Open access is a growing international movement that uses online technologies to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. Open access projects at UBC are embracing and encouraging unrestricted access to research and scholarly publishing.
Featured Projects:
UBC Library Open Education Guide
The UBC Library guide to open education resources including faculty toolkits for open education, open access and open textbooks, a vetted list of open education repositories, and evaluation criteria for assessing open education resources. It also includes rubrics and promotional material on open education topics.
Open UBC Week
Open UBC is held in conjunction with International Open Access Week, which encourages the academic community to come together to share and learn about open scholarship initiatives locally and worldwide. Open UBC showcases a week of diverse events highlighting areas of open scholarship in which UBC’s researchers, faculty, students and staff participate.
Image attribution: International Open Access Week Logo. Created by Andrea Higginbotham. CC-BY.
cIRcle
cIRcle is the University of British Columbia's digital repository for research and teaching materials created by the UBC community and its partners. Materials in cIRcle are openly accessible to anyone on the web, and will be preserved for future generations.
Open Access Journal Hosting
The UBC Library provides access to server space and to the open source Open Journal Systems software for UBC faculty members who are editing or supporting Open Access electronic journals as well as recognized UBC student journals. This includes BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Midwifery Research and Practice.
Transcription Factor Encyclopedia (TFe)
The Transcription Factor Encyclopedia (TFe), an initiative of the Wasserman laboratory, is an online open access encyclopedia that houses more than 800 articles about transcription factor genes. Transcription factors are a special class of genes that control when genes are turned on or off. They are critical to learning how to use embryonic stem cells for the treatment of human disease. The TFe, which is a wiki-based software system, encourages experts to create short summaries of the known information about each transcription factor. The summaries are comprised of text, 3D models, and word clouds.
HLWIKI International
The objective of the HLWIKI is to build a health sciences librarianship wiki with an international perspective, but also to emphasize issues affecting practice in Canada. For example, it focuses on expert searching to support the development of systematic reviews in medicine, and searching for the grey literature. The HLWIKI International Advisory supports the Creative Commons principles of sharing and collaboration (i.e. copyleft).
Public Knowledge Project
The UBC Library has entered into a major partnership with Public Knowledge Project (PKP), furthering a commitment to the development of scholarly communication software. As a result of this agreement, UBC Library will support and assist PKP’s ongoing development and support of its open source software suite – Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS) and Open Harvester Systems (OHS), and Open Monograph Press (OMP).
Open Access Publisher Memberships
UBC is a participatory member of a number of open access publishers including the Directory of Open Access Journals, Biomed Central, Hindawi, and the Public Library of Science (PLOS).
Scholarly Communications at UBC
The system of scholarship is going through a process of change across the world. Notions of authorship and scholarly publishing are rapidly evolving in the digital age. The purpose of the Scholarly Communications at UBC site is to track these developments, examine the issues and help navigate the debate surrounding changing models of scholarly communication for all those involved in scholarship.
UBC Scholarly Communications Steering Committee
The purpose of the committee is to create a wider forum for discussion and consideration of changes to the system of scholarship and to recommend action on sustainability of current economic models of scholarship, public access to tax-payer funded research, issues surrounding copyright and author rights in the digital age, mechanisms and support to manage new scholarly distribution and information dissemination models such as digital repositories, open access, and other connected movements such as open data, open content, open science, and open education.
