Tag Archives: open scholarship

International Day for Universal Access to Information / Right To Know Week 2022

What is the Right To Know?

The right to know is a fundamental principle in Canada. It is enshrined in the Access to Information Act and it ensures that Canadian citizens have access to information about their government and its activities. It also allows Canadians to hold their government accountable and participate fully in our democracy.

What is the International Day for Universal Access to Information/Right To Know Week?

The United Nations’ (UN) International Day for Universal Access to Information and Right To Know Week are observed around September 28 every year. These two closely related events promote the right of citizens to access information held by public bodies. They also raise awareness about issues such as freedom of information, open government, and access to public services and encourage people to use their right to access information.

What is the role of UVic Libraries in exercising the Right to Know and Universal Access to Information?

Libraries of all types play a vital role in ensuring that everyone has access to information. They provide a safe and inclusive space for people to learn, explore, and discover. Libraries also offer a range of services that can help people exercise their right to access information.

UVic Libraries provides its stakeholders on- and off-campus (students, faculty, and the wider community) with essential information around the right to know. Not only does UVic Libraries provide free and comprehensive access to its holdings and services beyond the campus community to all members of the public. It also makes an important contribution as a regional memory institution by preserving and providing access to relevant materials on local and regional history in its collections. This involves preserving and indexing traditional library holdings and archival materials but also systematically archiving websites that have local community relevance.

Resources provided by UVic Libraries to help exercise one’s right to know

Subject-based LibGuides – detailed resources developed and maintained by UVic librarians – were created specifically to educate the campus community as well as the wider public about pathways to information around their civil rights, government activities, the history of democracy, Indigenous governance, and other related topics.

Please visit our LibGuides on British Columbian and Canadian Government Information, including knowledge around open government and access to information and freedom of information requests (Contact: David Boudinot).

Additional LibGuides with a focus on the right to know developed by librarians at the UVic Law Library provide information on A Legal History of the Right to Vote, Constitutional Law in Canada, Legal Information Services in Victoria, Indigenous Law / Indigenous Legal Traditions, including by the Coast Salish peoples, and Municipal Law, with a focus on British Columbian municipalities (Contact: Emily Nickerson and Jessie Lampreau).

These library-curated resources contribute to exercising the right to know and universal access to information and are a good example of how core values and ideas of open scholarship – transparency, accessibility, openness – can have an impact beyond the scholarly community.

Uvic Libraries’ contribution to providing universal access to information and supporting the right to know is guided by its Strategic Directions 2018-2023, which emphasize its role in:

  • providing differentiated approaches to […] digital citizenship, and the critical and creative inquiry skills needed to navigate complex, information-rich environments in order to nurture adaptable, resilient, life-long learners
  • providing experiential learning opportunities for students and the broader community
  • investing in preservation expertise, infrastructure, and partnerships in order to provide sustainable access to knowledge

Universal Access to Information in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Both the University of Victoria and UVic Libraries support the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its goals. Ensuring public access to information is one of the targets of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions declares to “Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements” as its target 16.10.

By providing the above-mentioned services and resources around universal access to information, UVic Libraries contributes to the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Peer Review Week 2022

peer review week logo

September 19 to 23 sees the international celebration of Peer Review Week in the academic community, emphasizing the central role peer review plays in scholarly communication. The theme for 2022 is Research Integrity: Creating and Supporting Trust in Research.

What is peer review?

In broad terms, peer review is the pre-publication evaluation of scholarly work by experts in the same field as the submitting authors or with expertise in the methodology they chose. It is common in academic publishing and helps ensure the rigor of publications. Its aim is to either help improve or reject submitted papers that do not meet minimal criteria of good scholarly practice, originality, and methodology. The purpose of this quality control is to build and maintain trust in the published scholarly content, the publishing platforms, and the research process as a whole. Reviewers are invited by the editors or suggested by the authors. Referee activity is considered a courtesy and an academic honor, reflecting a certain reputation and expertise that a reviewer has gained. It is not usually compensated.

A brief history of the peer review process

It is challenging to determine precisely how old the academic peer review process is. While some historians of scholarship have dated it back to the pre-Gutenberg era, and others quote Francis Bacon as one of its trailblazers, many histories of the scholarly system agree that the origins of the contemporary peer review system can be traced back to the editorial practices of the learned societies in the early to mid-18th century, with the Royal Society of London commonly named as one of the main originators.

