[Editor’s note: What follows is the convocation address delivered by Professor Willinsky on the occasion of his receiving an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Faculty of Education at York University, June 19, 2008.]

It is truly an honor, if a slightly odd one as I shall explain, to be asked to join in this celebration of so many graduates’ proud accomplishment as well as an honor to receive an Honorary Doctor of Laws from York University. I say odd because the degree I am receiving could be cast not just as an unearned degree, but a belated degree, . . . [more]

As academics might be said to live and thrive by consideration of fair use, we need to perk up when this vital legality goes to court, and all the more so when it is a good knock-down case of goliath celebrity taking on struggling Davidesque scholar. As most readers will know, with works of “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research,” to use the example of the U.S. legal system, authors can in the name of fair use reasonably cite others’ published work without violating copyright.

Fair use, in this sense, represents the larger society’s recognition that learning . . . [more]

What follows is the opening of a book prospectus I am in the midst of developing for a work on John Locke and what I refer to as the “intellectual properties of learning.” This book grows out of an earlier article I did on Locke’s “common-wealth of learning” and will explore — well, if that’s not clear in the first 800 words of the prospectus, can I reasonably expect a hard-pressed publisher to bite? Putting this in Slaw follows on recent Web 2.0 data-mashups that would drag the book-in-progress into the network, setting it adrift in the blogosphere and giving . . . [more]

My hope for 2008 is that Stevan Harnad will prove prophetic once again, this time by declaring this the year of the mandate, or as he puts it with his notable precision, “the year of institutional Green OA self-archiving mandates.” For those colorblind to Harnadian distinctions, the mandates in question have been enacted by research funding agencies (21 to date) and a few institutions and require researchers receiving funding from those agencies (or working at those institutions) to deposit an electronic copy of their published work in an online archive so that it is freely available typically 12 months after . . . [more]