Tag Archives: open access

20 years of Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) inspire Open Access at UVic

In the 2022 edition of the influential CWTS Leiden Ranking, UVic was ranked as top Canadian university in open access publishing: It is ahead in making its research publicly accessible, with an overall share of 57.8% circulating in open access journals and repositories.

With other Canadian universities close behind, this is a remarkable success for open scholarship and the open access movement at the university.

An important cornerstone for this development is the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The influential declaration was signed in February 2002. Although there are predecessor declarations advocating for public access to specific forms of information, the BOAI is considered the first international declaration on the general free availability of scientific publications and the first to adopt and define the term Open Access (OA). It gave momentum to the emerging OA movement by consolidating the ideas of several pioneering initiatives and laid the foundation for successive OA declarations that became equally influential, such as the Bethesda Declaration on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (both 2003).

The focus in the original 2002 BOAI declaration was on the transformation of scholarly, peer-reviewed journal publications to OA, either by publishing in OA-only journals (the golden road) or by self-archiving articles that had not appeared in OA journals in subject and/or institutional repositories (the green road).

The declaration was renewed (BOAI10) in 2012 to mark its 10th anniversary. The first generation of OA declarations made an impact and the acceptance and implementation of OA has improved since. The result was a set of detailed proposals on a wide range of critical issues. For the first time, they encouraged research institutions and funders to adopt policies to promote (green) Open Access publishing. In addition, the statement urged building sustainable infrastructures through repositories and open metadata. It advocated the use of the most open licenses possible to disseminate knowledge and open metrics to assess its visibility. The statement ended with a plea for greater collaboration within the global Open Access community and a call to create a positive narrative for Open Access.

This year’s 20th anniversary of the BOAI declaration led to a new update of its recommendations. The BOAI20 declaration highlights the role of open access as a building block toward open scholarship as a whole. Its key recommendations for more OA are:

  1. The use and expansion of open, non-commercial infrastructures for the realization of open access and open scholarship
  2. A reform of the evaluation procedures for research achievements that includes rewarding open access publishing
  3. Economic independence for researchers in OA publishing by moving away from APCs and even more consistently towards repositories (green OA) and free open access journals (diamond OA)
  4. Returning to the original goals of the open access movement in the face of an impending monopolization of the OA publishing market by a few dominant, commercial players and a global imbalance for researchers in accessing their publishing platforms. It specifically suggests a critical reassessment of Read & Publish (also called transformative) agreements with those publishers under these circumstances

UVic’s measures regarding Open Access moved along BOAI’s recommendations early on and they continue to do so:

The recent recognition of this fact by the Leiden Ranking confirms UVic’s existing strategies around open scholarship, and especially open access. Nevertheless, the latest recommendations for BOAI’s 20th anniversary hold plenty of incentives and suggestions for continuous improvement. Thank you for the continuous inspiration and Happy Anniversary, BOAI20!

Pathways to Impact: Mobilizing Knowledge

The Pathways to Impact: Mobilizing Knowledge Fund aims to support researchers in mobilizing knowledge and creativity for greater impact. A joint initiative of the Office of the Vice-President Research and Innovation’s Research Partnerships and Knowledge Mobilization (RPKM) Unit, in partnership with UVic Libraries, the fund supports UVic’s commitment to meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Many exceptional applications were received in the Fall 2021 call for proposals, and seven outstanding projects were selected for funding: Learn more about the Pathways to Impact projects.

UVic Libraries provides many supports for mobilizing your research and creative projects ranging from workshops, equipment loans, and self-help resources to full suite of digital services for grant-funded research. Explore some of our offerings below or contact us for more!

New Title: Cultivating Feminist Choices

Cultivating Feminist Choices: A FEminiSTSCHRIFT in Honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres edited by Brigetta M. Abel, Nicole Grewling, Beth Ann Muellner, and Helga Thorson is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/13021 or purchased from the UVic bookstore: https://www.uvicbookstore.ca/general/browse/uvic+publications/9781550586794

This book is a Festschrift in honor of Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, written by several former graduate students, whom she supervised over her years as professor of German Studies at the University of Minnesota, and some of her colleagues and collaborators. The book pays tribute to Joeres’s influence on the German Studies profession as well as to her influence on the contributors’ lives and the feminist choices they have made. Dr. Joeres is known for her feminist scholarly contributions to women’s writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including her book Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (U of Chicago Press, 1998), and her collaborative feminist editing practices as editor of both Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the Women in German Yearbook.”Together with Angelika Bammer, she edited a volume On the Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) that navigates the terrain of academic writing practices and calls for a focus not only on what scholars write but on how they write it. Because of her critical interventions in the realm of academia in general and feminist studies and German studies, in particular, as well as her influence on the lives of the next generations, this book will be of interest beyond those who know her personally.

Editors

Brigetta (Britt) Abel is Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Writing at Macalester College (St Paul, MN). She is a lead author and co-project director of Grenzenlos Deutsch, an open-access, collaboratively produced online curriculum for beginning German, which is funded in part through a digital humanities advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nicole Grewling is an Associate Professor of German Studies at Washington College (Chestertown, Maryland), where she has taught language, literature, and culture courses since 2011. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature and culture, portrayals of America in German literature, travel literature, and the exotic. Her work focuses particularly on German colonial fantasies and German relationships to their others, especially their love for Native Americans.

