Lightning Round #2

Wednesday October 05, 2022

From 2:00pm to 2:30pm

Join us for a series of 10-minute lightning talks!

Building Community around Policy with the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory (Caroline Winter)

This lightning talk provides an overview of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory and a snapshot of the policy landscape it describes. The OS Policy Observatory is an open, online hub for resources about open scholarship policy. An initiative of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership, it was launched in 2017 in response to a need identified by members of the INKE community, recognizing the importance of policy to open scholarship and the challenge of keeping up with policy developments. INKE, an international research network for fostering open social scholarship, is a highly collaborative endeavour, with partners and members across Canada (including CRKN), in the US, and in Australia, and collaboration is essential to the OS Policy Observatory as well. In addition to policy analysis developed in consultation with the community and published in English and French, the site includes response pieces written by community members and an archive of open scholarship policy documents from Canada and around the world.

The OS Policy Observatory takes a broad view of open scholarship policy, considering reports, activities, and trends as well as formal policy documents with direct or indirect implications for open scholarship. The descriptive policy overviews it presents consider the significance of a given policy or development for INKE’s extended community as well as for open scholarship overall, providing a foundation for stakeholders’ own policy development as well as policy recommendations on issues affecting our community.

This talk synthesizes and summarizes some of the findings of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory so far and a research scan based upon it, offering a snapshot of the current open scholarship policy landscape as outlined by INKE’s extended community, its trends over time, and the roads that lie ahead.

Facilitating Canadian Researchers’ and NGOs’ participation in Knowledge Mobilization; A Necessity to Enhance Societal Contribution of Academic Research (Hamid Golhasany, Blane Harvey)

Mobilizing knowledge between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to address societal needs and challenges is increasingly important. Still, there is a wide “know-do” gap between what the latest research-based evidence indicates and the norms we find in social policy and practice. This gap can lead to negative consequences such as inadequate access to effective healthcare and education. One key to narrowing this gap is enhancing the relevancy of research projects to the local needs and priorities. To this aim, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are uniquely positioned as they are often closely connected with communities. This connection provides NGOs with deep knowledge of local communities’ challenges and priorities that could assist researchers in generating more relevant knowledge for addressing the local needs. However, this input about local challenges and needs is absent from the accessible literature to researchers and NGOs’ potential role in increasing societal impact and participation in knowledge mobilization is largely understudied.

This study investigates the potential of a web-based online platform to facilitate NGOs’ and researchers’ participation in knowledge mobilization. This platform’s (called ScienceReach) ultimate goal is to improve the relevancy of research projects to local needs by increasing the mutual knowledge exchange between researchers and NGOs. For this objective, the study involves conducting qualitative interviews with NGOs and researchers to evaluate their needs, incentives, and barriers to engaging in knowledge mobilization activities. The outcomes of this study will constitute a richer understanding of NGOs’ and researchers’ participation in knowledge mobilization activities through online platforms such as ScienceReach.

Search tool to use with the CRKN Journal Perpetual Access Spreadsheets (Melissa Belvadi)

The CRKN Knowledge Base Entitlements Sub-Committee (KBESC) has developed a system for tracking perpetual access rights for journals. A team of student programmers working with Melissa developed a search front end for this system and designed it so that libraries with non-CRKN perpetual rights to journals will be able to incorporate that information into the search system. This presentation will demo the search tool.