Visit full UCT OA Week seminar programme here: Designing equitable open access foundations for social justice

The University of Cape Town (UCT) will join institutions and practitioners around the world in celebrating International Open Access Week on 22–28 October 2018. This annual event, initiated in 2009 and coordinated by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, focuses on promoting open access and other forms of open knowledge sharing through a series of online and campus-based events in a wide range of locations.

The event theme for 2018, “Designing equitable foundations for open knowledge”, encourages stakeholders to be intentional about designing new, open systems to ensure availability of inclusive, equitable and collaborative platforms that truly serve the needs of a diverse global community in accessing open knowledge.

As part of the international series of events, UCT Libraries, in collaboration with Disability Services the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) and Postgraduate Studies, will host a seminar on “Designing equitable open access foundations for social justice”. The event celebrates UCT’s long history of engagement with the open access agenda by acknowledging the significance of equity, intersectionality and inclusivity in content creation and sharing.

Open access plays a significant role in the attainment of social justice in the higher education context. As a global movement that emanated from the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Berlin Declaration, open access exists in parallel to other open movements (such as open educational resources and open science), which together advance partnerships and collaborative platforms that support legal, unrestricted, free access to scholarly research and other outputs.

The UCT seminar will focus on highlighting the voice of students and academics in the struggle to obtain a more inclusive approach to the creation and distribution of free, online teaching and learning materials in a diverse, non-binary, heterogenous, multilingual institutional context. Featured speakers will focus on disability access, open textbooks and new tools for democratising access to educational content.

UCT open access research and teaching materials can be accessed via the OpenUCT repository.

The “Designing equitable open access foundations for social justice” seminar will take place on Wednesday 24 October at the Hlanganani Junction, Level 5, Chancellor Oppenheimer Library, from 1.30 to 3.30pm.

Refreshments and a light lunch will be served from 1pm. 

For more detail on international Open Access Week events, see http://www.openaccessweek.org/events.

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