Open Access Archivangelism

The Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University in Montreal on Monday May 31 featured a symposium on The Age of Open Access: New paradigm for universities and researchers. To see the web-stream of the session, click here.

John Willinsky (Stanford University) and Heather Joseph (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Washington) reported on the progress and promise of OA; Michael Geist (University of Ottawa) discussed the more general question of copyright in the digital age, and Gerald Beasley (Concordia University) reported on the very productive faculty consultations that led up to the adoption in April of the Concordia mandate, Canada's first university-wide Green Open Access mandate (motivated in part to coincide with this very Congress, and strongly encouraged by the Congress's Academic Convenor, Ronald Rudin, Professor of History at Concordia).

Most of the subsequent discussion from the audience focused on the funding of Gold OA publishing rather than on the mandating of Green OA self-archiving that has been spearheaded among US universities by Harvard's Robert Darnton (who also spoke at Congress) and Stuart Shieber and among Canadian universities by Concordia's Ronald Rudin and Gerald Beasley. Yet it is Green OA Mandates that will usher in "The Age of Open Access" -- which, all the presenters agreed, has not yet arrived!.

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On Wednesday, June 2, there are two further OA events at Congress:

"Open Access: Transforming research in the developing world"

Access to knowledge is fundamental to all aspects of human development, from health to food security, and from education to social capacity building. Yet access to academic publications is severely restricted for many developing countries. As well, the prohibitive cost of publishing and distributing journals in the developing world means much of the research done there remains ‘invisible’ to the rest of the world. This panel will bring together experts to explore the potential impact of Open Access on the developing world.

Moderated by Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Trent University), this panel will bring together Buhle Mbambo-Thata (UNISA Library, South Africa), Leslie Chan (University of Toronto) and Hebe Vessuri, (Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research). It will be followed by a celebration of Concordia University’s commitment to Open Access at the Libraries, 5pm - 7pm, at the Webster Library (LB Building 2nd Floor)