The Public Knowledge Project at 21: Activism, Scholarship, Security Patches
A Conversation with Professor John Willinsky

Co-hosted by the UBC Library and the UBC iSchool (Library, Archival and Information Studies)

Date/location: July 11, 2019, 2:00-3:30pm (a one-hour talk followed by thirty minutes for informal conversation and refreshments)
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Lillooet Room | UBC Vancouver Campus
Light refreshments will be served.

Register in advance at: http://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/8066

On or around December 1998, a UBC professor of education inadvertently stepped out of his field of study and into the realm of scholarly communication, having been thrown off course by a glaring contradiction between teaching the young to read – on the promise that it would open worlds for them – and working in an academic system that needlessly cut such readers off from the world of learning in which he worked. His response was to create a Public Knowledge Project that soon attracted the attention, support, and, at one point, the censure of The University of British Columbia Library. Although this talk begins on a personal note, it soon leaps ahead to the current state of scholarly communication. Here, it sets out PKP’s continuing efforts to open that world of learning take the form of building out open infrastructure in the face of corporate lock-in, initiating economic models for universal open access, and proposing copyright reform as an advance over the legal workarounds of open access policies.

BIOGRAPHY:

John Willinsky is Professor in Publishing Studies at SFU, where he directs the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software; he is also Khosla Family Professor of Education and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. A member of the Royal Society of Canada, his books include the “Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED” (Princeton, 1994); “Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End” (Minnesota, 1998); “Technologies of Knowing” (Beacon 2000); and “The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship” (MIT Press, 2006).

Part-time position, in partnership with Public Knowledge Project.

In 2016, John Willinsky was honoured with a SSHRC Impact Award for his work with the Public Knowledge Project.

CARL, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries recently released an updated version of the Canadian Author Addendum along with an Authors Guide that supports the use of the addendum. Author addenda help authors insert legal language into their publishing contracts that allow them to retain rights in their work. This may be particularly useful in cases where grants require authors to make their work open access.

For more information and links to the resources, refer to the CARL news release.

Recording of Balancing the scales: The role of fair dealing in Canada now live in UBC’s institutional repository.

The planning committee for the joint SFU, UBC, Langara, KPU, Douglas, VCC and JIBC Fair Dealing Week event is happy to announce that an archived copy of the talk is now available for viewing in UBC’s institutional repository, cIRcle. Both the panel discussion and Meera Nair’s keynote address are available at the following link:

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/69041

The planning committee would like to thank all who participated virtually and in-person as well as the event sponsors CAUT, UBC, Langara, SFU, Kwantlen, and Douglas for making the event such a success.

The week of March 4th is Open Education Week, an annual celebration of the global Open Education Movement. This year we invite the UBC community to join us and our colleagues from other higher ed institutions from the Lower Mainland at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Richmond campus for a one day “Open in Action” event on March 6th from 8:30-3:15.

More information about the schedule and registration are available on BCcampus’s website.

We hope to see you there.

In response to a growing concern about the increasing concentration of control of research communication functions by a small number of players, SPARC and COAR have developed a list of seven Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication. The List is meant to “provide a framework to ensure that services are transparent, open, and support the aims and values of the scholarly community” (SPARC).

To learn more about the principles and download a copy, refer to the SPARC website.

Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week is an annual celebration of the doctrines of fair use and fair dealing — a perfect opportunity to reflect on what is quickly becoming a pivotal period in the history of copyright in Canada. York University has appealed the decision in its case with Access Copyright, the statutory review of the Copyright Act is still underway, and the USMCA free trade agreement promises to extend the term of copyright protection by twenty years. In this climate, building increased awareness about user rights such as fair dealing is more important than ever before.

This Fair Dealing Week, SFU, UBC, Langara, KPU, Douglas, VCC and JIBC invite you to an afternoon of presentations and discussion aimed at demonstrating the value of fair dealing in a modern Canadian context and highlighting the perspectives of diverse copyright stakeholders.

You are also invited to join us for a pub night hosted by the BCLA Academic Libraries Section, to unwind and play Copyright the Card Game.

Details and registration for both events are available here.

UBC Library is proud to support International Open Access Week through an exciting series of events happening during the week of October 22-28. Please refer to the Library’s Open Access Week page for information about individual events and how to register.

ScholComm@UBC looks forward to seeing you there!

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office was awarded a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund grant for the 2018/2019 cycle. With this grant funding, we have in turn granted out smaller amounts to support faculty creation of OER and open textbooks.

We are now proud to introduce the first product to come out of this project, Digital Meijis: Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150. This collection of visual essays has been adapted from The Meiji at 150 Project. Led by Tristan Grunow, Assistant Professor without Review, History Department and Naoko Kato, Japanese Language Librarian, Asian Library, this initiative celebrates the 150th anniversary of Japan’s 1868 Meiji Restoration and seeks to increase collaboration between scholars at universities across Canada, Japan, and the United States, strengthening UBC’s ties to Japanese studies programs around the region in disciplines including, and beyond, history, as well as magnifying the presence of UBC and UBC’s Japanese collections in the field of Japanese studies in North America.

Recently the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Office released its 2017/2018 Impact and Activity Report, showcasing some of the year’s highlights and accomplishments.

For more information, or to share feedback please contact scholarly.communications@ubc.ca

Read the Report.

Knowledge Unlatched, a prominent publisher of Open Access monographs, recently announced the achievement of an important milestone – Over 950 open access titles from the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have been accessed more than 1 million times by users worldwide in the past 8 months of this year alone. This achievement represents a significant increase in downloads over the previous year.

UBC Library is a proud supporter of Knowledge Unlatched, and, along with over 500 other libraries worldwide, helps make academic monographs openly accessible online, for free. This partnership demonstrates the Library’s commitment to open access and providing academic materials to as wide an audience as possible.