Leslie Chan
Associate Professor and the director of the Knowledge Equity Lab in the Department of Global Development Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough.
Abstract
Open Scholarship – Resisting Knowledge Commodification and Embracing Diverse Ecologies
In this talk, I will share personal perspectives on Open Access and Open Scholarship, drawing from my collaboration with global South communities, as well as with students, community partners, and librarians at my institution. My work explores the growing privatization and commercialization of public knowledge, focusing on how multinational publishing conglomerates reinforce and deepen knowledge inequities and power imbalances. This includes the hegemony of Eurocentric knowledge over the knowledge of the majority world and the dominance of academic knowledge from global North centers over community-based, Indigenous, and diverse knowledge systems. Understanding the workings of this extractive, commodity-based system allows us to unpack its “black boxes” and to begin to reclaim control over our collective labor. I will conclude by sharing hopeful examples of community-centered, community-governed knowledge systems, and explore how diverse knowledge ecologies enabled by open praxis are indeed possible.
Bio
Leslie Chan is Associate Professor and the director of the Knowledge Equity Lab in the Department of Global Development Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough. An early practitioner of the Web for scholarly exchange and online learning, Leslie has been interested in the role and design of knowledge infrastructure and their impact on local and international development. In particular, he has been studying the geopolitics of academic knowledge production and the uneven power relations embedded in this production. One of the original signatories of the BOAI, Leslie was the PI of the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) funded by IDRC and DFID. He is on the advisory board of several international organizations, including the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), AmeliCa, and was a founding steering committee of Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI).