"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results [...]."¹
Open Access Week is an invaluable chance to connect the global momentum toward the open sharing of knowledge with the advancement of policy changes and the importance of social issues affecting people around the world.
The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions, and organizations around the world, and its organization is led by a global advisory committee.
The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek²
This year’s theme encourages a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.
Adopted by its 193 Member States, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science highlights the need to prioritize community over commercialization in its calls for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities” and support for “non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges.” By focusing on these areas, we can achieve the original vision outlined when open access was first defined: “an old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.”²
| Dates | Descriptions |
|---|---|
|
Thursday, October 19 |
Copyright and Licensing for Open Educational ResourcesDoes your project include work created by others? Do you have questions about Creative Commons licenses and how to incorporate licensed works into your project? This session will introduce you to copyright basics for your OER project and take you through licensing considerations to insure that your work is reusable by others. Importantly it will also provide you with a simple workflow to help you identify and respect Creative Commons licensed works. This session will cover:
From 4:00 to 5:00pm |
| Monday, October 23 |
Hacking the Academy: The Adoption of OpenThis year’s Open Access Week focuses on the theme of “community over commercialization” and provides an opportunity to examine the successes and challenges of adopting open practices in software development, open education, open data, and new funding models to support this work. Join our panelists as they converse around their work to support the adoption of open. This program will take place fully online through Zoom. From 1:00 to 2:00pm |
| Tuesday, October 24 |
Find and Make Open Scholarship with Creative Commons LicensesLearn how to get, collaborate on, and share research or creative works with Creative Commons (CC) licences. Researchers frequently use these licences to enable open scholarship or open science processes. Whether you need images for a presentation, are seeking information for your own work, or want to mix sounds into new music, Creative Commons licences enable you to access and share with people around the world. In this workshop you will find out what the Creative Commons is and how to use CC licences. We will practice working with CC content and look at the ramifications of applying different licences to our own work. We will also explore some useful tools for finding CC-licensed work. From 1:00 to 3:00pm |
| Wednesday, October 25 |
Making Methods Move: Toward Protocol Sharing Across the DisciplinesMissing or inaccessible information about the methods used in scholarly research can slow the pace of discovery. Yet less attention has been paid to the sharing of detailed methods information than to other Open Science practices like data sharing or preprint posting. Drawing on survey research and large-scale analysis of recent scientific publications, this talk makes the case for step-by-step protocols as a format that can foster research quality, efficiency, and equity in a wide variety of research fields, including the humanities and social sciences. Highlighting diverse use cases from replication to abductive reuse, the talk discusses interactions with other tools such as persistent identifiers, considers limit cases, and explores opportunities for approaching protocols as first-class scholarly outputs. From 2:00 to 3:00pm |
| Thursday, October 26 |
Advancing Research Visibility through National PortalsJoin the Public Knowledge Project and Érudit as they celebrate 25 years by bringing you timely programming on pivotal topics in scholarly communications and publishing. On October 26, during Open Access Week, join panelists from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Sweden to discuss national portals – collections of journals that are published within a geographic location that combine their metadata, and sometimes content, in a single interface. This panel discussion brings together representatives from nascent and mature national portal projects to shed light on the benefits, challenges, and strategies for effectively establishing and maintaining these critical platforms. From 11:00am to 12:30pm |
| Thursday, October 26 |
Catalyzing Open ScienceOpen science—and the broader open scholarship movement—is reshaping the landscape of research by democratizing access to knowledge and bringing inclusion and transparency to the forefront. While endorsing the concept of open science is straightforward in principle, translating it into action poses great challenges because it requires that researchers implement several practices in their workflows. These practices include open access, open educational resources, open data, open labs, open peer review, open-source software, and citizen science. While open science implementation once depended on scholars voluntarily incorporating some of these practices into their research, it is now unmistakably becoming a priority in both Québec and the rest of Canada. This shift is substantiated by new policies and mandates currently being enacted by federal and provincial funding agencies. The Concordia Open Science Working Group (COSWG) invites you to join us in charting the path forward for the implementation of open science at Concordia University. Led by Nicolás Alessandroni and Krista Byers-Heinlein, COSWG consists of 20+ professors, librarians, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students from across different academic units and departments. COSWG recently published a report outlining a series of practical recommendations for fostering Open Science at Concordia University—now openly available on Concordia University’s institutional repository, Spectrum. From 2:00 to 4:00pm |
| Friday, October 27 |
Creative Commons WorkshopCreative Commons (CC) licenses are an important tool in the Open Access movement. They signal that a work can be freely used and shared in ways the copyright holder allows. Join us for this fully online workshop to review how the CC licenses work and find out where to find CC licensed media. From 1:00 to 2:00pm |
| Friday, October 27 |
Open for Community: Across Platform Demos and ConversationsWant to learn more about how academic communities can push back against paywalled knowledge in various genres, including books, journals, research-creation materials, datasets, software, dissertations, and more? Want to learn more about how the right to share and access data, information, and knowledge equitably can benefit our research and educational environments? What does cross-platform use mean or look like for innovation in higher education? This event offers a series of show-and-tell demonstrations of Concordia-led innovation and work-in-progress on community-driven open initiatives, followed by a lively discussion. Participants will have the chance to explore a range of open genres and platforms (i.e.: Manifold for book publishing, Pressbooks for open textbooks, Spectrum for open-access articles and more, Dataverse for data, blogs, and more). We will look at open scholarship and educational content alongside the potential for cross-platform use to reach multiple audiences. From 4:00 to 5:30pm |
| Tuesday, October 31 |
Open access PublishingWhat is open access publishing? Researchers have a number of options to openly publish articles and other scholarly outputs such as posters and conference presentations. This workshop will provide an overview of the possibilities and things to know when considering open access publishing. From 2:00 to 3:00pm |
| Wednesday, November 8 |
Introduction to Open Society Framework (OSF)OSF is a free open platform to support your research and enable collaboration. As a project management tool, it encourages best practices in project organization and reproducibility. In this introductory workshop, you will explore some existing projects, set up an OSF account, and learn the basics of OSF to manage a research project from start to finish. From 2:00 to 3:00pm |
