Newsletter May 2009

Following the highly successful CAUTHE 2009 Conference in Fremantle, Jack Carlsen and his team have uploaded a series of pod casts of the keynote addresses, an introductory video from Jack and selected concurrent sessions. These can now be downloaded from CAUTHE 2009 conference website.

A date for your diaries is the mid year meeting scheduled for Friday July 24 at UTS.

Fiona Wheeler has prepared a very interesting discussion paper on the emerging issue of Open Access. I thank Fiona for her great contribution. I recommend that you read the article and I invite colleagues to offer their thoughts on and responses to this important issue.

The call for papers for the CAUTHE 2010 Conference in Hobart is now out, as is the advance notice for the PhD Scholars' Workshop that will, as usual, be held immediately prior to the Conference.

A team from our Volunteering SIG are actively engaged in and co-hosting a major conference in Singapore next month.

The GFC is hitting all sectors of the economy, and our area of hospitality and tourism education and research is not immune. Now, more than ever, we need your financial support, and the support of your colleagues. So, please renew your membership as it falls due. You may also wish to extoll the value of CAUTHE membership to your colleagues who are not yet members.

STOP PRESS: A full list of members and their contact details is now AVAILABLE on the Associate Members page. Please advise the CAUTHE secretariat if your details are incorrect.

For many of our colleagues the end of semester is nigh. Take a short break from the joy of marking assignments and catch up with these latest developments within CAUTHE. Enjoy the read.

Paul A. Whitelaw
CAUTHE Chair

Update on CAUTHE 2010 Conference

The planning for CAUTHE 2010 in Hobart is well advanced, with the conference website live and an updated CAUTHE 2010 conference flyer available for your use. Please contact the CAUTHE secretariat if you would like copies sent to you for distribution at conferences or other events.

The Governor of Tasmania, His Excellency, the Hon. Peter Underwood AO, will host an official reception for delegates at Government House at the commencement of the conference. The Conference Organising Committee expects to finalise registration costs by the end of June and will incorporate a registration and accommodation facility on the web page which will be managed through an experienced PCO. On each day of the conference there will be a key note address and an expert panel discussion will round off the programme.

Image: Paul Whitelaw and Penny Jose check out the 2010 Conference venue
with organising committee members Malcolm Wells, Trevor Sofield and Julia Crozier

CAUTHE 2010 PhD Workshop

A one day CAUTHE PhD workshop will be held on Monday 8 February 2010 prior to the commencement of the 2010 conference. The workshop will take place in the Grand Chancellor Hotel, Hobart. It will include guest speakers and a discussion facilitation session coordinated by academics from Australia and overseas. All CAUTHE members are encouraged to mark this date in their diaries and communicate this date to PhD students. Please print and distribute the attached PhD workshop flyer to any colleagues who may be interested in attending this workshop.

The cost of the workshop will be $100 (or $50 for full-time students who have registered and paid to attend the conference). Students will be able to book a place at the workshop via the conference website later this year. Enquiries should be directed to Dr Brent Ritchie.

CAUTHE 2009 mid-year meeting

University of Technology, Sydney will again host the CAUTHE mid-year meeting and industry engagement forum.

One of the key topics for discussion in the mid-year meeting will be the development of a motion for the 2010 AGM to invite New Zealand Universities to join CAUTHE as chapter members with full voting rights.

Building on the momentum generated last year, the half-day industry session will be open to CAUTHE members and industry representatives. The objective of the forum is to ascertain the issues currently facing the tourism and hospitality industry and to address these concerns via a panel session of members who have conducted pertinent research in these areas.

The details of the CAUTHE mid-year meeting and industry engagement forum are as follows:

Images: MYM 2008, UTS Sydney

Date:	Friday 24 July 2009
Time:	10:00am – 12:00 (CAUTHE mid-year meeting )
	2:00pm – 4:00pm (Industry Forum, followed by networking drinks)
Venue:	UTS Sydney, Level 5, B, Corner Quay St & Ultimo Rd, Haymarket, Room B517

To indicate your interest in attending, please RSVP Penny Jose by Monday 20 July 2009.

International Volunteer and Tourism Symposium

The first International Volunteering and Tourism Symposium will be held at the James Cook University, Singapore campus on 15 June 2009, prior to the BEST Education Network TTIX.

The symposium is a joint initiative between the CAUTHE and ATLAS Special Interest Groups and the BEST Education Network. CAUTHE is a major sponsor of the symposium signaling a new era in CAUTHE’s international collaboration and engagement. The one day symposium includes abstracts, full papers and two roundtables. The day will culminate in a future research agenda for volunteering and tourism.

Participants will be able to:

explore with others the opportunities for developing the area of volunteering and tourism;
create an agenda for developing a future research framework;
network with others interested in volunteering and tourism; and,
explore publishing opportunities, includes student publishing opportunities.

The symposium includes two outstanding keynote speakers:

Professor Robert A. Stebbins, Faculty Professor and elected member of the Royal Society of Canada, author of 33 books and monographs, as well as numerous articles and chapters in several areas of social science.
Associate Professor Stephen Wearing, has conducted numerous projects and lectures worldwide, author of 8 books and over 100 articles dealing with issues concerning leisure and tourism.

Unusually, for an academic conference, some industry organisations will present papers on industry perspectives in relation to volunteering and tourism.
You can register for the conference at BEST EN.

Open Access Debate

In February 2009, CAUTHE was contacted by Australian Academic Press (AAP) regarding the current debate taking place in Australia and worldwide about the dissemination of scientific scholarship through “open access” (OA) models of research via journal and institutional repositories. The OA model proposes to replace the current user-pays model with a contributor-pays system via the use of author fees, page charges, institutional charges and various other funding approaches and to also mandate the placement of articles accepted for publication into open online university repositories.

Earlier this year, both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mandated their researchers to contribute their papers to an OA repository. AAP does not believe that a contributor-pays system would work very well in the social sciences. They support the use of university repositories as long as they are not designed as de-facto “free systems” to give away exactly what they have been asked to edit and publish for Society clients such as CAUTHE.

AAP question whether mandated policies for the entire research community are the way to proceed, in terms of what they would achieve and what value of improvement they would provide, particularly given near-worldwide availability of major published research via the internet. They are concerned that such future government policy may “inadvertently threaten the continued existence of Australian Society journals”. Overall, they believe that the OA debate to date has not fully reflected all of the information, issues and stakeholder perspectives, such as:

the voice of the owners of peer-reviewed journals i.e. scholarly Societies;
the broader benefits for Societies and their members of the current publishing model;
increasing access through innovations such as digital publishing and free or discounted access to journals in certain instances;
operational issues of an OA model and potential conflicts of interest created for researchers / authors; and
issues of copyright law; internal university processes and library resource issues.

AAP is working closely with the Australian Publishers Association (APA) to engage government so that any future legislation is based on careful and accurate assessments of all the facts.

In light of the above, is there a role for CAUTHE to respond to and engage in the OA debate? We would also like to hear from CAUTHE members about their perspectives on this issue. Please email your views asap to Paul Whitelaw.