Open Access Week Highlights Advocacy Efforts Worldwide

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 10/22/2009

• Expanded to five days in 2009 from one day in 2008
• Wellcome Trust calls on publishers to reconsider subscription models
• Two schools launch revamped digital scholarship sites

Open Access Week is nearly over, but its impact is likely to carry on for months to come. From its student-led, one-day beginnings in 2007, the event this year, heavily backed by the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), stretched to a full five days, running from October 19-23.

Last year, many of the major programs on Open Access Day were tied directly to one of the founding groups. Since then, however, activities celebrating the movement have taken on a life of their own, something that comes as a welcome surprise to the event organizers.

In addition, according to the SPARC, the Right to Research Coalition now includes groups representing more than five million students around the world "demonstrating the broad, passionate support Open Access enjoys from the student community."

This year, the 2008 organizers—SPARC, the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture—were joined by a number of other groups as well, including eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries), OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); the Open Access Directory (OAD), JISC, and the SURFfoundation.

Open Access Week advocacy 
Among the announcements made to coincide with the kick-off of Open Access Week was a call from British research funding organization Wellcome Trust for "greater transparency from journals on open access publishing costs."

At the same time, the organization announced the dedication of "£2 million [$3.3 million USD] to fund open access publication fees for its researchers over the next 12 months." The Trust hopes to persuade publishers to rethink their subscription models to take into account revenue from open access publication fees.

A number of instutions also are spreading the word about in-house repositories and services. This week, both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California Digital Library launched revamped web sites dedicated to open scholarly communications. Called ScholarlyCommons and eScholarship respectively, both sites aim to collect faculty scholarship and promote its availability.

For more on Open Access Week, see Barbara Fister's recent Peer to Peer Review columns, including "A Long and Winding Road for Open Access: Are We There Yet?" and "Access to Publicly-Funded Research: Why Not Now?"

Contact the author: josh.hadro@reedbusiness.com

Read more Newswire stories:

Collections Are For Use, but Is Wikipedia the Prime Outlet?

Scientific American Price Change Defended; Oberlin Group Not Convinced

No, Abu Dhabi Is Not Paying To Digitize All of NYU's Library Holdings

Indiana University: More Than 25% of Audiovisual Materials in Jeopardy

Placements & Salaries Survey 2009: Jobs and Pay Take a Hit

Columns:
It Was Nice Knowin’ Ya, Special Branch Library | From the Bell Tower

A Long and Winding Road for Open Access: Are We There Yet? | Peer to Peer Review

LJ Design Institute Dallas

Best Sellers in Literature