Leslie
Chan is Program Supervisor for the Joint Program in New
Media Studies and the International
Studies program at the University of Toronto at
Scarborough. Since 2000, he has served as the Associate Director of Bioline
International, a non-profit international electronic publishing collaboration
with the main objective of improving the visibility and impact of health
and other scientific journals from developing countries.
From 1997-2002, Leslie was the managing editor of an experimental digital publishing unit within the Centre for Instructional Technology Development. These positions reflect Leslie’s long-standing interest in the use of information technology in support of teaching, learning and research, as well as his commitment to engage in new modes of scholarly publishing and communications, human capacity building and international co-operation. Leslie has been invited to participate in numerous international conferences on scholarly communication issues and conferences on ICT and development, and he has conducted workshops on these topics for a wide variety of institutions, many of them in developing parts of the world.
As one of the original signatories of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Leslie has been active in experimentation and implementation of open access publishing projects and with the set up of open access archives using open source software applications. Since 2003, he has been testing and evaluating T-Space, an institutional repository at the University of Toronto that is running the DSpace software.
Leslie is a faculty member of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) and he is serving on the Advisory Committee of the Institute. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of Project Open Source|Open Access, a project funded by the Provost at the University of Toronto. Since 2005, Leslie has been serving on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network. In 2006, Leslie joined the Board of the Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) and in 2008 he joined the Editorial Board of the Open Access Directory.
An active member of the international conference series on Electronic Publishing, Leslie served as Program Chair for Elpub2007 and he was the General Chair for Elpub2008, which was hosted by the Knowledge Media Design Institute of the University of Toronto in June 2008.