Open scholarship and open education can often feel mystifying—especially from the outside. But even for those working within these practices, common challenges and shared experiences are bound to emerge across institutions.
Approaches to countering the gatekeeping of knowledge manifest in various forms, including library-led initiatives and programming, teaching and learning centres' guidebooks, and collaborations, as well as student union endorsements of open education, open-access university press publishing, and open science working groups. These efforts—led by libraries and librarians, university presses and their dedicated staff, teaching and learning centres and their instructional designers, faculty groups, student unions, and more—might often be united by a common goal: to prioritize community over commercial interests in the pursuit of democratizing knowledge.
This Behind the Scenes hybrid event brings together practitioners from different institutions to share what excites them about a current project, the behind-the-scenes work that makes it possible, and a key challenge they face in their practice!