The Public Knowledge Project at 21: Activism, Scholarship, Security Patches
A Conversation with Professor John Willinsky
Co-hosted by the UBC Library and the UBC iSchool (Library, Archival and Information Studies)
Date/location: July 11, 2019, 2:00-3:30pm (a one-hour talk followed by thirty minutes for informal conversation and refreshments)
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Lillooet Room | UBC Vancouver Campus
Light refreshments will be served.
Register in advance at: http://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/8066
On or around December 1998, a UBC professor of education inadvertently stepped out of his field of study and into the realm of scholarly communication, having been thrown off course by a glaring contradiction between teaching the young to read – on the promise that it would open worlds for them – and working in an academic system that needlessly cut such readers off from the world of learning in which he worked. His response was to create a Public Knowledge Project that soon attracted the attention, support, and, at one point, the censure of The University of British Columbia Library. Although this talk begins on a personal note, it soon leaps ahead to the current state of scholarly communication. Here, it sets out PKP’s continuing efforts to open that world of learning take the form of building out open infrastructure in the face of corporate lock-in, initiating economic models for universal open access, and proposing copyright reform as an advance over the legal workarounds of open access policies.
BIOGRAPHY:
John Willinsky is Professor in Publishing Studies at SFU, where he directs the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which conducts research and develops open source scholarly publishing software; he is also Khosla Family Professor of Education and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. A member of the Royal Society of Canada, his books include the “Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED” (Princeton, 1994); “Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End” (Minnesota, 1998); “Technologies of Knowing” (Beacon 2000); and “The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship” (MIT Press, 2006).
Part-time position, in partnership with Public Knowledge Project.
In 2016, John Willinsky was honoured with a SSHRC Impact Award for his work with the Public Knowledge Project.