We discussed predatory journals in a previous blog post, but you may have also heard of predatory conferences. Conferences are an important piece of the scholarly publishing world, and give you valuable opportunities to present research and network with colleagues. Just as it’s important to do research on journals before publishing, it’s important to look into conferences you are thinking of attending. Poor quality and deceptive conferences can be hard to spot; here is some information on what to look for, and how they operate. 

The University of California recently took a bold step in support of open access publishing by terminating subscriptions with Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. We asked SFU Faculty for their thoughts on the cancellation and what this means for open access.

Open Education Week (March 4-8) is being celebrated across the globe this week with a goal to “raise awareness and showcase impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide.”

By Alice Fleerackers

Changing the academic system to be more accessible

“You shouldn’t have to pay a large sum of tuition to have access to basic information,” Melissa Roach says when I ask her what she’d like to change about our academic system. “It just creates layers of mediation between scholars, media and the public, and that disconnect can cause a lot of misunderstanding.” 

Happy Fair Dealing Week!

February 25 to March 1 is Fair Dealing Week 2019. Fair Dealing Week (and Fair Use Week in the US) "is designed to highlight and promote the opportunities presented by fair use and fair dealing, celebrate successful stories, and explain these doctrines" (Association of Research Libraries, fairuseweek.org).

SFU Library and the Graduate Student Society are pleased to announce the 27 recipients of the 2018 GSS Open Access Award.

Are you curious about the conversation around issues of invisible labour in open scholarship hosted at SFU Harbour Centre during Open Access Week 2018?

Your Masters or PhD thesis is the result of years spent in study of a specific topic. It's no surprise that many grads would like to turn their thesis into an article, a series of articles, a book chapter or a monograph.

Do you have the right to do this? What are SFU's rights to your thesis? Will publishers want a work that is based on a thesis, especially once the thesis is publicly available in Summit?

By Emily Guerrero, former SFU Reference Librarian.

One of the first steps in getting your work published, open or otherwise, is picking the journals to submit to. With predatory journals on the rise, it's becoming even more important to assess any call for papers that might come your way via email.

As you look at calls to publish, here are a few general rules to keep in mind: