Champion of Open Access Initiatives (OAI), Leslie Chan, Senior Faculty Member in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto, is visiting the city for a series of programmes. He is accompanied by Subbiah Arunachalam, the crusader of OAI in India.
The duo will lead a session on ‘Knowledge Management in the Open Access Environment’ at the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kerala, at 11 am on Monday. This will be followed by a session on ‘Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communications and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment’ at the National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology (NIIST), Pappanamcode, at 3 pm.
There will be a lecture-cum-open forum on Open Access Initiative at 10.30 am on Tuesday at IIITMK, Technopark. Leslie and Arunachalam will visit ICFOSS in the afternoon.
Organisers believe that the spirit of the Open Access Movement kindled by the Thiruvananthapuram visit of Nobel Laureate Harold E Varmus a decade ago and strengthened by a series of visits subsequently by Richard Stallman, with his message of Open Source Software, will be further enriched with much more focused programmes through the visit of Leslie and Arunachalam.