In this talk I provide an extended argument on why we need to shift the narrative about Open Access from one emphasizing the university's research prowess to Open Access as university's commitment to its public mission.

1. Aligning Open Access with the Social
Justice Mission of Public University
Leslie Chan
University of Toronto Scarborough
@lesliekwchan
OPENCON Toronto
2016

2. Open Access in the
Era of Post-Truth
Why we need better Narratives
about the Social Justice missions of
Open Access

3. “Those who tell the stories run the world.
Politics has failed through a lack of competing
narratives. The key task now is to tell a new
story of what it is to be a human in the 21st
century.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/ne
oliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_link

4. Strategy: Changing the narrative
from
Open Access as a means to showcase a
university’s research prowess
to
Open Access as university’s
commitment to its public mission

5. Brief definition of OA

6. “An old tradition and a new
technology have converged to
make possible an unprecedented
public good.”
Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

7. Open-access (OA) literature is digital,
online, free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions.

8. OA is possible because scholarly
communication is a form of peer
production in the gift economy.

9. OA is compatible with traditional peer
review, but it also opens possibilities
for other forms of participation,
assessment, and value propositions.

10. OA expands the boundaries of research,
our peer networks, and promotes closer
linkage between teaching, learning, and
research.

11. https://theconversation.com/homo-naledi-fossil-discovery-a-triumph-for-open-access-

12. Above all, OA provides expanded
opportunities for scholarly participation
that are inclusive, collaborative, and
innovative.

13. But…

14. Changing the narrative of OA has been
difficult …

15. http://www.ucla.edu/about/mission-and-values

16. https://www.ualberta.ca/strategic-plan/overview/our-vision-mission-and-values

17. https://www.utoronto.ca/about-u-of-t/mission
…principles of equal
opportunity, equity, and
justice

18. Overall, THE weighs
research and
research
performance heavily
at 60 per cent of the
total score (30 per
cent for research
volume, reputation
and income and 30
per cent for citation
research and
influence).

19. Asking Different Questions:
Do we want our knowledge commons to serve the needs
of market or the public good?
How to align the principles of Open Access with the
mission of the public university?
How could OA allow us to reconceive and broaden the
meanings of scholarship ?
How do we re-conceptualize “excellence” to reflect the
richness of knowledge and cognitive diversity?

20. http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/need-challenge-primacy-
productivity-educational-metric/

21. Centre
Could Open Access change the current
power structure of global scientific
production and dissemination?
Periphery
Periphery
open access creates the
potential for new spaces for
collaboration and co-creation
of knowledge

22. Metrics and Inequity

23. Unequal contribution and participation in science.
Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8(3):
e1001016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016
http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosmedicine/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016

24. Cognitive Injustice
• The Global South is gaining access, but lags in
local content
• Criteria for legitimation of knowledge set by
the Global North
• Knowledge from the Global South has been
rendered invisible
• Exclusion from participation is still the norm

25. https://vimeo.com/10169351

27. “Weeds” or Vegetables?

28. http://www.worldwatch.org/kenyan-professor-promotes-indigenous-crops-solve-
africa%E2%80%99s-food-crises

29. https://blog.ruforum.org/2016/11/23/new-
publication-top-19-young-innovators-and-
entrepreneurs-from-uganda/

34. http://www.bioline.org.br

35. The Centro de Referência em Informação
Ambiental, CRIA (Reference Center on
Environmental Information)
http://www.cria.org.br/

36. 36
: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=117328677437228595850.00044ec490b69019e64a3&z=2
Bioline Journals graphed with Google Maps.

37. But why Journals?

38. “Is the scientific paper a fraud?”
“I mean the scientific paper may be a fraud because
it misrepresents the processes of thought that
accompanied or give rise to the work that is
described in the paper. That is the question and I will
say right away that my answer to it is ‘yes’. The
scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a
totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the
nature of scientific though”.
Sir Peter Medawar
(From a BBC talk, 1964)
http://contanatura-hemeroteca.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/medawar_paper_fraud.pdf

39. 1888

40. Format of a scientific article
• Title
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Materials and Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusions
• Acknowledgments
• Literature Cited

43. Fig 4. Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline of Social Sciences and
Humanities, 1973–2013.
Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

44. “We editors seek a global status for our
journals, but we shut out the experiences and
practices of those living in poverty by our
(unconscious) neglect. One group is
advantaged, while the other is marginalised.”Richard Horton,
THE LANCET • Vol
361 • March 1,
2003

45. “Research or reviews that cover diseases unlikely
to be encountered in the western world will not
gather the citations that some editors seek.
But if this commercial environment does
seriously skew content away from what matters
to those people the journal claims to serve, as it
surely does at some journals, the culture of
medicine is distorted, even harmed.”
Richard Horton (2003)

46. Berners-Lee

47. Scholarly Primitives and Reputation?
Discovering Annotating Comparing
Referring Sampling Illustrating
Representing “…basic functions common
to scholarly activity across
disciplines, over time, and
independent of theoretical
orientation.”
John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities
Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?"
"Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental Practice"
Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000.
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

48. Scholarly Primitives and the
Research Life Cycle
Discover
GatherCreate
Share

49. The Scholarship of Engagement and
Open Access

50. Boyer’s Scholarship of
Discovery
Integration
Application
Teaching Engagement
PUBLIC

51. "The scholarship of engagement means
connecting the rich resources of the university to
our most pressing social, civic and ethical
problems, to our children, to our schools, to our
teachers and to our cities..."
Boyer, Ernest (1996) The Scholarship of Engagement.
Journal of Public Outreach. 1(1): 11-20.

52. Opportunities for Engagement
Public outreach and
engagement
New forms of
“impact”
Data sharing
New scholarly
practices
Experimentations
Interdisciplinary and
Collaborative
research
Professional
development
Personalization
Curation
Student training
Service

53. CUE (Community-University
Engagement) Factor – Edward Jackson
calls on universities across Canada to
“increase their CUE factors by deepening
and broadening their teaching, research
and volunteering activities with the
external constituencies that have the
greatest need for sustainable solutions
to the challenges they face every day”

54. Participedia
http://participedia.net/

55. http://www.knowledgemobilization.net/participation-democratization-knowledge-new-
convergences-reconciliation-june-12-16-2017-cartagena-colombia/

56. Broadening the definition of “success”,
“impact”, “value” and “capital”
Business value monetary return, financial capital,
efficiency, competiveness
Scholarly value Reputation and citation; trust; symbolic
capital
Institutional value Public mission, community outreach,
intellectual capital
Social value Equity, participation, diversity, social
capital
Political value Evidence based policy, transparency,
accountability, civic capital

57. Concluding remarks…
• Access to Knowledge is essential for a healthy
democracy
• The Rights to Research is central for sustainable
developent
• Universities as centers of knowledge need to
reclaim its role in sustaining the public sphere for
the public good
• Open Access is a contestation over power and
control over the production of knowledge
• We don’t need more metrics but alternative to
metrics

58. http://ocsdnet.org/

59. Thank You!
chan@utsc.utoronto.ca @lesliekwchan
http://www.openoasis.org
http://www.bioline.org.br
http://www.openaccessmap.org