OA Publishing @ SJSU (ScholarWorks)

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.

The widening gap between research output in the Global North and South is arguably an extension of historical structural power when colonial capitals were centers of knowledge production and poorer colonized countries were providers of data. In recent times, the escalating costs of subscription-based scholarly communication and copyright barriers have deepened the crisis because scholars in the Global South often can’t afford access to expensive journals that publish the most cutting edge research by the best scholars in the Global North. Moreover, APCs or article processing charges required for Open Access publishing pose a monetary challenge owing to currency conversion rates. So, scholars in the Global South are limited and sometimes excluded from research and scholarly communications.

For whom is the research made accessible? How is the research made accessible? What should scholars do? Why should they do it? How will scholars find Open Access research? How can librarians work with scholars both in the Global South and North?