About the Conference Proccedings

FOCUS & SCOPE

The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association (OTESSA) organizes a conference annually along with other events. During the annual conference, there are often co-located sites. One site takes place during the annual conference of the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, also known as Congress. Congress is the convergence of over 70 scholarly associations, each holding their annual conference, and is Canada’s largest gathering of researchers, scholars, graduate students, and practitioners with approximately 8,000 attendees. Other sites occur outside of Congress, and include an online conference site plus physical sites located in different cities who propose to host the event. 

The mandate of the OTESSA conference is to build connections with respect to the application of technology and open across K12, post-secondary, and other spaces where learning and knowledge sharing happens.

This is the portal for conference submissions and home for the publication of the conference proceedings. These are short conference papers of 1000-2000 words that are publisehd on this site at https://conference.otessa.org. Any full papers should be submitted separately to the OTESSA Journal located at https://journal.otessa.org.

To find the conference website, visit https://otessa.org and click on "Conference" then "Current Conference."

PEER REVIEW PROCESS

Articles  submitted to the OTESSA Conference Proceedings are assigned to three reviewers and are reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers. The reviews are double-blind by default. Open reviews are used if the editors approve the author's request for one or if the content of the submission makes it impossible to anonmize, such as media or profiles of practice which can identify the authors. Please allow approximately six weeks for reviews to be completed. If there are any exceptional reasons to request an expedited review, and possible revisions have been completed, it mus go through a copyediting process and translation of at least the title, abstract, and keywords. To improve turnaround time required for copyediting and to increase chances of acceptance, we strongly recommend that authors submit polished and properly proofread works with attention to detail in citations and reference lists that us APA style.

PUBLICATION FREQUENCY

Short conference papers for the OTESSA Conference Proceedings are published continuously throughout the year. Conference presenters may add on a short paper submission for the proceedings at any time. This may extend to a subsequent year, but would be added to the appropriate conference year collection.

LANGUAGE OPTION

The official language of the OTESSA Conference Proceedings is English; however, submissions can be accepted in either English or French, which are the official languages of Canada. Papers will be published in the language in which they were received; however, abstracts will be published in both languages. English submissions may use either British or American English, but the usage must be consistent throughout. Please check spelling and grammar before making a submission. Authors are encouraged to sign up as reviewers. Under "areas of interest," enter "English reviewer" or "French reviewer" in addition to keywords for expertise to assist us with the review assignment process. We are open to publishing additional languages provided authors provide an English translation and we are able to secure an editor for that language.

STANDARDS AND ETHICS

We expect authors to follow the International Standards for Authors published by COPE. The OTESSA Conference Proceedings take issues of copyright infringement and plagiarism in publication very seriously. We will seek to protect the rights of our authors and investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles in order to protect the reputation of the conference proceedings against malpractice. We reserve the right to check submitted articles with duplication-checking software. Where an article is found to have plagiarised other work or included copyright material without permission or acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing a correction, retracting the article, contacting leadership within the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies, or taking appropriate legal action. The manuscript must be original material that has not been published and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

“The means of communication should be held by the public, the very basis of how we connect should be a public utility. That principle we are trying to bring to research and scholarship” (Willinsky, 2012). 

The conference proceedings provide immediate open access to its content to support the public good. We pursue open access for expanding equity, impact, reach, and knowledge advancement. We welcome sponsors to support the important work we do at OTESSA. Please visit Becoming a Sponsor on our OTESSA website.

UVic TIE Lab. (2012, October 19). The Intellectual Properties of Learning and Changing Political Economy of Technology in Canada [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GgbE-8rXVg&feature=emb_logo

ARTICLE PROCESSING FEES

To ensure equitable access to publishing opportunities, the OTESSA Conference Proceedings do NOT require any article processing charge (APC) or submission charges from authors.

VOLUNTARY AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

As an open access collection of conference proceedings, the lack of APC does not negate the fact that we require funding to operate. While there are no required APCs for authors to publish in our proceedings, we do encourage those authors with the privilege to access research or other funding to consider paying a voluntary author contribution (VAC) at an amount your budget allows or to consider including an author contribution amount in your funding proposals. 

The VAC is genuinely voluntary. Authors with submissions under review are not eligible to submit a voluntary author contribution amount until the final decision has been made on their manuscript. An author's ability to contribute makes absolutely no difference to the editorial decision-making on the submission. In fact, the editors will remain unaware of any VAC or donation payment to the proceedings. The VAC, if the author is able to make one, even $50-100 would help to cover publication costs (editorial processes, copyediting, translation, marketing, etc.), which in turn helps our proceedings to fund even more short papers for publication. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and helps our proceedings to be run in a sustainable way.

The receipt for any VAC will be labelled "author contribution." The link to contribute a VAC will be provided in the final decision email and, again, remains entirely voluntary.

DONATE TO THE PROCEEDINGS

Readers or other stakeholders are welcome to donate to the proceedings to help offset our editorial costs (e.g., editorial work, copyediting, translation, etc.). This may be done as a one-time payment or as a recurring monthly or yearly payment via PayPal. Alternate methods of payment can be arranged by contacting our secretariat at admin@otessa.org. NOTE: OTESSA is not a charity, therefore, no tax receipts will be provided. No donation is too small and we welcome your support of the OTESSA Proceedings.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Authors retain copyright and grant the proceedings right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) License. This licence allows anyone to share the work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it at no cost and without further permission, provided that appropriate attribution of initial publication in the proceedings is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.

An example of attribution to used is as follows:

The article, {insert article title}, by {insert author name(s)} has been reproduced from the OTESSA Conference Proceedings under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 CC-BY. 

Please link the article title directly to the article location on our website.

If you are redistributing or remixing one of our articles, please let us know by contacting us at conference@otessa.org, as we are interested in learning more about the frequency and context in which our papers are being used.

PUBLISHER

The owner/publisher of the OTESSA Conference Proceedings is the Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association, which is a non-profit corporation registered in Canada. The conference proceedings are hosted and supported by the University of Victoria Libraries.

ARCHIVING

This conference proceedings utilize the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the conference proceedings for purposes of preservation and restoration.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the conference proceedings published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in the OTESSA Conference Processings.