Category Archives: Author’s Fund

UVic’s 2022 “Pathways to Impact” Grant: Caetano Dorea

UVic’s “Pathways to Impact” fund aims to move original research that aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and move it into real-world applications for greatest impact. The fund is a partnership between UVic’s Research Partnerships and Knowledge Mobilization (RPKM) unit and UVic Libraries. Funded projects will make their research openly accessible, including via UVicSpace, contributing to the democratization of knowledge and knowledge equity. The inaugural UVic fund is one of a few institutionally led knowledge-mobilization funding initiatives across Canadian research universities and among the first to directly target the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

A prospective cohort study of access to safe drinking water in Malawi – Community dissemination and engagement

UN Sustainable Development Goals: 3, 6, and 17

Among the seven projects that were selected for the 2022 Pathways to Impact fund is
A prospective cohort study of access to safe drinking water in Malawi, the summary of the doctoral research of Dr. Alexandra Cassivi – supervised by Dr. Caetano Dorea.

Dr. Cassivi’s research potential was recognized in 2020 with a Green Talents award. She is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Dr. Dorea is a professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Victoria, research group leader of the Public Health & Environmental Engineering (PH2E) Lab, and the director of the NSERC CREATE in Water & Sanitation for Low-Resource Contexts (#WASHCanada) project.

This research project is dedicated to exploring access to safe drinking water and sanitation for diverse populations in Malawi. It is hoped that the findings can be applied globally to make recommendations for assessing and monitoring access to water, particularly for low- and middle-income countries.

The following articles were published in connection with the project so far:

  • Cassivi, A., Tilley, E., Waygood, E. O. D., & Dorea, C. (2020). Trends in access to water and sanitation in Malawi: Progress and inequalities (1992–2017). Journal of Water and Health, 18(5), 785–797. https://doi.org/10.2166/wh.2020.069
  • Cassivi, A., Tilley, E., Waygood, E. O. D., & Dorea, C. (2021a). Evaluating self-reported measures and alternatives to monitor access to drinking water: A case study in Malawi. Science of The Total Environment, 750, 141516. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141516
  • Cassivi, A., Tilley, E., Waygood, E. O. D., & Dorea, C. (2021b). Household practices in accessing drinking water and post collection contamination: A seasonal cohort study in Malawi. Water Research, 189, 116607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116607
  • Cassivi, A., Tilley, E., Waygood, O., & Dorea, C. (2021c). Seasonal Preferences and Alternatives for Domestic Water Sources: A Prospective Cohort Study in Malawi. ACS ES&T Water, 1(6), 1464–1473. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsestwater.1c00045

Dr. Cassivi’s doctoral thesis, on which this project is based, is available in UVicSpace:

Find a full list of achievements and publications by Dr. Caetano Dorea here and those of Dr. Cassivi here.

UVic Libraries congratulates Professor Dorea, Dr. Cassivi, and the rest of their team on the successful application and their valuable research contribution to the fulfillment of the United Nations’ SDGs.

WILEY and Projekt DEAL in Germany sign agreement

January 15, 2019

Wiley and Projekt DEAL establish groundbreaking partnership for Germany to pilot new publishing models, better enable researchers to create and disseminate knowledge through Wiley’s journals, and continue to provide participating German institutions access to Wiley’s portfolio of academic journals.

Under an annual fee, this transformative three-year agreement provides all Projekt DEAL institutions with access to read Wiley’s academic journals back to the year 1997, and researchers at Projekt DEAL institutions can publish articles open access in Wiley’s journals.

To support the overall advancement of scholarly research, Wiley and Projekt DEAL are together launching three important new initiatives as part of the partnership. First a new flagship open access journal. This interdisciplinary journal will publish top-tier scholarship from the global research community and will serve as a unique forum for the development of new open access publishing models. In another key aspect of the agreement, Wiley and Projekt DEAL will establish an open science and author services development group focused on innovating and accelerating new publishing approaches. The partners will also create and host a new annual symposium for early-career German researchers focused on surfacing cutting-edge ideas on the future of research communications.

More information available at: https://www.hrk.de/press/press-releases/press-release/meldung/wiley-and-projekt-deal-partner-to-enhance-the-future-of-scholarly-research-and-publishing-in-germany/

Cambridge launches new mid-length publishing program

January 15, 2019

Cambridge Elements are a new concept in academic publishing and scholarly communication, combining the best features of books and journals. They consist of original, concise, authoritative, and peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific research, organised into focused series edited by leading scholars, and provide comprehensive coverage of the key topics in disciplines spanning the arts and sciences.

Elements are:

  • Rapidly published and disseminated.
  • Authoritative, written by leading scholars and rigorously peer-reviewed.
  • Structured in focused series, edited by senior figures in each discipline.
  • Short: 20,000-30,000 words (40 to 75 pages).
  • Available in online, onscreen, and print versions.

Elements include:

  • Analytical surveys on foundational building blocks of the discipline.
  • Original, cutting edge insights into frontier topics.
  • Masterclasses and advanced tutorials on emerging topics.
  • Detailed descriptions of novel technologies or protocols (in Medicine and Engineering).

Open access options are available for Elements:

  • CC BY-NC license
  • Gold OA fee of $5,500 pounds, excluding taxes

Editors from Journal of Informetrics resign

Nature | January 14, 2019 | Dalmeet Singh Chawla

The editorial board of an influential scientometrics journal — the Journal of Informetrics — has resigned in protest over the open-access policies of its publisher, Elsevier, and launched a competing publication.

The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making bibliographic references freely available for analysis and reuse, and being open access and owned by the community.

The Board members also asked Elsevier to reduce the current articles processing fee (US 1,800, plus tax) to something more appropriate. Elsevier declined to meet these demands and the editorial board for the journal resigned. With independent funding, the researchers set up a new free open access journal called Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) with MIT Press instead–see https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/qss

Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications – UVic Libraries Support

March 17, 2015

The Tri-Agencies 9NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR) recently launched their Open Access Policy on Publications. The objective of the policy is to improve access access to the results of agency funded research and to increase the dissemination and exchange of research results.

The University of Victoria Libraries is interested in supporting researchers’ compliance with the policy. The “compliance guide” outlines the different ways in which we are able to assist.

University of Ottawa launches open access program

December 8, 2009

The University of Ottawa is the first Canadian university to adopt a comprehensive open access program that supports free and unrestricted access to scholarly research.

The University's new program includes:

• a commitment to make the University's scholarly publications available online at no charge through the University's repository, uO Research;

• an author fund to help researchers defray open access fees charged by publishers;

• a fund to support the creation of digital educational materials organized as courses and available to everyone online at no charge ;

• support for the University of Ottawa Press's commitment to publishing a collection of open access books; and

• a research grant to support further research on the open access movement.

The University of Ottawa also becomes the first Canadian university to join the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE),