Open for Health: How Open Access Can Create a More Equitable World

Abstract

This lesson plan was created for the Scholarly Communications Notebook (SCN). The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholarly communications topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019. In this lesson plan, there is an optional reading list to review the literature related to OA, health equity, and social justice to provide background on the topics depending on student familiarity. A brief PowerPoint lecture is included to provide an overview, and then students will break into groups, and each group will be given a topic with questions to spark discussion on the subject. Questions such as "Historically, how has access to health information created benefits or barriers to users?" or "When thinking about medical research, what stakeholders are concerned about open access and why?" Each group will select a notetaker to keep track of the responses, and time will be given at the end of the class to report out and have a wider discussion with each other.