PDF - CARL - ABRC

generally better Tuesday to Thursday afternoons for UBC events. Late in our planning process we
learned about the CARL sponsored webcast, Q&A session with John Wilbanks. We added this to our
schedule.
Our overall objectives for this year were to increase awareness of open access (OA) and the principle of
open scholarship and to utilize our event as a forum to engage our community (UBC & non‐UBC) in a
discussion of OA. To this end, the week’s events were built around three themes: Open Access Around
the World, Surfacing UBC Scholarship, and Journal Publishing. Our rationale for drawing up these
themes are as follows:
1. Lectures constructed around the theme Open Access Around the world was intended to
emphasize and educate our community on the global nature of open access and its connected
open movements;
2. Sessions on the theme of Surfacing UBC Scholarship was intended to showcase local, UBC
community participation in the open movement and to further advertise cIRcle, the university’s
Information Repository;
3. The theme of Journal Publishing was based on a UBC Journal Editor’s Forum, UBC Library hosted
in October 2008. At the forum, we learned many of the UBC journal editors had questions about
open access business models. Some were struggling to consider how best to transition their own
journals to an open access model. They indicated they would appreciate a follow‐up session
addressing these questions. We felt a follow‐up session that coincided with our Open Access
Week planning would be ideal.
A listing of talks per theme can be found on the Open Access Week@ UBC website:
http://www.library.ubc.ca/schol_comm/oa/start.html
We also hosted a small exhibit, displaying open access initiatives and our OA events on video monitors
located in the centre and other libraries and we exhibited two poster displays of our IR and another
exhibit of open access and costs of journals in high‐traffic areas in our centre.
Overall the event was felt to be a success as evidenced by the increased attendance per day from the
previous year’s one day event, 1 particularly faculty attendance, and meeting most of our objectives:
Each event was full with a total of 121 participants over the course of the week. Of that number 45
faculty attended, 12 UBC (non‐library) staff members; 7 students; 49 UBC librarians & library staff, and
10 members of the public. We also met our objective to broaden participation to our library community
at large. Although public attendance was fairly minimal, it was interesting for us to see who came: one
was a medical doctor (came for every event), one was a faculty member from a local college (came for
every event), one was a faculty member from the University of Washington, and one was a recent
undergraduate of UBC (came for every event). We were also pleased faculty attendance increased
substantially particularly on the Journal Publishing Day.
It is also always a measure of success, when an event leads to follow‐up speaking invitations to
departmental groups. Several weeks after the event, a faculty member who attended our OA week
events invited us to conduct a workshop on open access, copyright & author rights and cIRcle, UBC’s
1 Open Access Awareness Day took place on October 14, 2008 from 1‐5 pm: (total of 24 in attendance, 9 faculty, 3
UBC staff, 12 UBC Library staff). The organizers attributed low attendance to the event falling on the 2008 Federal
Election Day and the next working day following Thanksgiving.
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