Open Access Week 2020 – Being Open with Purpose
Open Access Week in 2020 is all about being open with purpose and taking action to build structural equity and inclusion. Open Access Week is an international campaign that takes place in October, this year, it runs from October 19 to 25. Open access is something that everyone can benefit from, it doesn’t matter if you are a researcher, instructor, faculty, or student at U of G, open access is for you.
Open Science
If you’re a researcher, you may be interested in learning more about open science. The Roadmap for Open Science was published by the Canadian Government in 2020, with a vision “to make Canadian science open to all, maximizing benefits for the well-being, health and economy of our country.” An example of open science at U of G is the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics.
Right now, we’re all affected in some way by COVID-19. COVID-19 has enabled us to see the impact of accelerated sharing of data and research. Governments, NGOs, and research institutes have pooled together resources to respond scientifically and socially to the pandemic. Some examples are:
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s COVID-19 Resources: Research outputs and open science
- UNESCO’s Open access to facilitate research and information on COVID-19 and COVID-19 - Open science and reinforced scientific cooperation
- Zenodo’s Coronavirus Disease Research Community
- OpenAIRE’s COVID-19 Open Research Gateway
Impact on Education
COVID-19 has had an impact on education as well, aside from the shift to online learning, or perhaps connected to it, due to the lack of access to online texts. Leading up to the fall semester, we published an article on the challenges commercial textbooks present in the virtual environment, and the struggle it can be to provide access to students in a primarily online environment. At the library, we continue to work on exploring and identifying textbook alternatives including eBooks, open educational resources (OERs), or creating an online course pack through U of G’s Course Reserve System Ares, as a way of building more equitable foundations for opening knowledge.
How you can get involved
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries is asking for researchers and librarians to participate in a crowdsourcing project this week. Learn about Creating More Visibility for Canadian Journals' Self-Archiving Policies: An Open Access Week 2020 Crowdsourcing Project.
Open Educational Resources
If you’re a U of G faculty or instructor and are interested in learning more about open educational resources and how you can use them in your courses, we encourage you to consider attending one of our upcoming workshops. Both workshops will highlight OERs an alternative to commercially published textbooks and other course materials. Whether you're looking for an open textbook, or you'd like to curate several resources to align with your learning outcomes, these workshops are for you.
- Finding OERs to Use in the Classroom: The Science
- Finding OERs to Use in the Classroom: Business and Social Sciences
- Finding OERs to Use in the Classroom: Arts and Humanities
Open Scholarship Support
At the library, we can support you in all open related scholarly pursuits including managing, preserving and sharing your data, consultations on author rights, grants compliance and ensuring researchers can share their works, and more. Visit out open scholarship support page to learn more. If you are curious about learning more about open scholarship and publishing, consider attending our upcoming workshop.
Questions?
Ask us. We’re here to help.