Concordia celebrates International Open Access Week starting October 23
Each October, Concordia Library participates in International Open Access (OA) Week. This global event provides an invaluable opportunity for the academic and research community to learn about the potential benefits of open access in scholarship and research.
This year the Library will be hosting a series of events and workshops for undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty between October 23 and 29.
An abundance of university-based research is published in scholarly journals, but not everyone has access to these materials. Open access began in part with the idea that everyone can benefit from improved access to publicly funded research.
Open access to knowledge supports equity, allowing communities that may not be able to subscribe to scholarly journals to use open scholarship to further their own research.
The theme for Open Access Week 2023 is “Community over commercialization.” The goal is to foster an honest conversation about which approaches to open scholarship highlight the best interests of the public and academia — and which ones do not.
Concordia supports open access through several Library services, including Spectrum, the university’s open access research repository. Spectrum provides access to and preserves research created at Concordia.
Concordia scholars who deposit their research in Spectrum provide access to their work. In turn, the visibility of their research and the university’s intellectual output is enhanced.
The statistics on the most downloaded thesis and non-thesis items prove their popularity, with over 6.7 million downloads completed over a period of 13 years, from 2009 until today.
“Various forms related to open access — whether open data, open source, open publishing or open educational resources (OER) — are available across units and disciplines at Concordia,” says Rachel Harris. Harris is the scholarly publishing librarian and one of the main organizers of OA Week events.
“The work involved in OA Week includes increasing the visibility of the Library’s long-standing commitment to open access, while fostering collaborations with faculty members across departments, Concordia’s Open Science Working Group and 4TH SPACE. Community is a core value,” she says.
“The movement toward connecting scholarship and education, and making scholarship open, is growing at Concordia. Faculty, graduate students and researchers are contributing to this growth,” Harris notes.
“And the diverse lineup of workshops and events at OA Week is proof of the important role open access plays at Concordia.”
Concordia’s OER projects, namely its open textbooks, provide learning materials that are freely available to use, copy, modify and share. This approach significantly reduces textbook costs for students.
One of OER’s assets is that learning materials can be adapted or customized to meet learning objectives and course content. These materials can also integrate accessibility standards and diversity best practices.
Two hybrid events among the OA Week lineup take place at 4TH SPACE:
- Catalyzing open science, on October 26, 2 – 4 p.m. This event is organized by the Concordia Open Science Working Group (COSWG), charting the path forward for the implementation of open science at Concordia.
- Open for community: Across platform demos and conversations, on October 27, 4 – 5:30 p.m. This event offers a series of demonstrations of Concordia-led innovation and work in progress on community-driven open initiatives and the opportunity to explore open scholarship and educational content with the potential for cross-platform use to reach multiple audiences.
The start of the submission period for Concordia’s open textbook grants this year coincides with Open Access Week 2023. The university’s full-time and part-time undergraduate teaching faculty are welcome to apply for an open textbook grant.
Submissions are open from October 23 until November 3.
Find out more about the events and workshops during Open Access Week at the Concordia Library.
