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 Community over Commercialisation, an opportunity to engage in a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not. Questions to consider may include:
- What is lost when a shrinking number of corporations control knowledge production rather than researchers themselves?
- What is the cost of business models that entrench extreme levels of profit?
- When does the collection and use of personal data begin to undermine academic freedom?
- Can commercialization ever work in support of the public interest?
- What options for using community-controlled infrastructure already exist that might better serve the interests of the research community and the public (such as preprint servers, repositories, and open publishing platforms)?
- How can we shift the default toward using these community-minded options?
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 join together, take action, and raise awareness around the importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems.
Attend a workshop
A short introduction to Statistics Canada resources
Preparing to Publish
Attend the Coalition Publica OA Week webinar
Coalition Publica, a partnership between the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and Érudit, will be hosting an Open Access Week webinar on Advancing Research Visibility through National Portals: Insights from Spearheading Institutions.
On October 26th (8-9:30am PDT) 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.
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 more information about using PKP's open source software at SFU, contact our Digital Publishing team.
Listen to a podcast, or watch a film or a talk
Creative Commons' Open Minds podcast
On this episode hear more about the Open Access movement from Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
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.
Read more at Radical Access: the Scholarly Publishing Blog
The latest news and answers to your questions about scholarly publishing and open access.
Contact us: For assistance with scholarly publishing, please contact digital-scholarship@sfu.ca.
This work, the Simon Fraser University Scholarly Publishing website, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License unless otherwise noted.