Creative Commons License
Wanting to follow Wikimedia’s initiative and mission to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain” (Wikimedia, 2018), the intention was always to have one Creative Commons (CC) license for all the chapters. In the early stages, we discussed the possibility of allowing contributors to pick their license, but after some deliberation, we decided to publish the whole volume under a CC BY license and be transparent about that from the beginning. We chose this license because it would allow for the largest dissemination and would allow for our contributors to still retain some ownership over their work. We also considered the possibility of publishing the whole volume under a CC 0, no rights reserved license, but ultimately we decided against this option since this may have impacted the number of contributors willing to publish their work under a public domain license and because this license might have made it difficult for our contributors to track the impact of their work, use their published work as part of any promotion processes, or even make it difficult to justify the value of the work they are doing.
“In the Time of COVID”
Perhaps due to the optimism expressed toward the beginning of the pandemic, we believed that simply extending the proposal deadline would let us get through the worst of things. Little did we know that our reality was about to be overturned and that we would be writing, peer reviewing, and publishing our work during a pandemic. To this day, it is sometimes difficult to fathom how this book managed to take shape. While you may only be hearing our perspective as editors, I hope that you instead consider and thank our contributing authors and peer reviewers for their labor, both academic and emotional. After all, they stuck with us until the end and made it all possible.
This publication is just a microcosm of what academia and teaching have become during the pandemic, and the fact that we were working
