Notes from “Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship”

I’m currently at the Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship conference. Hackathon, presentations on open data,  open access, and alt metrics. You can follow what’s happening via Twitter at #arcs2015. I’ll add some notes from the conference soon and am excited to present on “Beyond Open: Global Perspective on Research Communication and Knowledge Production.” The panel’s chaired by Brian Rosenblum (University of Kansas Libraries) and I am joining Jane Anderson (NYU) Mónica I. Feliú-Mójer, (Ciencia Puerto Rico and iBiology) and John Willinsky (Stanford). Below is the description:

Current scholarly communication initiatives are focused on expanding access, use, and reuse. This session will explore the relationship between these issues and the needs and goals of the developing world and marginalized communities.  We will consider how new models and expectations affect and address knowledge distribution structures in the developing world, and the control local research communities have over their own legacies and outputs.

For example, are efforts to make cultural materials “open” at odds with the interests of indigenous or marginalized groups, whose culture may be appropriated by those with greater resources or access to the means of knowledge production? How do Traditional Knowledge (TK) licenses address some of the inadequacies of Creative Commons licenses in this regard? How do open access initiatives of the global north impact the visibility of scholarship produced in the global south. What are the main institutional forces driving knowledge production in the global south and how does this affect scholarship from and about those regions? What infrastructures are needed to allow the south to support the production and distribution of its own research?

We will explore these and similar issues in order to identify points of entry to expand the scope of discussion around global research communication.  The discussion will be relevant to researchers across disciplines, as well as publishers and professionals in libraries, archives, museums and other cultural institutions.