Building capacities in Open Knowledge for the Library and Information Science (LIS) sector
Creators: name: Santos-Hermosa, Gema
name: Atenas, Javiera
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Capacity building, Openness, Library and Information Science (LIS), Open Education, Open Science, Policies

description: Building capacities in open knowledge for the Library Information Science (LIS) sector The impact openness to knowledge is having, not only in the Higher Education (HE) sector but at public and institutional policy level, is largely due to the efforts of information professionals (librarians) and researchers, as thanks to these two groups, initiatives such as open access, open education and open science have changed the way in which research is being taught, conducted, and communicated. Openness is a way to democratise access to knowledge developed through public funds, and this movement has been led by informational professionals worldwide, however, we have observed that to a large extent, professional development in areas such as open access, open source, open data, open education, and citizen science is rather self-taught, informal, mentored or continuous, but not formalised in information science, documentation or scientific educational programmes. In this exploratory research, gathered evidence on how (or if) openness to knowledge is being taught by reviewing a series of syllabi from undergrad and postgraduate programmes in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools sampled from universities which either/ a) are leading the agenda in open access, open science or open education; b) have policies in open access, open science or open education; c) have national / federal mandates, policies, laws or regulations regarding open access, open science or open education and also a range of non-formal and/or lifelong learning training offer in areas of open access, open science or open education with the aim to map good practices in capacity building towards providing recommendation to LIS schools for curriculum design (Maina et al., 2020) in open knowledge. We reviewed supranational declarations recommendations about Openness, from the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001 to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science in 2021; national policies and strategies in Open Access and/or Open Science in 10 European countries and the activities around openness of 36 HE european institutions that host a LIS school, including their syllabi in LIS programmes, their institutional policies on openness to knowledge and the training in openness in their libraries. We consider that it is key to prepare information professionals in open knowledge, thus, LIS schools should adopt an open education approach to build capacities towards enhancing their contribution and impact in society through democratising access to knowledge, as one of the problems of professional training is the traditional nature of the curriculum, to develop and promote openness (Atenas &amp; Havemann, 2013; Atenas, Havemann &amp; Priego, 2015; Santos-Hermosa, 2019; Ferreira Borges et al., 2020) and on the need to update the syllabi to integrate new educational approaches (Ramírez-Montoya et al., 2021). Librarians are the key catalysers and champions to foster openness in the HE sector, by building capacities amongst educators, scientists, policymakers and to their own peers, while putting in openness into practice (Manca et al., 2017; Santos-Hermosa et al, 2020), to promote the adoption of openness at strategic and practice level. For this reason, it is necessary to embed openness to knowledge in curriculum design in librarian’s training, from undergraduate level to continuous professional learning, in order to contribute to democratise access to knowledge, culture and science.