McMaster digital scholarship centre uses open access to make research more useful

McMaster University's new Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, and others like it being established around North America, aims to make new research faster, more thorough, more insightful, and more useful -- by promoting collaboration and open access. Made possible by a $2.5-million gift from the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Foundation, the centre helps graduate students and faculty process huge amounts of data to reveal new information that a few years ago would not have been possible to find. The centre's administrative director says digital scholarship promotes a collaborative approach to research and allows researchers to think big. "People entering academics now have grown up with this technology," says the centre's academic director. "It will be inconceivable that future academics won't expect and demand this." National Post | McMaster Daily News