John Hepburn, UBC’s Vice President Research & International (left), congratulates David Ng, winner of the 2014 Innovative Dissemination of Research Award, at a March reception. Credit: Don Erhardt Photography
This story appears in UBC Library’s 2013/14 Community Report. Read more to find out how we’re supporting economic, environmental and social sustainability at UBC.
At UBC, the future of knowledge is opening up – and the Library is playing a key role to bolster the University’s research and share its efforts.
Last December, the University’s Vancouver Senate approved the UBC Open Access Position Statement (the Okanagan Senate approved it earlier in 2013). This statement encourages UBC faculty to deposit their work in cIRcle, the Library’s open access digital repository that hosts the University’s scholarly output.
Open access is a concept that involves making research literature freely available online. In doing so, it can be a key contributor to making scholarship accessible to current and future generations of learners, on campus and around the world.
“If research is publicly available, then other researchers can build on it,” explains Hilde Colenbrander, cIRcle Coordinator. “And it could contain the costs of future research, because you don’t have to duplicate what someone else has done.”
UBC Library launched cIRcle in 2007; it was recently ranked as the top repository in Canada and 29th out of 1,746 repositories worldwide. It also hosts more than 45,000 research, learning and teaching items, one of which belongs to David Ng, Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories.
Ng’s offering, a 2012 presentation entitled “Adventures in Open Science Advocacy,” was given at Open UBC – an annual event organized by UBC Library and the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology that encourages the academic community to learn about open scholarship initiatives locally and worldwide.
“In science, I do think open access ultimately is quite important,” says Ng. “The scientific method does work better with that transparency at every stage.”
Ng also won the 2014 Innovative Dissemination of Research Award for Phylo, a trading card game with a biodiversity theme, crowdsourced content and an open philosophy. UBC Library established this award in 2010 to honour faculty, students and staff who find unique ways to share research through the creative use of new tools and technologies.
Cover photo: Humpback Whale, Megaptera novaeangliae, illustrated by Jennifer Rae Kinyak, courtesy of the Phylo Project.
