Congratulations John Willinsky
Posted: February 6th, 2014John Willinsky, founder of the Public Knowledge Project, which developed the Open Journal Systems (OJS) used at Queen’s, has been honoured as the January 2014 SPARC Innovator. The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group.
Willinsky, currently the Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University, gave the keynote address, titled The Intellectual Properties of Learning in the Digital Age, during the 2009 Open Access Week @ Queen’s program.
Queen’s University Librarian Martha Whitehead first met Willinsky in the late 1990s at the University of British Columbia, when he was Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology in the Faculty of Education. “John was an innovator then, and he really hasn’t stopped,” says Whitehead, “It’s a great pleasure to see him honoured now by SPARC, an organization that has provided such strong leadership in the open access movement.”
As a result of a conference conversation in 2010, Whitehead agreed that Queen’s would contribute to a study Willinsky was starting at Stanford, published as “Setting Aside the Course Reader: The Legal, Economic, and Pedagogical Reasons” in Innovations in Higher Education (2013). Sharon Murphy, Head of Academic Services, enjoyed liaising with the Stanford team and the Queen’s Campus Bookstore, who supplied course packs for Queen’s part of the project. “We benefitted greatly from the goodwill and generosity of the bookstore,” says Murphy, “From the moment we approached them, they were supportive.” Library technician Kim Bell, who analyzed 50 course packs at Queen’s, says the results of the study were interesting: for the 110 course packs studied at the two universities, 45% of the readings were freely available either through the university library or open access sources.
In the article, authors Brent J. Evans and Willinsky also discuss “a number of pedagogical benefits to having students work directly with scholarship within a dynamically hyperlinked environment.” In a poster presented at the Ontario Library Association SuperConference in 2013, Bell observed that “the study strongly suggests the need for further multi-institutional investigation to bring course reading offerings in line with student cost considerations, copyright law, and educational priorities of post-secondary institutions.”
The January 2014 SPARC Innovator Profile is online at http://www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/innovator
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