Beth Ann Muellner is a Professor of German Studies in the German and Russian Studies Department at the College of Wooster, where she has taught language and culture courses
since 2004. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographical writing, photography studies, museum studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature.

Helga Thorson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen peoples. Her
research focuses on a diverse range of topics, including modernist German and Austrian literature and culture, Scandinavian studies, gender studies, history of medicine, foreign language pedagogy, and Holocaust studies.

 

New Title: As if they were the Enemy

As if They Were the Enemy: The Dispossession of Japanese Canadians on Saltspring Island by Brian Smallshaw is a new release published by the University of Victoria. It can be downloaded for free on UVicSpace: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/12244

On 22 April 1942, the CPR ship, the SS Princess Mary, was docked at the wharf in Ganges on Saltspring Island. The 77 Japanese Canadians taken away to camps in the British Columbia interior that day were among the over 22,000 who were forced into internal exile, and less than a year later, had their property liquidated against their will. Eleven properties on Saltspring were sold, some to the Soldier Settlement Board, and others at auction, including the largest belonging to Torazo Iwasaki that ended up in the hands of the local agent of the Custodian of Enemy Property. In the 1960s Iwasaki took the government to court in an effort to get his property back in a widely publicized case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost his case, but this book argues that though the government was operating under the War Measures Act, the liquidation of Japanese Canadian property was a breach of trust, and the illegal application to Canadian citizens of a law governing the property of enemies.

Brian Smallshaw has a master’s degree in history from the University of Victoria. His interest in trans-Pacific history dates from his period of residence in Asia. He lived for many years in Japan prior to moving to Saltspring Island in British Columbia. His current studies centre on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Can. Medical Assoc. Journal goes Open Acess

Brian Owens | Jan. 14, 2020

The Canadian Medical Association Journal content is now freely available online. The older issues will become available on March 1, 2020!

Dr. Andreas Laupacis, editor-in-chief of the journal, says providing immediate free access to content will make the journal more relevant to discussions about improving Canada’s healthcare system.

For more information see: http://cmajnews.com/2020/01/14/cmaj-drops-paywall/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cmaj-drops-paywall

 

 

Open access in the age of surveillance technology

As part of our Open Access Week celebrations, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and University of Victoria Libraries invite you to a public talk by Honorary Resident Wikipedian, Dr. Erin Glass:

Open access in the age of surveillance technology: Fighting for ground in the public imagination

Does the influence of surveillance technology in our academic and everyday information practices have any bearing on the open access movement? How might the open access movement fruitfully respond to these issues in ways that deepen its purpose while further serving the academic community and the broader public? In this talk, Dr. Glass will show how the growing dominance of surveillance technology, or technology whose business models are based on monitoring and controlling of user behavior, threatens to exploit and undermine the goals and existing achievements of the open access movement.

Dr. Erin Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where she facilitates the Digital Humanities Research Group. Her work focuses on using digital tools and social practices to make education and knowledge production more democratic, collaborative, and publicly engaged.

When: October 21, 2019

The talk will be followed by a Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Join Matt Huculak and Michael Radmacher to learn how to use Wikipedia to enhance the global knowledge graph.

All events will take place in the Digital Scholarship Commons at Mearns-McPherson Library, UVic.

11-12     Open access in the age of surveillance technology: Fighting for ground in the public imagination

Talk by UVic’s Honorary Resident Wikipedian, Dr. Erin Glass.

More details   Register

12-1       Lunch provided for edit-a-thon participants

1-3:30    Wikipedia edit-a-thon, Matt Huculak and Michael Radmacher

More details   Register

Sponsored by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and University of Victoria Libraries

New program provides mobile end-of-life support to people in poverty

September, 2019 | UVic News & UVic News

In 2 recent UVic News articles, Dr. Kelli Stajduhar has been recognized for her work in developing a Palliative Outreach Resource Team (PORT) in Victoria.

‘The Palliative Outreach Resource Team (PORT) is a collaboration of the University of Victoria, Island Health, Victoria Cool Aid and Victoria Hospice. PORT acts as a bridge between people with serious illness and their caregivers, palliative care, and other health and social support systems.

The program is built upon lessons learned from a three-year study led by UVic palliative care researcher Kelli Stajduhar, lead investigator of the Equity in Palliative Approaches to Care program with the Institute on Aging & Lifelong Health and the School of Nursing.’

PORT endeavors to fulfill the important need for respectful end-of-life care within vulnerable portions of the Victoria community whereby…

‘Mirroring similar models in Toronto and Calgary, people can self-refer or be referred by their caregivers to a palliative care nurse and a physician who manage the pain and symptoms related to life-limiting illness, support chosen family and caregivers, and provide grief and bereavement support.’

Dr. Stajduhar has published several open access papers that you can access via our institutional repository UVicSpace – you can read them now by clicking here and here.

The Copyright and Scholarly Communications office located in the UVic McPherson library wish PORT much success!

Forest Corridors Vital for Wildlife

July 29, 2019 | UVic News

Frances Stewart and Jason Fisher both adjunct assistant professors at UVic’s the School of Environmental Studies have recently published an exciting paper that..

…shows how the movements of one small mammal – the weasel-like fisher – through natural forested corridors underlines the importance of these safe pathways and points to implications for many other forest animals across the country such as the wolverine, moose, lynx and hare.

Please visit Stewart & Fisher‘s respective UVicSpace pages to read more about their valuable research.