Enabling Open Scholarship Launched

A new organization for senior management in universities and research institutions, Enabling Open Scholarship, has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The aim of Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) is to further the opening up of scholarship and research that we are now seeing as a natural part of ‘big science’ and through the growing interest from the research community in open access, open education, open science and open innovation. These, and other, 'open' approaches to scholarship are changing the way research and learning are done and will be performed in the future.

Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) provides the higher education and research sectors around the world with information on developments and with advice and guidance on implementing policies and processes that encourage the opening up of scholarship. It also provides a forum for discussion and debate amongst its members and will be taking that discussion into the wider community.

EOS membership is for senior institutional managers who have an interest in — and wish to help develop thinking on — strategies for promoting open scholarship to the academy as a whole and to society at large.

The EOS website is a resource open to all. It provides background information, data and guidance material on open scholarship-related issues. In a limited access area, members can find announcements, news and discussions.

EOS offers an outreach service to universities and research institutes — whether members or not — that need help, advice, guidance or information on open scholarship issues. We do this through our website and also by providing information on an individual basis to institutions that need it.

The EOS board is composed of people who have personally designed or instigated the kinds of changes in their own institutions that herald the benefits of the open scholarly communication system of the future. Now this expertise is available for others to tap into.

The current EOS board comprises:

  • Bernard RENTIER (Chairman), Rector of the University of Liege, Belgium
  • Tom COCHRANE, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
  • William DAR, Director General of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad, India
  • Stevan HARNAD, Canada Research Chair, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Montreal, Quebec
  • Keith JEFFERY, Director of IT and International Strategy at the Science & Technology Facilities Council, Swindon, UK
  • Sijbolt NOORDA, President of VSNU, the Association of Dutch Research Universities
  • Stuart SHIEBER, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Office of Scholarly Communication
  • Ian SIMPSON, Deputy Principal for Research and Knowledge Transfer, and Professor of Environmental Science, University of Stirling, UK
  • Peter SUBER, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
  • John WILLINSKY, Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and director of the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, USA
  • Alma SWAN (Convenor/Coordinateur), Director of Key Perspectives Ltd, Truro, UK