Today, I'm at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, participating in a three-hour symposium, "The new environment for information dissemination". The session takes place as part of Canada's Congress of the Humanities and Social Studies (CHSS), whose theme this year is "Crossroads: Scholarship for an Uncertain World."
Led by David Mitchell, professor at the University of Calgary, the session asks questions relevant to humanties publishing in a digital age:
"The environment in which social science and humanities (SSH) research is developed and disseminated in Canada is currently undergoing radical transformation. Is this new environment necessarily a good or bad thing? More importantly, how should we define the public interest in this newly emerging environment?"
The morning features six topic-driven sessions:
- "Beyond belief: An action foundation for social science and humanities" (Rowland Lorimar of Simon Fraser University)
- "A business model for open access products" (Frits Pannekoek, Athabasca University)
- "The opportunity in abundance" (an edited version of the earlier presentation)
- "As the future catches you" (Linda Baer, I4 Solutions)
- "Public Knowledge Project" (John Willinsky, Stanford University/Simon Fraser University)
- "New realities in educational publishing" (Laura McLeod, Nelson Education)
I'm particularly looking forward to the John Willinsky's mid-morning presentation on the Public Knowledge Project, which is dedicated to "making the results of publicly-funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible." I'll try to take good notes and report back in a future post.
