In celebration of open access and its global impact for over a decade, UBC and SFU will be participating in the 2018 International Open Access Week event during October 22-28, 2018.

 

Throughout UBC’s 2018 Open Access Week event, scholars will showcase and discuss their innovative research, teaching and learning skills and experiences while inspiring others to learn more and get involved with the global open access movement. These events will highlight the various opportunities and pathways enabling open scholarship for researchers at UBC and beyond.

 

Similar to past UBC Open Access Week events, this year will include free lectures, workshops, a panel discussion with a Q&A session, seminars, and symposia for students, faculty, staff, and the general public. Topical and timely issues will include the following ones to list just a few:

 

• new challenges faced by practitioners and stakeholders
• developing a scholarly/publishing profile
• applying Creative Commons licenses to your work
• navigating the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy (NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR)
• discovering Open Educational Resources (OER)

 

Visit Open UBC to register and attend these free events

 

Learn more about Open Access at UBC

 

 

 

 

This year’s International Open Access Week 2018 theme is “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge” as announced by the 2018 Open Access Week Advisory Committee

 

Key highlights will focus on thought-provoking questions about challenges raised as the open access movement and scholarly research system draw closer despite changes in technology, education, funding, governments, publishing and such affecting many stakeholders around the world. This annual event is of keen interest to scholars, libraries, private and public research institutions, and anyone desiring to improve and advance a more equitable open scholarly research system.

 

Examples of anticipated questions surrounding the “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge” theme for 2018 are as follows:

 

How do we ensure sustainability models used for open access are not exclusionary?

What are inequities that open systems can recreate or reinforce?

Whose voices are prioritized? Who is excluded?

How does what counts as scholarship perpetuate bias?

What are areas where openness might not be appropriate?

 

Stay tuned for more news about Open Access Week 2018 and upcoming Open UBC events!

 

 

 

 

Librarian Erin Fields tells the Ubyssey about how professors are leveraging technologies to help make learning more flexible (October 15, 2016).

Open UBC, the Library’s annual celebration of Open Access week, highlights areas of open scholarship for UBC’s researchers, faculty, students and staff. 

The events include presentations, debates, workshops, demonstrations and a film screening. This year’s events will be held October 28 and 29, in conjunction with UBC’s Celebrate Learning Week. 

Highlights include: 

• a keynote with Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education at SPARC
• a debate on the value of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), moderated by UBC VP Angela Redish 
• a discussion on  the future of scholarly publishing
• brown bag sessions on open education resources
• student presentations on open access research
• a robotics and 3D printing demonstration 

All events will be held in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, in the Lillooet Room (301) unless otherwise stated.

For registration and a full schedule of events visit the Open UBC website.

October 20 to the 24 is International Open Access Week and a number of educational institutions are offering workshops and events to celebrate open access.

 You’ve probably heard the term “open access” before, but what does it really mean? And how is it relevant to you as a student, researcher or instructor at UBC?

Open access is both a theory and a movement – encouraging the removal of barriers to scholarly research, so that scholarly work is accessible by people everywhere. Open access advocate Peter Suber defines open access literature as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”

The key components to open access include removing price, copyright and access barriers to information. For example, most books or articles are individually affordable – but for a researcher, or a library, to consult hundreds of works would be a significant cost, and thus, a price barrier.

Open access encourages publishers to remove price-based access, or “toll road” access. It also encourages researchers to share their work in open access journals or scholarly publications with no permissions or copyright barriers.

Restrictive licences and publisher policies limit who can view articles and how they can be used or shared with other people. Authors are often restricted from sharing their own articles with colleagues or students. Open access encourages removing most permissions barriers, so that scholars are free to access or reuse literature for academic or research purposes, so long as the original author is properly cited – for example the Wikimedia Commons uses Creative Commons licenses.

This would mean access is available to everyone: policy makers, health care workers, professionals, educators, scholars in the developing world, and the public. This has many benefits for researchers – open access articles and journals tend to be cited more frequently than non-open access works. Open access makes scholarly research available to more people who can put it to use. It also frees those people to use and reuse it.

How can you support open access initiatives at UBC and beyond?

• Come to the Library’s annual open access celebration – October 28 and 29. Visit the Open UBC website for a full schedule of events
• Check out the Scholarly Communications website for information about ways UBC is encouraging open access
• Find research in cIRcle, UBC’s open access institutional repository
• Explore the Library’s Open Access Journal Hosting site

 

This content was developed from the Scholarly Communications @ UBC website and Peter Suber’s Open access (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).