To broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access

This new booklet on Open Access ,published to co-incide with OA week, promotes the work JISC have been doing in this field and includes a nice name check for the Welsh Repository Network - see the purple box on the left of page 4 in the pdf version.

Publishing humanities monographs in Open Access

OAPEN is a project in Open Access publishing for humanities and social sciences monographs. The consortium of University-based academic publishers who make up OAPEN believe that the time is ripe to bring the successes of scientific Open Access publishing to the humanities and social sciences.

The OAPEN partners are all active in the Open Access movement already, with details available on their pages on this site and on their own websites.

The project will find useful, exciting and beneficial ways of publishing scholarly work in Open Access, enhancing access to important peer reviewed research from across Europe. Most importantly it will find a financial model which is appropriate to scholarly humanities monographs, a publishing platform which is beneficial to all users and create a network of publishing partners across Europe and the rest of the world. 

The partners:

The George Mason University has created a wiki http://openaccessweek2009.pbworks.com/ that is the George Mason community’s source for information about Open Access Week. View a schedule of events and find resources for students, faculty, and staff which include video OA 101, SPARKY Awards Contest information,  and more!  

George Mason supports your Right to Research!

Check out the George Mason Statue,
located in the Johnson Center North Plaza, Fairfax Campus.
He’s wearing an Open Access t-shirt!

SURF, the higher education and research partnership for network services and ICT in the Netherlands, is launching the website www.openaccess.nl. The website has been developed on behalf of the whole higher education sector and links up with international Open Access week (19 to 23 October).

The Open Access website provides structured information about Open Access to research results and the advantages that Open Access has. Practical examples are used to illustrate the possibilities opened up by the Internet for innovations in scholarly communication.

The website provides researchers with information about how Open Access can give their work a larger potential audience. Openaccess.nl shows the options that each discipline has for making research results openly accessible.

Boston College’s special edition OA Week Newsletter http://www.bc.edu/libraries/newsletter/

The Universidad de Oriente is actively participating in OPEN ACCESS WEEK, 2009.  The Academic Council of the University unanimously approved the concept of the OA and collecting all intellectual products (Thesis, Dissertations and journals) of the University on Open Access

Here are some additional highlighted activities:

• Organized a triangular videoconference with two other universitiesin Venezuela.
• Hosting workshops on different campuses of the University to promote the benefit of the Open access and promoting OA
• Posting posters on campus on the doors of all classrooms and libraries.
• The Universidad de Oriente signed the Declaration of BOAI (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/sign.shtml. )last week
• Published News letter on the celebration of Open Access week on the
  university web page (www.udo.edu.ve) and local News Paper.
• They are building an Institutional Repository using DSpace,
  and hoping to launch within a month with thousands of academic
  resources.

At Yale, Students for Free Culture are teaming up with librarians, fellows and professors at the Law School to spur the movement towards a digital repository during Open Access Week. They have signed the Student Statement on The Right to Research (http://www.righttoresearch.org/endorse/index.shtml), a letter of commitment to open-access ideals that currently has over 5 million student supporters.

Read two recent blog posts by Yale students:

Adi Kamdar, Open up, Yale, Yale Daily News, October 19, 2009.

… Yale should join in the [OA] movement; it should push its faculty to make their articles available online by creating a free, open, University-supported repository of scholarly knowledge. …

The issue is thus one of social justice and responsibility. It is an opportunity for Yale to fulfill its own mission. …

Harvard University has already established an open-access policy. So has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford School of Education, and the universities of Kansas and Oregon. Now Dartmouth University, Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, have signed onto the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, committing their schools to help underwrite the charges required to republish articles in open-access journals.

Yale is notably absent from this list. …

Harvard’s policy came about through faculty leadership, and often movements for open access begin below the university administration. We must therefore help those around us to realize the benefits, the importance and the inevitability of open-access publishing. We must fight for the ideals behind our commitment to global education. We need to make our university aware that we believe in these values. …

Paul Ramirez, Yale lags behind peers in open access policies, The Yale Herald, October 16, 2009.

On Tues., Feb. 12, 2008, Harvard astonished the academic world when its Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously voted for a mandate that would require all faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free online. Then in September 2009, a consortium of five elite universities, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley, declared that they would commit significant resources to open-access publishing. But one name is conspicuously missing from this list: Yale.

As universities and other institutions across the world celebrate Open Access Week (beginning Mon., Oct. 19), it is an important time to reconsider Yale’s mission regarding the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge in an emerging digital landscape. Despite recent efforts, Yale lags behind its peers in the adoption of open-access models that would make scholarly work available to the world. …

Harvard and other universities have already led the way by joining the five-member Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. It’s high time for us to join this effort with equal resolve. Yale has taken some steps toward disseminating information online, such as its open courseware initiative and the creation of an Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure, alongside smaller projects like the Law School’s digital commons repository. But we must expand these efforts; Yale must stand with its peers and take action by adopting a campus-wide open access policy

To coincide with the start of Open Access week, EDINA (a JISC UK-national academic data centre based at the University of Edinburgh) is pleased to announce that the Depot has been opened up internationally. Building upon its initial role given to it by JISC, the Depot is now being opening up into a facility to support the Open Access agenda internationally.

The Depot http://www.depot.edina.ac.uk/ is an assured gateway to make research Open Access - they provide two main services:

1. a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints).

2. a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist.

The first time a researcher visits the Depot they will automatically check with OpenDOAR, the registry for open access repositories, to find a more appropriate local repository. If none exists then the author will be invited to deposit their research in the Depot. The Depot is OAI-compliant allowing deposited e-prints to be ‘harvested’ by search services, and other repositories, giving them instant global visibility.

For the present you can find the Depot at http://www.depot.edina.ac.uk/ but working with eIFL-OA we hope to provide a more international URL to denote its new role.

Four members of the Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) Board will be attending the invitation-only conference hosted by the European Commission this week in Brussels. The conference is called ‘Working Together to Strengthen Research in Europe’.

There is a morning session on Open Access on Thursday 22 October. Its remit is to come up with recommendations for policies on Open Access that the Commission can take forward. With Sijbolt Noorda as one of the panel speakers and Bernard Rentier and Keith Jeffery invited participants, some good outputs are assured.

The University of Zimbabwe’s OA Week activities are in full swing!  To see a schedule of their activities please go to their website.  www.uz.ac.zw/library.

University of Zimbabwe OA week images