep editing. Everyone should then check the comments first to see if someone has already started editing; that way you can jump straight to the spot where the other person left off. Whenever you get to the end of a video and you go to submit, you do not need to check to allow others to keep editing. I'll then get a notice it's done and can publish them. That's a pretty weak list of videos Yeah, I know. I started with the videos I wanted to use for my own websites. I then started trying to find others to add. Guess what - there's a lot of videos out there about OA! I highly doubt that even with group effort we'll ever edit all of their closed captions. So I decided to focus on those videos most in demand. I selected a few that seemed popular, but I figure this is another area where crowd sourcing could help. Got a video you want included? Step 1) Make sure it's either got a CC license or some other permission that allows me to make a copy. Step 2) Go to the Contact form to let me know about it (please include its website URL). I can then download the video and add it to my list of videos needing editing. Got a video that already has edited CC you want to include? Even better! Just go to the Contact form and send me a link to the video. I can then include that link in my list of OA videos with edited CC. No copying of the video needed.
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