Stop blaming open access: what’s wrong with scholarly communication

Speaker: Dr Danny Kingsley
Date: Thursday, 12 June 2014 Time: 6:00-7:30pm Location: Ainslie Football Club, 52 Wakefield Ave, Ainslie ACT 2602

Free Admission

Scholarly communication is changing rapidly. New methods of communication, new types of journals, changing funding rules and widespread use of social media are just some of the changes. Researchers are working under huge pressure to publish their work. New funding or institutional requirements to make their work available open access means people can be caught out by unscrupulous publishers. This and other factors have meant that some researchers and commentators consider open access to be problematic, of low quality and should not be engaged with. This talk will discuss how the whole scholarly communication system is cracking under pressure, from problems with peer review, with the reward system, with the cost of subscriptions and subsequent lack of access through to the generally poor understanding of how the system works amongst many researchers. Open access, far from causing the problems in the system can be seen instead as one solution.

Dr Danny Kingsley is an expert in open scholarship and the dissemination of research and ideas. Her current role is as the inaugural Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group (http://aoasg.org.au) which began operations in January 2013. She shares information about open access issues and communications through a website, blogs, a discussion list, Twitter and presentations. Prior to this role Danny was the Manager, Scholarly Communication at the Australian National University (ANU), responsible for developing the policies and repository to enable open access at the university.

Dinner will follow the lecture in the Ainslie Football Club restaurant. To RSVP for the dinner please email mail@canberraskeptics.org.au