CFP – Interrogating Access: Current and Future Directions for Scholarly Research and Communications in Canada

CALL FOR PAPERS
Interrogating Access: Current and Future Directions for Scholarly Research and Communications in Canada
Friday, February 14–Sunday, February 16, 2014
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON

The scholarly enterprise is experiencing the impact of the digital revolution simultaneous with shifting paradigms of institutional, governmental and other supports to research brought on by a worldwide financial crisis and the current rise of neoliberalism. How are these forces affecting the scholarly ecosystem in Canada? What should those engaged in scholarship — researchers, librarians, post-secondary administrators, academic publishers, and funding agencies — anticipate for the future of scholarship in Canada? When access to resources, funding, employment, and dissemination are all in a state of flux, how should our scholarly support systems be restructured or re-visioned for the future?

Interrogating Access: Current and Future Directions for Scholarly Research and Communications in Canada is a conference designed to bring together a range of stakeholders in scholarship, particularly those working in the social sciences and humanities. Academic researchers and librarians, university and college administrators, scholarly editors and publishers, and representatives from funding agencies and scholarly associations are all invited to attend and participate to advance our mutual knowledge and understanding about current and future directions of the pursuit, support, and communication of Canadian scholarship.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association and author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (2011), will give the keynote address, providing context for the Canadian debate. Roundtables will focus on the issues of intellectual property, open access and the rise of digital initiatives in the humanities and social sciences.

We seek paper proposals from Canadian stakeholders in the scholarly enterprise on topics such as:

• the research enterprise and financial supports for the scholar (e.g. research and dissemination)
• the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian research infrastructure (e.g. vetting and acquisition practices associated with libraries and archives; library collaborations and consortia; data collection, integrity and access provided by government, public and private entities; long- term preservation; independent versus partnered research)
• scholarly communications and academic capital (e.g. forms of measuring success and their strengths/limitations [metrics and altmetrics]; differentiated credit for outputs across fields; career advancement and scholarly outputs)
• scholarly publishing and dissemination (e.g. analysis of business models; external funding; paid and volunteer labour; acquisition, marketing, production, distribution, and discovery; contexts of publication [scholarly societies, scholar-led supported by libraries, or formal publishers]; consortia opportunities)
• peer review (e.g. established and alternative models [management and timing of the review process in the research lifecycle, blinded or open]; reliance on a gift economy of labour; credit for peer-reviewed vs. non-peer-reviewed publications)
• intellectual property (e.g. copyright and the researcher/creator, the publisher, the instructor, the librarian, the student; Access Copyright, commercial databases and alternative business models for providing access; data mining; open access)
• electronic publishing (e.g. relationship between print and electronic publishing models and reading practices; costs/challenges of conversion & archiving; licensing versus ownership; the ‘death’ of the monograph; publishing and academic status of electronic forms of scholarship such as blogs, websites, apps, etc.; the culture of free and open access and its effects on the dissemination of scholarship)
•new directions and initiatives

Please send proposals of 250-350 words, accompanied by a brief bio, by August 1, 2013 to:

Lisa Quinn, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (quinn@press.wlu.ca)

This conference is co-sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University (with support of the Office of Research Services) and York University.

Organizers: Lisa Quinn, Acquisitions Editor, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Janet Friskney, Research Officer, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University
Andrea Kosavic, Digital Initiatives Librarian, York University