Open Access Week past events
2022
Open for Climate Justice: An Across-Disciplines Fair at 4TH SPACE

Date and time: Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 2–6 p.m.
Location: 4TH SPACE, J.W. McConnell (Library) Building (LB-103)
Co-hosted: Concordia University Library and 4TH Space
Drop by in person at 4TH Space OR join us online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube (the online component will be from 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm).
Want to learn more about how climate justice work can connect and collaborate with open movements, and how the right to share and access data, information, and knowledge equitably can benefit climate justice research and educational work? Come drop in!
Book Launch and Fireside Chat with Alex D. Ketchum

Date and time: Thursday, October 27, 2022, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Location: 4TH SPACE, J.W. McConnell (Library) Building (LB-103)
Concordia University Press and 4th Space launch Engage in Public Scholarship! A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication with an event to celebrate Open Access Week. Dr Ketchum will be joined by Dr Natalie Kouri-Towe in a conversation about finding better ways to share knowledge and connect with public audiences through acts of public scholarship – whether this is through social media and online content, or through in-person events and exhibitions. They will also discuss how to make public scholarship accessible and inclusive for as many groups and ability types as possible by encouraging scholars to design with disability in mind and to publish work in open access formats. This event will be in-person as well as streamed live online. Engage is available in a free digital open-access edition, as well as in a print edition for sale.
Workshops
Using and sharing Open Access content: Creative Commons licences
Learn how to get, collaborate on, and share open access research or creative content with Creative Commons (CC) licences. Whether you need images for a presentation, are seeking information to inform your own research, or want to mix sounds into new music, Creative Commons licences enable you to access and share with a greatly expanding, global body of work.
Date and time: Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 9–11 a.m.
Location: LB-205 (Webster Library)
See full event details and link to register
Paying too much for textbooks? Open Educational Resources have a future through collaboration
This workshop introduces the basics of Open Educational Resources (OER) such as renewable assignments and open textbooks and their place in the open ecosystem. Given the challenges and significant benefits of integrating OER into course content, such as saving students money, this is an opportunity to ask questions, including about the implications of OER for affordability, accessibility, and social justice, and participate in growing the availability and relevance of OER at Concordia.
Date and time: Thursday, October 6, 2022, 2–3:30 p.m.
Location: Online (link will be emailed to those who register)
See full event details and link to register
Introduction to OpenRefine
OpenRefine is a powerful, free tool that simplifies working with messy data. During this workshop, attendees will learn how OpenRefine can be used to clean and normalize data sets, reorder columns, filter data, and transform data sets into different file types.
Date and time: Wednesday, October 12, 2022, 2–3:30 p.m.
Location: LB-205 (Webster Library)
See full event details and link to register
Digital display project: Seer
The Concordia Library is presenting an interactive digital experience, Seer, which will ask people to explore questions about our world through open access research sources. Seer helps people discover, in a playful context, how open access benefits everyone, even outside of academia.
The Seer project provides an interactive interface using a fantasy-game style motif. The display exposes people to intriguing, bite-sized facts in response to a series of pre-determined questions. Users will discover the open access and freely available research sources of these facts and learn about open access licences. As people examine the questions, they will also be prompted to form critical approaches toward the information.
This Concordia Library project will disseminate its code as free and open source software, enabling others to replicate it with the same or new content. Try the web browser version of Seer now.
Date | Time | Location |
Tuesday, October 25, 2022 | 2 - 6 p.m. | 4TH SPACE, J.W. McConnell (Library) Building (LB-103) |
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 | 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. | Visualization Studio, LB-314 (Webster Library) |
October 24 – 31, 2022 | All day | Display counters near the Ask Us desks at the Webster Library and the touchscreen near the book displays at the Vanier Library |

2021

Using and sharing open access content: Creative Commons licences
Learn how to get, collaborate on, and share open access research or creative content with Creative Commons (CC) licences. Whether you need images for a presentation, are seeking information to inform your own research, or want to mix sounds into new music, Creative Commons licences enable you to access and share with a greatly expanding, global body of work. In this workshop you will find out what the Creative Commons is and how to use CC licences. We will practice working with CC content and look at the ramifications of applying different licences to our own work. We will also explore some useful tools for finding CC-licensed work.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Tuesday, October 26, 2021 | 9:30 to 11 a.m. | Online | Register |
Open Educational Resources: Making course materials affordable and accessible
Open educational resources (OER) have gained considerable momentum in Canada and around the world, significantly lowering the cost of course materials and enabling access for all. As part of Open Access Week, this session will give an overview of OER, go over the major OER repositories, and introduce the OER program at Concordia.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Tuesday, October 26, 2021 | 1 to 2 p.m. | Online | Register |
Accessing Open Data
This presentation will give an overview of the main open data sources at the federal, provincial and municipal level. For instance, we will talk about Statistics Canada, l’Institut de la statistique du Québec and the geospatial data from the Ministère de l’Énergie et Ressources naturelles (MERN). We will also cover the Montreal Open Data Portal. The focus will be identifying the best tools We will conclude by introducing the question of Research Data Management and where to find data produced by faculty and graduate students.
Cet atelier présentera l’éventail de données ouvertes, aussi bien données statistiques que géospatiales, qui s’offre aux chercheurs québécois et canadiens. L’accent sera mis sur les données produites par les différents gouvernements aux niveaux fédéral, provincial et municipal. On y verra notamment les produits de Statistique Canada, de l’Institut québécois de la statistique, les données géospatiales du Ministère de l’Énergie et Ressources naturelles (MERN), et le portail de données ouvertes de la Ville de Montréal. Nous traiterons aussi de la question des licences d’utilisation.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Wednesday, October 27, 2021 | 9 to 10:30 a.m. | Online | Register |
Proposal to publication: What authors should know about scholarly book publishing
The peer-reviewed monograph is one of the primary ways by which in scholars in many disciplines share and disseminate their research. In this workshop, Concordia University Press's acquisition editor and managing & production editor will give a brief overview of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Wednesday, October 27, 2021 | 1 to 2 p.m. | Online | Register |

