The latest news and answers to your questions about scholarly publishing and open access.
In recent weeks, you may have seen a call for applications to the SFU Open Educational Resources (OER) grants program (note: current deadline is November 7th). This program provides funding of up to $5,000 along with staff support to help faculty members redesign a course to adopt or adapt open textbooks or other OER as their primary course material.
It can be daunting to think about your thesis or dissertation being openly available in Summit for anyone to find and read. You may have heard concerns about plagiarism, predatory publishers or limitations on your ability to publish a manuscript based on your openly available thesis. Be reassured that, for the most part, these concerns are unwarranted. Most universities in Canada make their students' theses and dissertations open.
Happy Open Access Week from SFU Library!
Whether you’re a new graduate student, a student new to designing or running research projects, or a researcher looking for support on a specific aspect of the research life cycle - we can help!
In the Research Commons, we offer workshops and consultations on a wide variety of topics that support research at all stages of the research life cycle.
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.”
“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.”
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).
