What can the open access / scholcomm communities do right now in light of COVID-19?
First, go or stay home and do what you need to do to keep yourself, your family and communities safe. It is normal to need some time to absorb the massive social changes we are all going through, to figure out how to work from home if this isn't your current practice, to help your organization to adjust to providing service without a physical location. When you have time to get back to a OA / scholcomm focus, my recommendation is to focus for now on OA to the most relevant materials and resources. If you have scholars whose work could help the fight to find vaccines or treatments or speed up production of needed equipment and supplies, it would be helpful to make this material OA if possible. Maybe someone in India, China, or Africa could build on this knowledge to create solutions that will help your community. Many people are sharing links to free resources that can help people adjust to social distancing and isolation - free cultural resources, online workouts, etc. Thank you, that is a great idea and in the medium to long term will help people see the benefits of OA. There will be a time for broader discussion of OA policy to be better prepared next time. In my opinion, the time for this will come in several months for those of us in North America and other places where the immediate need is to slow the spread of COVID-19. To help prepare for this phase, I have reposted 2 related posts from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics and their links here: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2020/03/23/reflections-on-covid-19-and-oa-materials-now-advocacy-later/ Dr. Heather Morrison Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project sustainingknowledgecommons.org heather.morri...@uottawa.ca https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706 [On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020]
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