OASPA 2022 Annual Conference: Beyond Open Access
20 – 22 September 2022
All times listed are UK BST (British Summer Time) / UTC +1
Registration https://oaspa2022.eventbrite.co.uk
Tuesday 20 September
2.15- 3.45 pm
Extended opening panel discussion and Q&A
Towards equitable open access – how do we get there?
OASPA was founded in 2008 to promote open access publishing and provide a forum for sharing experiences and challenges in implementing open access. Our criteria and definition of open access are based on the BOAI original recommendation, and our membership has broadened to include many different publishing models, infrastructures and services. Our mission has also developed over time – advancing open access and supporting a diversity of approaches is at the heart of the work we do. Unintended consequences have emerged along the way, however, in particular the danger of embedding new inequities for the global scholarly community. It is clear that ‘open’ alone is not enough. This opening discussion will bring together different perspectives and consider the pathways to an equitable future for open scholarship.
5.15 – 6 pm
Keynote: Embracing Real-World Complexity On The Road To Open Scholarship
Amy Brand, Director and Publisher, MIT Press, USA
The theme of the OASPA conference this year is Beyond Open Access, and in my keynote I’ll build on this theme to talk about going “beyond binary thinking about open access.” When our interventions do not adequately capture the underlying complexity of the information access problem, they are more likely to have unintended consequences downstream. I’ll discuss relevant examples and observations concerning open models for journals, books, infrastructure, and policy, and point towards a greater university role and investment in scholarly communications.
Wednesday 21 September
12.15 – 1.45 pm
Panel | Open Scholarship and Data Practices in the Global South
2 – 2.45 pm
Keynote | Digital Bundles: Creating a new space for Indigenous Knowledge that moves Beyond Open Access Publishing
Jennifer Wemigwans, University of Toronto, Canada
Digital Bundles are new spaces for sharing Indigenous Knowledge and challenge non-Indigenous audiences’ understanding of online genres, copyright practices and the transference of knowledge in new forms.
3 – 4.30 pm
Panel | What Open Means for the Humanities
Open access publishing is accelerating–but how quickly depends on the research discipline. Many STEM fields are making an ever-increasing number of publications openly available to a global audience. Humanities disciplines, on the other hand, have proven a more complicated fit for the APC-driven OA model: these fields generally have less funding and fewer funder mandates for OA; they are often book-centric in their professional publication requirements; and their scholars can face complicated licensing issues related to 3rd-party rights to materials featured in their publications. As a result, many humanities fields are trailing STEM in terms of the visibility and the accessibility of their published research–and there are significant cultural and professional risks to this imbalance within scholarly communication. How can we ensure that the humanities don’t get left behind? What models already exist to address the complexities faced by humanists who seek to publish OA? What challenges remain and how can we address them? Join us as our panelists discuss what open means for the humanities!
4.45 – 6.15 pm
Panel | Subscribe to Open (S2O) experiences shared
In this session, four publishers summarise their experiences with Subscribe To Open (S2O), the Open Access model funded by library subscriptions. Berghahn Books and IWA Publishing have been operating S2O for several years with impressive results. EDP Sciences have flipped a major disciplinary journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, to Open Access with S2O. And the University of Toronto Press is launching a new interdisciplinary Climate Change journal with S2O. Together, we review how S2O can work across HSS and STEM subject areas, and for journals which are currently being created and for those which have served the research community for 75 years.
Thursday 22 September
1.15 – 2.45 pm
Panel | Has Open Science failed to influence research assessment?
The culture and practice of assessing research and researchers based upon publications in journals with high journal impact factors is a barrier to wider adoption of open science. Despite the potential of open science practices – such as open access publication, sharing all research outputs, and engaging diverse audiences in dissemination of findings – for improving research quality, efficiency and impact, open science practices are largely absent from policies and criteria for academic hiring, promotion and grant review. This in turn limits some of the incentives for researchers to practice open science. However, some initiatives in the community are beginning to identify, share and communicate examples of research assessment procedures that place greater value on open science. A mixed panel of researchers, policy makers, institutional representatives and international multidisciplinary collaborations will outline the challenges of recognising open research practices in research assessment, the supporting research evidence, and discuss recent progress on reforming research assessment to recognise more diverse and open research activities and outputs.
3 – 4.30 pm
Changing perspective on knowledge: From marketable asset to common good
As the conversation on open access grows more broad and more mature, the focus of communities in the Global North has expanded. More and more conference sessions like this one help us to be more thoughtful about what knowledge is and what we want to be open, about differing practices in other corners of the globe, and about the impact of practices in one community (say, the Global North) on another (the Global South). Where our focus was once on how we sustain systems and practices (and market-based behaviours) of the past 250 years, it is moving increasingly toward how we may each contribute to realising the benefit of the unfettered, global, multidirectional exchange of knowledge that has always been our aim. That benefit is the common good. This discussion will explore some of the questions and considerations that have emerged as the focus of the Global North community has shifted.
4.45 – 6.15 pm
Panel | Pathways to Open Access: Values-based publishing models
As open access has evolved from the early days of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), there has been some disappointment at what is seen as the co-opting of the OA movement by large, commercial publishers. Critics of commercial open access models point to the ways in which they reinforce some of the traditional knowledge asymmetries between the Global North and Global South: scholars and libraries may be increasingly able to access scholarly publications as open access expands under the auspices of the large publishers, but those same scholars and libraries often cannot afford to publish within APC- or BPC-based OA models, and are therefore excluded from participating in global science. In this way, commercial OA hasn’t delivered on the hope for a particular type of transformation within scholarly communication centered on a set of values that include fairness, equity and community. In this panel we will explore non-commercial open access publishing models that seek to align their activities with particular values that are being lost in the transition at open access at scale. The panel presenters will make a case for the values-alignment and relevance of non-commercial OA publishing models as important institutional investments. Their presentations will provide real-world evidence of what can be done to realize the promise of equity within OA publishing and will illustrate the necessity of supporting multiple “pathways” to open access that address context-specific and fundamental needs within scholarly communication.