We are pleased to announce the webinar “Sustainable Development and Open Access" that will take place in conjunction with the e-forum on "Sustainable Development Goals: The Impact of Access to Information on our Societies".

The e-forum is an online event is a joint effort by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to provide a forum for institutions and individuals to learn more about the Lyon Declaration, and to exchange ideas about how information centers and libraries can promote the adoption of access to information as part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Click here for more information on the e-forum.

Abstract

Some of the aspects that will be addressed by this webinar are:

• The backdrop is sustainable development;
• Without open access, sustainable development is simply not possible. Open access is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition to development in terms of research capacity;
• Controlling one's research agenda is also very important. Working purely in terms of criteria such as "international" journals and impact factors will work only insofar as some problems addressed in rich countries are also of interest in developing countries; working on problems of interest to a country or, better, a region, is also an important part of the research agenda of this country or region (it addresses, for example, the issue of neglected diseases, some of which are very dangerous (e.g. Ebola virus) and others are huge killers (malaria). The same is true in the domain of agriculture.
• What precedes suggests a general strategy based on open access: Organize institutional repositories around sets of important regional or national problems, rather than disciplines and specialities; Distinguish between problems of interest everywhere, and problems of particular interest for a given country or region. In the first case: Examine how best to insert local and regional research teams or individuals into the relevant networks, without losing them; In the second case: in which case, organize South-South networks that can provide a sufficient scale and transparency to the whole operation to avoid the dangers of endogenous mediocrity; use these networks to attract some researchers from the North into these problems. As they are probably relatively isolated in their own research communities, this should not be too difficult (and the power relationship in this case would probably stand a chance of being in the benefit of the South.
• Operational correlates: For the FAO: continue to help identify major problems of interest to developing and emergent countries and help design research strategies according to each case of research problem; For the libraries and COAR: work with repositories and publishing platforms to present the available OA materials according to the set of problems identified by FAO and their partners. Similar operations could be developed with other international bodies, in particular WHO for health issues; Help navigate through these collections of documents organized according to problems by: a. Building appropriate meta-data; b. Relying on quality and reliability assessments with no attempt to rank; c. Incite scientists from the North that do research around the selected problems to deposit their publications in suitable depositories. 

Date

8th of September 2015 - 16:00 CEST - Use Time Converter to calculate the time difference between your location.

Presenter

Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon is a professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal and a specialist of digital culture, internet studies, and electronic publishing, Dr. Guédon has been an advocate for open access to research for many years. He was one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration in 2002 and again of the BOAI 10 Declaration last year, and has served on the board of numerous international organizations that support openness and digital scholarship such as the Electronic Information for Libraries and the Information Programme of the Open Society Foundations.

Participation

The session is open to anyone, Use the link at http://fao.adobeconnect.com/eforumwebinarjcg/. Contact us at [email protected] for further information.

System requirements

Make sure that: you have good internet connection; Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10; Mozilla Firefox; Google Chrome; and Adobe® Flash® Player 10.3. If in doubt, go to Checking system requirements of the web conferencing programme Adobe Connect.

Sponsors

This webinar is co-sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), COAR and IFLA