Contemporary peer review slowly emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. The steadily growing volume of scientific publications called for a screening process, and the newly invented Xerox photocopier made it possible to send out copies of manuscripts to multiple reviewers on a large scale. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that some of the most reputable journals in academia embraced the practice (Nature in 1964; The Lancet in 1976). Today it is a well-established system, guided by standards and principles that preserve it as one of the pillars of the academic publishing ecosystem.

The increasing awareness of the concept in the broader public is the latest chapter in the history of peer review. Previously it was known primarily to an expert scholarly audience. The Covid-19 pandemic changed that. The tremendous demand for readily available knowledge about the virus led to an unprecedented acceleration of related research. To make the exponentially growing SARS-COV-2 research available as quickly as possible, interest in preprints – scientific papers published before peer review on dedicated servers – increased. Because these preprints are now more commonly used as primary sources, explanations of the peer review process have since found their way into journalistic reporting on scientific topics.

Different types of peer review

Since its establishment, the peer review landscape has diversified. Not only are there different approaches to traditional peer review, but with the advent of the open scholarship movement, newer peer review practices have emerged. They break with some of the established practices of classical peer review, such as anonymity (in Open Peer Review) or confidentiality (in Social Peer Review).

The terminology around peer review is not always used consistently, but some procedures and their terms have become largely accepted. The main types of traditional peer review are commonly distinguished by their approach to anonymity. Anonymity is seen as a critical factor in traditional peer review to eliminate or minimize potential bias among reviewers. Any comments and editing suggestions by the referees remain confidential and are not published along with the work.

  • Single-blind PR – Reviewers are aware of authors’ identities.
  • Double-blind PR – Neither authors nor referees know each other’s identities.

Recently, the term “blind” has come under criticism for being ableist and a number of journals and publishing platforms have shifted to referring to it as “anonymous peer review”.

Newer, innovative types of peer review step away from anonymity/confidentiality and include:

  • Open Peer Review – The identities of authors and reviewers are known to each other and sometimes revealed to the public (there are other interpretations of this term).
  • Transparent Peer Review – The identities of authors and reviewers are known to each other, and any comments and editing requests by the referees will be made publicly available. The published article usually has an accessible version history.
  • Social or Community Peer Review – The wider (academic) community is invited to participate in reviewing a submitted work and suggest changes. These suggestions and the resulting revisions are usually documented publicly. This approach can be found in the form of pre-publication or post-publication reviews.

Common critique of the peer review system

Critics of traditional peer review question whether it is adequate in a scholarly environment evolving toward more open procedures and principles. Commons criticisms include:

While many critics believe the peer review system needs improvement and some are calling for its elimination, there seems to be an ongoing consensus among an academic majority that the system is a foundation of academia.

Current discussions

This is only a selection of current discussions. Peer review is a broad topic that is studied extensively not only in scholarly communication, philosophy of science, and scientometrics but also in individual academic disciplines themselves.

Further Information

To learn more about peer review and Peer Review Week, consult the Peer Review Week committee’s official blog, their Youtube Channel, or Scholarly Kitchen’s series of articles in celebration of the event. On Twitter, follow the handle @PeerRevWeek and use the hashtag #peerreviewweek22.

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!

April is Citizen Science Month

What is Citizen Science?

The term Citizen Science refers to the involvement of the general public in scholarly research activities. A more detailed definition by CitizenScience.gov emphasizes the concept’s potential for positive societal impact:

In citizen science, the public participates voluntarily in the scientific process, addressing real-world problems in ways that may include formulating research questions, conducting scientific experiments, collecting and analysing data, interpreting results, making new discoveries, developing technologies and applications, and solving complex problems.

What is the purpose of Citizen Science Month?

Citizen Science Month encourages the public to participate in academic research and highlights numerous scientific projects around the globe that bring the idea of participatory research to life. Successful Citizen Science projects have tackled the ecological fingerprint of Covid-19, climate change, biodiversity conservation, water quality, the long-term effects of chemical pollution, and new explorations of the Earth’s atmosphere. 

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