Open Access Wall of Fame

Dr. Trevor Hart is the Director of the HIV Prevention Lab and Director of TMU’s new HOPE Centre for Gender and Sexual Minority People: the first and only Centre in Canada dedicated to combining health research aimed at understanding disparities in sexual and gender minority health, with the identification, testing, and implementation of counselling and other practice solutions for better health outcomes. He has received several awards for his advancements to research and clinical work, including membership in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), a Toronto Metropolitan University Social Innovation and Action Research Award, and membership in the international Sigma Xi Honor Society of scholars and scientists.

Dr. Hart states:

I am so honoured to receive the Open Access Wall of Fame Award.  It is important that we make our science as accessible as possible to people across the world, including people who are in lower or middle income countries who want to know the latest updates in research.  Having open-access research is also demystify the process of research for people in the public, who may also want to know about our research and to open conversations with the people we learn about in our research.

Frank Russo is a Full Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Science of Music Auditory Research and Technology (SMART) Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research in the SMART Lab investigates the neuro-cognitive, neuro-affective, and socio-biological aspects of music, speech, and hearing. Additionally, he is the Scientific Director of SingWell, a global network dedicated to singing and wellbeing. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received over 10M CAD in lifetime funding. His contributions have earned him Fellowships at Massey College, the Canadian Society for Brain Behavior and Cognitive Science, and the Canadian Psychological Association. 

Regarding Open Access, Dr. Russo states:

While I respect that every researcher must make their own choices, I am personally committed to the principles of Open Access. My commitment is driven by a belief in making scientific research accessible to all, promoting transparency, and fostering efficiency in knowledge dissemination. By ensuring open access to data, publications, and tools, and utilizing pre-registrations, we can illuminate the darker corners of the scientific enterprise, ultimately improving the rigour and reach of our work. The more I practice open science, the more I see that all the objections I once held are no longer defensible.

Anatoliy Gruzd is a Canada Research Chair in Privacy-Preserving Digital Technologies, an Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management and the Director of Research at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is also a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, a co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society, and a founding co-chair of the International Conference on Social Media and Society. As a computational social scientist, Dr. Gruzd’s research broadly explores how social media platforms are changing the ways in which people and organizations communicate, collaborate, disseminate information and misinformation, conduct business and form communities online, and how these changes impact society.

Jennifer Lapum is a leader and social justice advocate in the development and curricular integration of Open Educational Resources (OER) in post-secondary education. She has been a lead author and editor in the production of several e-textbooks that have involved creating original content combined with adapting and remixing existing OER. These resources have included topics related to health assessment, vital sign measurement, scholarly writing, nutrition, nurse-client interviewing, and immunizations. In addition to reducing textbook costs for students, Dr. Lapum’s passion is to promote learner engagement and create accessible learning spaces by leveraging the multi-media and interactive elements of book authoring software programs. The collaborative nature of OER production has been a cornerstone of her work in which she has valued the joint efforts of students, educators, instructional designers, librarians, artists, among others.

Statement from Aaron and Paul:

When we started developing our e-textbook, Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research, we did so with the notion of it being Open Access for a number of reasons. The first was fairly straightforward: we know that our students spend a lot of money to go to university and we wanted to provide a free textbook to the over 1400 students who take SSH 205: Academic Writing and Research each year at Ryerson. Making the text Open Access has allowed us to do this while making the textbook free to anyone across Ontario.

More than this, Open Access documents and projects encourage exactly the kind of building and sharing of ideas we want our students to undertake. We want them to consider their own placement in the ongoing academic discourse; cite and analyze parts of this scholarly dialogue; and adapt those ideas and documents to their own arguments and thinking. Open Access allows for this process to be undertaken in a public commons, where texts and thinking can be shared easily. We believe our first year students’ writing will be strengthened through this sort of openness. By choosing Open Access content and incorporating it into our work, and then making our textbook available to others so that they can not only access but also engage and interact with our words and videos, we are hoping to encourage that same healthy academic construction in the writing classroom. — Paul Chafe and Aaron Tucker

Dr Bauder is the Academic Director of the Ryerson Centre for Immigration & Settlement and a graduate Professor in Immigration & Settlement Studies and the Department of Geography. Dr Bauder has been a long-time supporter of Open Access publishing, participating as both as writer and an editor. He was the editor of the journal ACME: An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies  for nearly a decade and also served as editor of the open-access book publisher Praxis (e)Press. Through Praxis (e)Press, Dr Bauder published the textbook Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings with Salvatore Engel-di Mauro. In addition, as the inaugural Academic Director of the Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement (RCIS), Dr Bauder founded and edited the open-access RCIS Discussion Paper Series and the RCIS Research Briefs. Other Open Access publication venues include Comparative Migration Studies, the CERIS Working Paper Series, and popular media, such as Open Democracy. For more information about Dr Bauder’s work, including links to his publications, please see his faculty page.

Dr Gucciardi is an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and an Affiliate Scientist with the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. She has written over a dozen publicly-accessible manuscripts on diabetes research. On the subject of open access, she writes:

I feel that everyone should have equitable access to publicly-funded research. Many libraries cannot purchase all of the journals available, particularly in less developed countries; thus, open access material helps to support research at all institutions worldwide. I also believe that publishing in open access journals will help attain a higher level of impact from greater numbers of citations. Ultimately, if all research is moved out from behind paywalls, our work can inspire broader collaboration, proliferate more research and potentially have greater benefits on society globally.

For more information about Dr Gucciardi’s work, including selected publications, please see her website.