Celebrate Open Access Week 2022

Scholarly Publishing and Open Access plus a stylized book with the open access symbol

 About International Open Access Week

Every year, SFU Library participates in International Open Access Week, to raise awareness of open scholarship and celebrate the work that the SFU community is doing to make knowledge public.

This year’s theme is Open For Climate Justice,  an opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around how open can be a means for climate justice:

  • by encouraging knowledge exchange and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community.
  • because sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

Established by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and partners in the student community in 2008, International Open Access Week is an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research -- to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives. 

 Attend a workshop

Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): October 26 

Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): What is it and why should I care?

About the workshop

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the de facto standard for digitizing and enriching textual materials. An XML encoding language, the TEI offers a robust, multi-lingual vocabulary for describing, analyzing, preserving, and publishing “texts” across various genres: poems, drama, manuscripts, tombstones, posters, audio recordings, music videos, et cetera.

This in-person workshop will serve as an introduction to the TEI as an encoding language, outlining how individuals can use the TEI in their own research projects. No prior experience with markup language, text encoding, or the digital humanities is needed.

By the end of this workshop, participants will understand why it is that so many digital humanities resources—including Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and the Women Writers Project—use TEI to enrich their digital archives and what the scholarly and technical affordances are of using the TEI. This workshop will also provide participants tangible tools for taking up the TEI for their own purposes and outline how participants leverage the mechanisms of the TEI within their own work.

Register for upcoming workshops

DatesLocation

No upcoming workshops available.

Grad Conversations on the Open Access topic: October 27
Next semester's workshops will be posted soon.
Unlock the Potential of Volunteered Geographic Information: October 28

Unlock the potential of Volunteered Geographic Information: Exploring and downloading OpenStreetMap data [Online]

About the workshop

The creation of spatial data is no longer confined to government entities, commercial corporations and GIS professionals.  Volunteered Geographic Information has been on the rise, with OpenStreetMap (OSM) being a prominent example as a map of the world created by volunteers. Unlike Google Maps, OSM data is free to download and use in a GIS capable format. Also, OSM uses a community-based tagging system to describe and organize its mapped features, which in many cases provide great value to communities, but are not monetarily lucrative (e.g. gender-neutral washrooms, biking racks, wheelchair accessible places, etc). This Wheelmap (the data is pulled from OSM) is an example. Despite the extensive coverage and unique value of OSM data, it has been underused by academia. This workshop will introduce you to how to find, explore, and download OSM data. 

Learning outcomes

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to: 

  • Understand how OSM stores, describes, and classifies data by a community-based tagging system.  
  • Explore and query OSM data by tags in Overpass Turbo, a web-based tool.  
  • Query and download OSM data in QGIS.  

Target audience

This workshop caters to people with any level of GIS expertise, including beginners. If you are curious about what data is there in OSM that might be hard to find elsewhere (i.e., locations and information of gender-neural washrooms, bike racks), and/or how you can use the data for your research project, for example, to make a map/app or do spatial analysis, this workshop is right for you.  

  Requirements

Optional: If you wish to participate in the last part of the activities (downloading OSM data from QGIS), please have QGIS installed on your computer. To download QGIS, please visit https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html  However, since the QGIS activity only takes a small fraction of the workshop, it is fine if you just want to watch.  

 

Register for upcoming workshops

DatesLocation

No upcoming workshops available.

 Check out the new Climate Justice collection in Summit, our institutional repository

To celebrate Open Access Week 2022 and this year's theme, we have created a new & featured Climate Justice Collection in Summit, SFU's institutional repository. This new collection provides examples of open scholarship from SFU students, faculty, and staff, related to the climate crisis.

Members of the SFU community are invited to contribute further to the collection by submitting your climate research related work.

 Listen to a podcast, or watch a film or a talk

Indigenous Climate Action Pod 
A podcast bringing Indigenous peoples together to discuss climate change, sustainability, and Indigenous rights.

Paywall: the Business of Scholarship 
Learn about the major academic publishers and open scholarship in this 2018 documentary.

OER at SFU
An introduction to Open Education Resources at SFU, filmed for Open Access Week 2020.

 Public Knowledge Project (PKP): Collection of climate-related open scholarship

SFU Library is a long-term partner and proud supporter of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP). Based at SFU, PKP develops open source tools for scholarly publishing and is best known for Open Journal Systems which is used by over 25,000 journals worldwide and is available in over 40 languages. For Open Access Week, PKP has pulled together a collection of climate-related open scholarship published using PKP’s open source publishing platforms. We invite you to explore these examples of open scholarship from around the world which contribute valuable knowledge to help tackle the crucial climate crisis.

 See our posters and table displays on open access 

You are welcome to visit our Open Access Week posters and table displays at the 3rd and 7th floor (Room 7010, in Research Commons) of the Bennett Library at SFU Burnaby.

Browse (or check out) books, or grab a handout or a magnet from the OA Week table displays. 

Visit our posters for an array of information about open access and open education, including how much journal subscriptions cost, or how to assess a journal.

 Take a look at these comprehensive open access resources on climate change

 Read more at Radical Access: the Scholarly Publishing Blog

The latest news and answers to your questions about scholarly publishing and open access.

Date(s)
October 24 - 28

Contact us: For assistance with scholarly publishing, please contact digital-scholarship@sfu.ca.

Creative Commons License
This work, the Simon Fraser University Scholarly Publishing website, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License unless otherwise noted.