Networked Open Social Scholarship

An INKE-hosted gathering

17 January 2017 | Victoria, BC, Canada

http://inke.ca/projects/victoria-gathering-2017

Proposals Due: 1 October 2016

Canada’s path to the widespread adoption of digital scholarly practices and principles has been challenging. Scholars, institutions, and their representatives struggle with ways to implement progressive Canadian open access and open source policies in ways that make sense for research professionals and society at large. Even in the national press, we hear about research libraries that cannot cope with for-cost access to publicly-supported research due to the rising cost of journals, books, and even digital scholarship. Other forums express concern about the lack of appropriate, national-level digital research infrastructure. Within this context, how can we work toward networked open social scholarship: the successful realization of robust, inclusive, participatory, and publicly-engaged digital scholarship?

Networked open social scholarship involves creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. But how can we model networked open social scholarship practices and behaviour? What approaches to the development of workflows, tools, systems, technologies, publishing apparatus, protocols, policies, and initiatives best foster and encourage openness? How do we promote, record, archive, and study the evolving processes of engaging with data? How can we leverage existing resources in libraries and cultural institutions across Canada to provide regular opportunities for mentorship and training in core networked open social scholarship areas?

We invite you to join this discussion during our annual INKE-hosted researcher and partner gathering in Victoria, BC. This gathering will provoke conversation and mobilize collaboration in and around digital communication, especially electronic scholarly production, as well as issues of (open) access, partnership, dissemination, alternative modes and methods, and the shift from prototype to production. This action-oriented event is geared toward leaders and learners from all fields and arenas, including academic and non-academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, librarians and archivists, publishers, members of scholarly and professional associations and consortia, open source practitioners and developers, industry liaisons, and other stakholders. Taking the success of past years’ INKE-hosted gatherings in Whistler as our starting point, we hope to simultaneously formalize connections across fields and open up different ways of thinking about the pragmatics and possibilities of digital scholarship.

Featured events include:

  • Lead presentations by Dr. Susan Brown (U Guelph) and Dr. Vincent Larivière (U Montréal)
  • Lightning talks, where authors present 4-minute versions of longer papers
circulated prior to the gathering, followed by a brief discussion (papers may be 
conceptual, theoretical, application-oriented, and more)
  • Show & Tell session, where presenters do digital demonstrations of their projects and / or prototypes
  • Next Steps conversation, to articulate in a structured setting what we will do together in the future

We invite proposals for lightning papers that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area, or for relevant project demonstrations.

Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words, plus list of works cited), and the names, affiliations, and website URLs of presenters. Longer papers for lightning talks will be solicited after proposal acceptance for circulation in advance of the gathering. We are pleased to welcome proposals in all languages of our community; note that the chief working language of past gatherings has been English. Please send proposals on or before October 1st 2016 to Alyssa Arbuckle at alyssaa@uvic.ca.

“Networked Open Social Scholarship” is sponsored by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This gathering is organized by Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, Jon Bath, Tanja Niemann, and Brian Owen, working with our Whistler Advisory Group: Clare Appavoo, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Chad Gaffield, Janet Halliwell, Brian Owen, and Sally Wyatt. Please consider joining us in Victoria for what is sure to be a dynamic discussion!