Are you a hockey fan? Have you been watching the Canadian men’s and women’s teams make their way through the quarter and semi-finals?

I came across a digital exhibition from McGill’s Rare Books & Special Collections today which celebrates the Winter Olympics from 1924-2006. Some of my favourite images were the oldest ones–showing the hockey competitions taking place outdoors and some early images of figure skating.

I have to admit though that I also liked the one showing Canada beating the US 2-1. 🙂

Looks like it was just as cold and snowy out! 

For some more blasts from the past, check out McGill’s collection of digitized yearbooks. The collections spans from 1898 to 2000. Did you parents go to McGill? Maybe there’s an embarrassing photo you can look up to share over the holidays.

Good luck with exams and have a good holiday break!

I realize I’m about a week late on this post but I don’t think it has to be Open Access week for us to discuss Open Access issues.

Open access refers to the principle and practice of making scholarly publications free and open to everyone. While you’re at McGill you may not reflect often on the fact that the articles you cite in your papers aren’t actually free. They’re free to you while you’re in school (well…note technically free…you pay tuition) but if you’ve ever tinkered around on Google Scholar and been asked to pay $40 to access an article, you’ve dipped your toe in the world of paid-for academic content.

Why does open access matter? Well, for one, most scholarly articles are to some extent publicly funded (that is, they are authored by people working at publicly funded institutions such as universities). Additionally though, it allows for information to be disseminated and spread to the widest audience possible. The more people who can access the work you’ve done, the more people who can build it on it and advance their own research. It is believed that this leads to greater discoveries and knowledge.

Open access isn’t without its detractors and even within academic circles, certain concepts of open access are misunderstood.

What do you think? Are we moving to a model of free scholarly content? What are your opinions on the open access debate?