5th Biennial Open Access Conference at San José State University. Please consider submitting a proposal or attending this free, virtual conference.
It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity
Biennial Open Access Conference at San José State University
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Library
October 29, 2021, 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM PDT
This will be a virtual conference and registration will be free
Call for Proposals
Efforts to open access to knowledge, research, and scholarship are often focused on building new structures: new systems for distributing and archiving scholarship and data, new reward structures for researchers, new cultures of research that favor openness. But simply opening access does not ensure a more equitable knowledge environment. Without intervention, new and open structures can reproduce existing structural inequalities.
The recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which inspired the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week and for this conference, proposes a framework for equitable, open structures for science on the national and international level. Libraries and library workers often work at a much more local level, but in many ways we are implicated in the same structural concerns. These concerns manifest in the systems we build and in the systems, structures, institutions, and corporations that form the context for our work.
Because “it matters how” we do our work, this conference will focus on ways that the structures of “open” promote or inhibit a diverse, inclusive, and equitable scholarly communication environment.
In our upcoming conference, we invite proposals for presentations of 10, 30, or 60 minutes. Topics include but are not limited to:
Open access and institutional repositories
Institutional policies, mandates, workflows, and cultures related to open access
Open access and information literacy
Open access and faculty labor, including tenure processes and contingent employment
Disciplinary cultures, structures, and practices surrounding open access
Transformative agreements
Infrastructure for open access: open source software, proprietary platforms, and institutional realities
OERs, Open Science, Open Data, Open Humanities, Open Knowledge
Promoting open access to faculty, administrators, and legislators
Vendor consolidation and open access
Scholarly communication futures and the impact of open access
Curation and preservation of open access journals, pre-prints, books, and data
Conference website: https://scholarworks.
Submit a proposal: https://
