The third LERU Doctoral Summer School, focused on Open Access, begins at the UB

Participants of the third LERU Doctoral Summer School.
Participants of the third LERU Doctoral Summer School.
(09/07/2012)

The University of Barcelona organises the third LERU (League of European Research Universities) Doctoral Summer School, which will take place on 8 - 13 July at the Palau de Les Heures, on the Mundet Campus of the UB, under the title “Beyond Open Access: Open Education, Open Data and Open Knowledge”. This yearʼs edition will have the participation of around thirty doctoral students from 13 LERU universities, a league in which the UB is a member, as well as students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States), the Weill Cornell Medical College (United States) and the Tsinghua University (China).

Participants of the third LERU Doctoral Summer School.
Participants of the third LERU Doctoral Summer School.
09/07/2012

The University of Barcelona organises the third LERU (League of European Research Universities) Doctoral Summer School, which will take place on 8 - 13 July at the Palau de Les Heures, on the Mundet Campus of the UB, under the title “Beyond Open Access: Open Education, Open Data and Open Knowledge”. This yearʼs edition will have the participation of around thirty doctoral students from 13 LERU universities, a league in which the UB is a member, as well as students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States), the Weill Cornell Medical College (United States) and the Tsinghua University (China).

The welcome reception, chaired by the rector of the UB, Dídac Ramírez, took place on 8 July at the Palau de Les Heures. It was attended by Claudi Alsina, secretary general of the Interuniversity Council of Catalonia; Kurt Deketelaere, secretary general of the LERU; Enric Aulí, director of Environmental Intervention of the Barcelona City Council; Paul Ayris, president of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), and Ignasi Labastida, from the Office of Knowledge Dissemination at the CRAI and coordinator of Doctoral Summer School at the UB.

The main objective of the LERU Doctoral Summer School is to bring together doctoral students to analyze the challenges and opportunities that the open scholarship agenda offers to universities from different perspectives of scholarly activity, including both teaching and research. At the end of the summer school, students will be able to identify the different policies that apply to their research, understand the legal aspects regarding their research outputs, evaluate the different ways to disseminate these outputs, appropriately use the tools available to openly share their knowledge and mark their research contents as open.

To achieve all these goals, the organisers have invited 10 international experts in open education, open data and open knowledge. Some of the lecturers that will take part in the third LERU Doctoral Summer School are: Paul Ayris, president of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), director of the University College London (UCL) Library Services and UCL copyright officer; Susan Reilly, coordinator of LIBERʼs participation in European projects and expert in open access, e-science, and digital libraries, and Daniel Dietrich, official representative for the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany, researcher at the Technical University of Berlin and cofounder and chairman of the Open Data Network, based in Germany.

Also participating in the summer school are: Anka Mulder, director of Education and Student Affairs at the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and president of the OpenCourseWare Consortium; Carlos Morais Pires, from the European Commission and head of Sector of the Scientific Data Infrastructure in the EU 7thFramework Programme; Julià Minguillón, current academic director of the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning; Judit Casals, head of projects at the Library of the UB, and Raquel Xalabarder, adjunct director to theOffice of the Vice-Rector for Academic Organization at the UOC. Jordi Graells, from the Government of Catalonia, and Ignasi Labastida, from the UB, will give workshops on open data and open policies, respectively.

Students will be introduced to their rights and obligations as researchers and as members of a higher education institution, in accordance with the applicable laws and policies developed by the institutions where they carry out their work, and by the institutions that provide public and private funding.

During the summer school, students will attend keynotes and workshops focused on the different aspects of openness. They will also work together in small groups to develop projects in which they can put into practice the knowledge gained through the summer school and apply it to their research.

Access to knowledge, information and data is essential in higher education, research and for the advancement of society, in general. Improved access is the basis for the transfer of knowledge (teaching), knowledge generation (research), and knowledge valorisation (civil society).

Several European countries have developed policy initiatives aimed to promote open dissemination of the research conducted with public funding. This requirement is also present at the EU 7thFramework Programme for certain areas of research. The LERU has also recently published a Roadmap towards Open Access based on current practices.

The third LERU Doctoral Summer School, organized by the UB, has been promoted from the Office of the Vice-Rector for Research and the Office of the Vice-Rector for Teaching and Science Policy of the UB and it has the financial support from the LERU and the Barcelona Knowledge Campus (BKC).