Towards a Global Knowledge Commons: Why Open Access is Necessary but not Sufficient

Given the diversity of views about Open Access (OA) and its importance, it is not surprising that there are competing visions and strategies on how best to enable and scale Open Access across regions and around the world.

In this talk, I review some of the ongoing and emerging local and international initiatives on Open Access and attempt to broaden and reframe what it means to be open in the highly connected world we live in. My main thesis is that OA has been difficult to scale because it has far more to do with simply lowering the cost and permission barriers to scholarly publications. OA is highly disruptive of long held institutional and cultural practices, such as authorship, authority, quality assessment, ownership, stewardship, and sustainability across diverse institutional, cultural and historical contexts. As such, we need to better understand the various dynamics and organizational principles at work in different situations as well as the external “global” forces at play. This would allow us to begin to frame a more generalized set of design principles of a knowledge commons that draws in all the good intentions and innovative practices of regional initiatives. I will centre the talk around a new IDRC/DFID funded projects on Open and Collaborative Science Network in the global South.

• http://www.ocsdnet.org
• http://www.openoasis.org
• http://www.openaccessmap.org
  

Leslie Chan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he serves as the Associate Director. An early practitioner of the Web for scholarly exchange and online learning, Leslie is particularly interested in the role and design of network in the flow of knowledge and their impact on local and international development.

As one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, a historical and defining event of the global open access movement, Leslie has been active in the experimentation and implementation of scholarly communication initiatives of varying scales around the world. The Director of Bioline International, Chair of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, Leslie is a passionate advocate for knowledge equity and inclusive development.  Leslie has served as advisor to numerous projects and organizations, including the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, the American Anthropological Association, the International Development Research Centre, UNESCO, and the Open Society Foundation.