Category — Public Knowledge Project

This post was written by The Alliance of German Science Organisations’ Open Access Working Group. The guest authors were:  Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen, Heinz Pampel and Rubina Vock.

The Alliance of German Science Organisations’ Open Access Working Group and the project partners of the information platform open-access.net support the broad participation of German science institutions in international Open Access Week.

The coordinating committee with representatives of the working group and open-access.net encourages scientific and scholarly organisations in Germany to take part in Open Access Week to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access among scholars and scientists. It is the aim of this group to support scientific and scholarly organisations with planning educational materials and events at their institutions within the framework of international Open Access Week in Germany.

The German Library Congress 2009 (the largest librarians meeting in Germany) offered us the chance to approach and inform over 3000 participants about Open Access Week. This meeting was instrumental in providing us with an opportunity to meet key players and allowed us to present the international Open Access Week and (possible) German contributions.

Our exhibit booth, located at a prominent corner of the fair hall, had been set up nicely with customized posters from Open Access Week. We displayed customized slides on Open Access Week, a poster from the information platform open-access.net and provided informational materials on different German open access projects.

Photo courtesy of Rubina Vock.

One highlight that also attracted many random visitors were the Open Access buttons (or perhaps it was the fresh and juicy strawberries that we also offered!).

Photo courtesy of Heinz Pampel.

It was impressive to see how more and more participants of the congress wore a button! Many participants of the congress got in contact with the representatives of the coordinating committee - questions varied from the general principles of open access publishing to support requests as well as requests for materials.

The whole activity was considered a great success not only because of the overwhelming response by the congress participants, but also by the many institutions willing to support and participate in Open Access Week.

Downloadable customized German and international materials - will be made available on the information platform open access.net. Moreover, all German institutions are invited to enhance their public visibility and publicise their activities and events at Open Access Week by registering with the information platform open-access.net.

Last year, we ran a popular Synchroblogging competition for Open Access Day and we asked the community to blog about why Open Access mattered to them (we’ll be running a different competition this year). It was nice to see this short post from Dorothea Salo, one of the winners, who seemed pretty pleased with her freebies. It took us a little while to send these items to her because we were waiting on the delivery of the new travel mug. Here’s what she said:

“I believe I promised a rundown of the PLoS swag kindly sent me as commemoration of adventures in Open Access synchroblogging. The swag arrived today! It contains:

* one “Hamsters love PLoS” t-shirt, with a cute hamster in a hamster ball
* one PLoS One t-shirt, in stylin’ dark green
* one PLoS travel mug, which will come in very handy for this summer’s travels
* two PLoS window decals
* several PLoS stickers (which I appreciate, because I can use them as giveaways to faculty locally)
* an Open Access Day button

That’s a pretty epic swag haul for writing one blog post! Thanks, PLoS!

(Though it really shoulda been “Pikas love PLoS.” I’m just sayin’ here.)”

The Public Knowledge Project is a research and development initiative directed toward improving the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online publishing and knowledge-sharing environments. They are having a conference in Vancouver from July 8 - 10, 2009.

Highlights include:

- An opening keynote address by PKP founder and principal investigator, Dr. John Willinsky

- Pre-conference Workshops on various PKP software applications and communities

- A post-conference Workshop on creating open access journals led by Dr. David Solomon and Dr. Caroline Sutton

- A day-long series of sessions from the Open Humanities Press on monograph publishing

- A wide range of sessions for editors, libraries, and developers, from speakers from around the world

Spaces are limited for the workshops and the conference, so please register early to avoid missing out on what promises to be a fascinating conference.