The Open Access Wall of Fame honours researchers who have demonstrated a commitment to ensuring their research and outputs are open and available to all. Our aim is to acknowledge and support those who consider open access avenues when publishing their work. Open Access material is scholarly work that is made legally available with no restrictions so the anyone can access the full text. Open Education makes openly licensed educational resources available publicly on the Internet.
2020 – Anatoliy Gruzd
The Library is pleased to announce the 2020 inductee to our Open Access Wall of Fame, Professor Anatoliy Gruzd from the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management. Grudz recognizes the importance and connection between open access publishing and the role of social media in promotion and dissemination of scholarly research, and regularly posts his research work in open formats.
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.
2019 – Jennifer Lapum
The Library is pleased to announce the 2019 inductee to our Open Access Wall of Fame, Professor Jennifer Lapum from the Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing.
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.
2017 – Paul Chafe and Aaron Tucker
The Library is pleased to announce the inductees for the 2017 Open Access Wall of Fame. This year, we are pleased to celebrate Aaron Tucker and Paul Chafe, two Ryerson researchers who have made a commitment to producing an Open Educational Resource entitled Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research.
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
2016 – Catherine Middleton
The Library is pleased to announce the 2016 inductee to our Open Access Wall of Fame, Professor Catherine Middleton from the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management (TRSM).
Professor Middleton is a current Canada Research Chair, and a consistent contributor to the Library’s Digital Repository, a space for collecting, preserving, and providing online access to research and teaching materials created by the Ryerson community. Available in the repository are theses, dissertations, articles, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, etc., which are freely available to anyone. Upon her induction to the Open Access Wall of Fame, Professor Middleton made the following statement: “Publishing work in open access venues like the RULA Digital Repository is crucial to make academic research accessible to broad and diverse audiences, including policy makers, students at all levels, and interested citizens.” There will be a forthcoming event to celebrate Catherine’s contributions to open access.
2015 – Harald Bauder and Enza Gucciardi
This year’s inaugural inductees are Dr Harald Bauder and Dr Enza Gucciardi.
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.
Congratulations to Dr Bauder and Dr Gucciardi! Ryerson Library is honoured to have you as our first Open Access Wall of Fame inductees.