2020

Proposal to publication: What authors should know about scholarly book publishing
The peer-reviewed monograph is one of the primary ways by which in scholars in many disciplines share and disseminate their research. In this workshop, Concordia University Press's acquisition editor and managing & production editor will give a brief overview of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Tuesday, October 20 | 10 to 11 a.m. | Online | Register |
Using and sharing open access content: Creative Commons licences
Learn how to get, collaborate on, and share open access research or creative content with Creative Commons (CC) licences. Whether you need images for a presentation, are seeking information to inform your own research, or want to mix sounds into new music, Creative Commons licences enable you to access and share with a greatly expanding, global body of work. In this workshop you will find out what the Creative Commons is and how to use CC licences. We will practice working with CC content and look at the ramifications of applying different licences to our own work. We will also explore some useful tools for finding CC-licensed work.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Thursday, October 22 | 9:30 to 11 a.m. | Online | Register |
Open Educational Resources: Making course materials affordable and accessible
Open educational resources (OER) have gained considerable momentum in Canada and around the world, significantly lowering the cost of course materials and enabling access for all. As part of Open Access Week, this session will give an overview of OER, go over the major OER repositories, and introduce the OER program at Concordia.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Tuesday, October 20 | 12 to 1 p.m. | Online | Register |
Accessing Open Data
This presentation will give an overview of the main open data sources at the federal, provincial and municipal level. For instance, we will talk about Statistics Canada, l’Institut de la statistique du Québec and the geospatial data from the Ministère de l’Énergie et Ressources naturelles (MERN). We will also cover the Montreal Open Data Portal. The focus will be identifying the best tools We will conclude by introducing the question of Research Data Management and where to find data produced by faculty and graduate students.
Date | Time | Location | Register |
Wednesday, October 21 | 10 to 11 a.m. | Online | Register |

2019

Proposal to publication: What authors should know about scholarly book publishing
Concordia University Press's acquisition editor and managing & production editor will give a brief overview of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social sciences. Topics discussed will include: strategies for turning a dissertation into a book manuscript; how to identify a press that publishes in your area; drafting a book proposal; the peer review process; book production processes and your role; and open access scholarly book publishing.
Using and sharing open access content: Creative Commons licenses
Learn how to get, collaborate on, and share open access research or creative content with Creative Commons (CC) licences. Whether you need images for a presentation, are seeking information to inform your own research, or want to mix sounds into new music, Creative Commons licences enable you to access and share with a greatly expanding, global body of work. In this workshop you will find out what the Creative Commons is and how to use CC licences. We will practice working with CC content and look at the ramifications of applying different licences to our own work. We will also explore some useful tools for finding CC-licensed work. Presentation
"I paid $0 for my textbooks!" - How open educational resources make course materials affordable
The cost of textbooks has skyrocketted in the last 20 years. Open educational resources (OER) have gained considerable momentum in Canada and around the world, making course materials more affordable and less restrictive in access. As part of Open Access Week, this session will give an overview of OER and its place in the open ecosystem. The new OER initiative at Concordia will also be shared. Presentation
Round table discussion on Wikipedia, translation, and open access
Featuring Anna Luisa Daigneault of Living Tongues, Daniel Bögre Udell of Wikitongues, and a member of the Atikamekw Wikipetcia project. This discussion will cover current issues related to translation and open-access in relationship to Wikipedia and Wikimedia.
Copyright and your thesis
This GradProSkills workshop aims to raise awairness of copyright issues in writing a thesis. After presenting general information about copyright, we will discuss how it applies to you as the author of a thesis. First and foremost, we will cover copyright ownership and licensing of your thesis. For example, all thesis written at Concordia University, since 2008, are available via an open archive called Spectrum on the internet site of the Libraries. Following this, we will discuss the use of copyrighted content within your thesis, such as images, tables, etc. The two main points to consider are exceptions to copyright as well as the process to seek permission.
Selecting quality open access journals for publishing your research
This presentation will review the options to consider when choosing open access journals as venues to publish your research. Starting with a brief overview of open access publishing options and article processing charges, we will delve into some of the red flags associated with lower quality open access publications, and finish off with a variety of resources available to help you through the process of assessing and selecting the open access journal that's right for you. Presentation
Open source hardware in research
This presentation will provide an overview of the open source hardware movement and discuss how open source hardware is being used in research.
Open access information desks
Got questions about Open Access? We're here to help! Librarians will be ready to answer your questions at different locations throughout the university during Open Access Week. Come say hi! And find out more about Open Access.
