Presentations: OA Public Health Archive & Platform for OERs

2 presentations:

Right To Know: How Legal Milestones Launched an Open Access Public Health Archive
Kate Tasker, Emma James, Melissa Ignacio, Rachel Taketa
University of California San Francisco, United States of America

How do you preserve and provide access to millions of previously internal corporate documents released through public interest lawsuits? Staff from the Industry Documents Library (IDL) at the University of California San Francisco will share an overview of the IDL repository, and how a box of documents from a tobacco company whistleblower launched a digital archive that now includes over 26 million freely available documents obtained from industries which impact public health. The team will discuss the challenges of navigating the legal landscape of document disclosure, managing large volumes of digitized and born-digital records which may contain sensitive information, and facilitating open access for a wide audience of academic researchers, students, policymakers, public health experts, educators, legal professionals, journalists, and community advocates. The presentation will offer tips and lessons learned for accessioning very large digital collections, sustaining staffing and funding, establishing policies and workflows for safeguarding sensitive data, and centering user needs in repository design and decision-making.

Building a lightweight national platform for OERs in international collaboration
Jörg Pareigis (1), Anna Wolke (2), Axel Klinger (3)
(1) Karlstad University, Sweden; (2) Linnaeus University, Sweden; (3) TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Germany

Despite early discussions of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in Sweden, their uptake remains limited, partly due to fragmented infrastructure. Recent national open science guidelines and the updated roadmap of the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF) call for stronger coordination, a sharing culture, and international collaboration around OER. This abstract presents the development of a forthcoming lightweight national platform for OERs in Sweden that directly addresses these ambitions. The initiative combines technical reuse with service design. Technically, Karlstad University and the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), together with Sunet and Swedish HEIs, integrate the Open Educational Resources Search Index (OERSI) as a central search layer that aggregates distributed OER repositories without hosting content itself. A simple WordPress-based front end, open APIs, and repository-grade services such as Zenodo minimize proprietary development while ensuring persistence, openness, and FAIR-aligned discovery. Equally important is the process behind the solution. Using design-led and agile methods, the project evolved through iterative prototyping, shared governance, and close engagement with educators, librarians, and national actors. The work was further shaped by cultivated serendipity arising from international collaboration and a “ready to reuse” mindset. The case offers a transferable reference architecture and practical lessons for sustainable, collaborative national (OER) infrastructures.