On May 14, 2019, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) and Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) issued a joint statement in advance of the Australian federal election, “Developing a Strategic Approach to Open Scholarship in Australia.”
Review, promotion, and tenure guidelines have been criticized by some as impediments to a transition to open scholarship (see The Film Paywall: The Business of Scholarship and Partner Response to Tri-Agency Statement of Principles on Digital Data Management). The Review, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) Project analyzes RPT documents from universities in the US and Canada in order to determine how publishing in Open Access (OA) and closed-access venues are incentivized and how this incentivization affects open scholarship.
On April 17, 2019, the Government of British Columbia announced a $3.26 million investment in Open Educational Resources (OER) through BCcampus. The funding was announced at the Cascadia Open Education Summit held at Simon Fraser University’s Harbour Centre Campus. BCcampus is a provincially funded agency with a mandate to “provide teaching, learning, educational technology, and open education support to the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia” (“Our Mandate” n.d.).
Open Education Week celebrates and raises awareness of the global Open Education (OE) movement. It was founded in 2013 by the Open Education Consortium, a nonprofit organization that supports a global network of OE advocates.
Generating discussion about scholarly publishing practices and supporting open access is precisely what Paywall aims to do. The film was directed and produced by Jason Schmitt, a filmmaker, journalist, and Associate Professor and Chair of Communication and Media at Clarkson University.