Open Access Week 2010

Stian Haklev

Stian grew up in Norway, and has also spent significant time working and studying in Italy, Sweden, China, Indonesia, and Mexico. His undergraduate degree is in International Development Studies at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, during which he spent a  year working for CARE International in Indonesia, and his honor’s thesis is about the community library movement in Indonesia.

He recently completed an MA in the Higher Education Program at OISE with Dr. Ruth Hayhoe and Dr. Jim Slotta. His thesis focused on the Chinese National Top Level Courses project. In September 2010 he began a PhD in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, with Dr. Jim Slotta. His PhD focuses on how to enable collaborative peer-based learning around Open Educational Resources.

Ping Chun Hsiung, Department of Social Sciences. Professor Hsiung's research interests include feminist theories; feminist methodology and epistemology; gender relations in Chinese societies; women organizing in contemporary China; and international gender politics. She is also the author of Lives & Legacies, a guide to qualitative interviewing that is available online via a Creative Commons license.

Rudy Boonstra, Department of Biological Sciences. Professor Boonstra's research focuses on how the stress axis functions in natural populations of mammals and birds to maximize fitness. The stress axis is a vital regulator of adaptation in birds and mammals and a pivotal component of the neuroendocrine system. The system is a major pathway that integrates environmental change and through which life history decisions to reproduce, to grow, or to put energy into storage are implemented.

Professor Boonstra is a featured author of the T-Space Repository, with 94 publications in T-Space to date.

John Scherk, Vice-Dean, Undergraduate/Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences. Professor Scherk received a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Toronto, and a DPhil in Mathematics from Oxford University. He has taught at the Universities of Alberta, Basel, Grenoble and Toronto. Since 1985 he has been a faculty member at UTSC. In the early 90's he was part of a group at UTSC which built up a mathematics computer lab for undergraduates. The software he developed in algebra is included in a text book published in 2000. Professor Scherk makes one of his texts - Algebra, A Computational Introduction - freely available as a PDF via a Creative Commons license.

Random Stuff That Matters

Leslie Chan is Program Supervisor for the Joint Program in New Media Studies and the International Development Studies program at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Since 2000, he has served as the Associate Director of Bioline International, a non-profit international electronic publishing collaboration with the main objective of improving the visibility and impact of health and other scientific journals from developing countries.

As one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Leslie has been active in experimentation and implementation of open access publishing projects and with the set up of open access archives using open source software applications. Since 2003, he has been testing and evaluating T-Space, an institutional repository at the University of Toronto that is running the DSpace software.