International Open Access Week spans 22 – 28 of October this year. It’s a great time to find out more about open access initiatives that you can both benefit from and participate in.
Open Access enables people to learn from a much greater commons of research and knowledge than would otherwise be possible. It’s a movement very much inline with the missions of libraries and with the research life cycle. Without open access we’re left with a scholarly ecosystem dependent on a few powerful commercial interests. Those commercial interests tend to control or prevent access except for the parties able to pay the most. A detriment to access-to-knowledge and research.
At Concordia, my colleagues and I have been organizing a screening of the film, Paywall: the Business of Scholarship. We’re following it up with a discussion/Q&A session so that people can get a better sense of what’s happening at Concordia.
Here is a nice article about OA at Concordia. More about our event here, it’s on Tuesday evening, doors open at 5 (film starts at 5:30) and it’s FREE, so come. I’ve discovered that a lot of other universities are holding a similar event so if you miss it at Concordia, you can probably find it somewhere else nearby.
Find out more about open access by following these links:
- Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
- CAUT Open Access Policy Statement
- Budapest Open Access Initiative
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
- Creative Commons on open access
- About Concordia’s open access repository, Spectrum. | Concordia University Press (OA)
- A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access
- Harvard Open Access Project
- Appel de Jussieu
- Joint statement about open access by COAR and UNESCO