The 2nd SPARC Japan Seminar 2017 entitled "Preprint and Open Access" will be held on 30 October, hosted by SPARC Japan, in keeping with this year’s Open Access Week theme of “Open in order to…”. We will review the role and management of the preprint servers in these 30 years and discuss how to contribute to the advancement of scientific research and the issues concerning the importance of the commercial publication, sustainable models of the publication and the quality…

In conjunction with this year’s Open Access Week Advisory Committee, SPARC today announces the theme for this year’s 10^th International Open Access Week, to be held October 23-29, will be “Open in order to…”.

This year’s theme is an invitation to answer the question of what…

Training-the-Trainers of Open Access

The Open Access landscape is changing. As advocates, we ought to be up-to-date with these changes. This is about the Train-the-Trainer platform adopted for Nairobi’s Open Access Week 2016. Inspired by this year’s Open Access Week theme, Open in Action, I thought of a platform where researchers, librarians, students and others who have committed to working in Open could share their experiences on…

What better way to take action during Open Access Week than by starting a request for an article or dataset you need? The Open Access Button is here to help!

The Open Access Button has released a new Button for Open Access Week - a simpler, more effective way to get find and request research with the press of a button.

Find and request articles and…

Most papers that are free-to-read are available thanks to “green OA” copies posted in institutional or subject repositories.  The fact these copies are available for free is fantastic because anyone can read the research, but it does present a major challenge: given the DOI of a paper, how can we find the open version, given there are so many different…

During the last eight years, the Obama Administration has embodied this year’s theme of “Open in Action.” The president and his team came into office with a strong public commitment to open government, and have demonstrated a commitment to open science as part of that agenda. As we approach the 2016 presidential election, the Center for Open Data Enterprise, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, is working to ensure that open science…

The Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) is a membership organization that has been working since 2011 to advance the promotion, passage, and implementation of Open Access policies at institutions of higher education. Membership in COAPI now includes 85 institutions. Membership carries no dues and is open to all North American institutions with policies in place, or those working to pass policies. The COAPI website at (…

Despite many changes in scholarly publishing and evidence for an open access citation advantage, many faculty are still worried about how their publication choices might affect their case for promotion and tenure. Over the past several years, we have identified a few strategies to alleviate those concerns and encourage faculty to include the full range of scholarly products they create along with more diverse metrics for impact. As we describe in a recent College and Research Libraries News…

The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) represents South Africa in the international community of science academies, and part of its mission is to proactively and reactively embark on a programme of systematic studies of evidence-based issues of national importance. As a signatory to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to…

We’re all obsessed with self-measurement. 

We measure how much we’re Liked online. We measure how many steps we take in a day. And as academics, we measure our success using publication counts, h-indices, and even Impact Factors.

But we’re missing something.

As academics, our fundamental job…

This year’s theme of “Open in Action” is all about taking concrete steps to open up research and scholarship and encouraging others to do the same.

We’ve created an Open Access Week action portal where you can indicate which key steps you’ll take to support Open Access this October and…

In conjunction with this year’s Open Access Week Advisory Committee, SPARC today announces the theme for this year’s 9th International Open Access Week, to be held October 24-30, will be “Open in Action.”…

OA advocates like me have been waiting for this significant and riveting time of the year. The highlight of this year is definitely the International Open Access Week; a focal week, when the global community unites to celebrate the achievements of openness, organize different events around the world in collaboration with one another, plan for the future and eulogize…

It was in mid September last year that I heard something about Open Access when I attended an academic event .The man said what Open Access means and said that will get more information about it well when we attend the Medical student’s conference later that year.

 The medical student’s conference was very interactive and among the pre-conference workshops that were present, Open Access workshop was among them and I really didn’t waste any minute and signed up for it.

That was…

Children struggle to learn when they don’t have science labs and libraries. Learning becomes difficult in classrooms that are falling apart, or where children are expected to sit on the floor because they have neither desks nor chairs.…

In response to the portentous need of access to scholarly content by the African research community, an additional SPARC Chapter, SPARC Africa, has been established and was launched at the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Academic and  Research Libraries (ARL) Satellite meeting on the 14^th August 2015.  The Chapter’s primary focus will be to capacitate Africans in academic and research sectors to champion…

In celebration of International Open Access Week and this year’s theme of “Open for Collaboration,” SPARC and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library are co-hosting a global, virtual edit-a-thon for Open Access-related content on Wikipedia. 

Wikipedia is the first source that many consult about…

At the University of Alberta Libraries, we’ve begun what we hope will become a tradition. For the past two years, we’ve included students in the University’s Department of Art & Design in our Open Access (OA) Week efforts. Students have created two important parts of OA…

The highlight of the year for OA advocates is surely International Open Access Week; a central focal point when the worldwide community unites to celebrate achievements, to plan for the future and to extol the virtues of open access to new audiences. As a researcher heavily invested in open dissemination of research work, I always find it an important and interesting time.…