The 15th International Conference on Open Repositories, OR2020, will be held in Stellenbosch, South Africa, from 1-4 June 2020. The organisers are pleased to invite you to contribute to the program. This year's conference theme is:
Open for all
In today's world, access to knowledge by all is viewed by some as a fundamental freedom and human right. In our societies, open knowledge for all can enable sustainable development and growth on many levels. How well do repositories support knowledge in the service of society? How well do they enable local knowledge sharing and support not only academic use, but also use in education and practice?
Invitation to participate
OR2020 will provide an opportunity to explore and reflect on the ways repositories enable openness for all. We hope that this discussion will give the participants new insights and inspiration, which will help them to play a key role in developing, supporting and sharing an open agenda and open tools for research and scholarship.
We particularly welcome proposals on the overall "Open for All" theme, but also on other administrative, organisational or practical topics related to digital repositories. We are particularly interested in the following sub-themes:
1. Equity and democratization of knowledge
- Accessibility of repositories and their content
- Equity and democratization of knowledge
- Inclusion of marginalized and underrepresented voices
- Local knowledge sharing
- Moving beyond traditional academic content and services, supporting educators and practitioners
- Supporting knowledge in the service of society, encouraging non-academic use
- Enabling access to governmental publications/data
- Addressing language barriers
2. Beyond the repository
- Integration with other open knowledge resources (e.g. Wikimedia and Wikidata)
- Next Generation Repositories, Pubfair
- Convergence and integration with other types of systems (e.g. current research information systems, digital asset management systems, publishing platforms, ORCID)
- Interoperability vs integration
- New models for scholarly sharing
- Data mining, artificial intelligence and machine learning
3. Open and sustainable
- Local systems vs repository as a service
- Securing long-term funding for open infrastructures
- Open business models and governance for open infrastructures
- Sustaining community-based infrastructure
4. Policies, licensing and copyright laws
- Impact of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act) and copyright laws
- Publisher policies, embargoes and rights retention
- Licenses and re-use of content
- Compliance and impact of funder policies (e.g. Plan S) on repositories
5. Discovery, use and impact
- Data/metadata visualization
- Open access discovery, research data discovery
- Tools for researchers and practitioners, interfaces for machines
- Measuring impact particularly outside of the academic context.
- Supporting use by practitioners.
6. Supporting open scholarship and cultural heritage
- Providing access to different types of materials (e.g. research data, scholarly articles, pre prints and overlay journals, open access monographs, theses and dissertations, educational resources, archival and cultural heritage materials, audiovisual materials, software, interactive publications and emerging formats)
- Repositories as digital humanities and open science platforms
- Inclusion of marginalized and underrepresented voices
Submission Process
The Program Committee has provided templates to use for submissions (see below for links). Please use the submission template, and then submit through ConfTool (link coming soon) where you will be asked to provide additional information (such as primary contact and the conference subtheme your submission best fits).
Accepted proposals in all categories will be made available through the conference's website. Later, the presentations and associated materials will be made available in an open repository; you will be contacted to upload your set of slides or poster. Some conference sessions will be live streamed or recorded, then made publicly available.
After the completion of the conference, we will solicit full papers from a selection of presentation in order to be published in the OR2020 proceedings (open access, no article processing charge) in cooperation with a scholarly publisher. If you are proposing a presentation or panel, you may want to consider whether it could be turned into a full paper.
Submission Categories
Presentations
Presentations make up the bulk of the Open Repositories conference. Presentations are substantive discussions of a relevant topic; successful submissions in past years have typically described work relevant to a wide audience. These typically are placed in a 30 minute time slot (generally alongside two other presentations for a total of 90 minutes). We strongly encourage presentations that can be delivered in 20-25 minutes in order to leave time for questions and discussion.
