Gobinda Chowdhury

gobinda_chowdhuryInvited Speaker

Professor Gobinda Chowdhury
Head, Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences
Northumbria University, UK

Professor Gobinda Chowdhury of Northumbria University will deliver an invited speech at ICKM2014. Professor Chowdhury’s primary research and teaching interests include knowledge organization, information retrieval and digital libraries. He has written several books that are the key readings in information science courses in many universities around the world.

Prior to joining Northumbria University as Department Head, Professor Chowdhury was the Director of the Centre for Information & Knowledge Management at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and has worked as an academic and researcher in information science for over 25 years in different parts of the world including Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. He managed a number of research projects funded by different funding bodies including the European Union and various UN bodies and universities. For many years he has served in the steering committee of CiSAP (Consortium of iSchools for Asia and the Pacific) and ICADL (International Conference of Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries).

Professor Chowdhury holds a BS degree in Chemistry, MS and PhD degrees in Information Science from Jadavpur University in India, and a second PhD degree from Sheffield University in England for his work on natural language processing.

Title: “Managing open access research content and data: towards a sustainable model.”

Abstract. The open access movement that started in the early 1990s has significantly boosted the idea of free access to research content. Various research councils and funding bodies have recently launched their open access policies in order to facilitate free access to the outcome of research – research content and data – funded by them. These OA policies are going to bring a paradigm shift in the information and knowledge management professions and practices in a number of ways. This talk will address various sustainability issues and challenges associated with the design and management of open access research content and data management systems. First it will discuss the basics of economic, social and environmental sustainability issues of information focusing particularly on scholarly communications. It will then critically analyse the recently introduced OA policies of some government and research funding bodies like the Australian Research Council (ARC), European Commission (EC), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Unesco, United States National Institute of Health (NIH), Wellcome Trust, World Bank, etc., with a view to analysing their implications for the economic, social and environmental sustainability of OA data and data management systems. It will then propose a model and a research framework for sustainable open access research content and data management system.