It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity

Biennial Open Access Conference at San José State University

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Library
October 29, 2021, 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM PDT
Virtual Conference/Free Registration

Efforts to open access to knowledge, research, and scholarship are often focused on building new structures: new systems for distributing and archiving scholarship and data, new reward structures for researchers, new cultures of research that favor openness. But simply opening access does not ensure a more equitable knowledge environment. Without intervention, new and open structures can reproduce existing structural inequalities.

The recently released UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which inspired the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week and for this conference, proposes a framework for equitable, open structures for science on the national and international level. Libraries and library workers often work at a much more local level, but in many ways we are implicated in the same structural concerns. These concerns manifest in the systems we build and in the systems, structures, institutions, and corporations that form the context for our work.

Because “it matters how” we do our work, this conference will focus on ways that the structures of “open” promote or inhibit a diverse, inclusive, and equitable scholarly communication environment.