Calling all OA authors!!

OA week approaches! Tell your OA stories to EPT!

As our contribution to OA Week, please re-read our request for OA stories posted in April. We have already received some interesting answers to this request, but we know you have more stories to tell! We will compile your stories into an ‘OA-week story book’.

Here are some questions to stimulate you:

• Has your article been requested by more people since it was made OA?
• Have you made contact with other researchers in your field as a result of OA?
• Did you get an invitation to speak at a conference as a result of OA?
• Have you been able to agree new research partnerships as a result of higher global visibility of your publications?
• Do you access OA repositories to check progress in your field?
• Does your head of department/head of institute encourage you to make all your publications OA? If so, what reason did she/he give for that?
• Has your institute/university department climbed up the ranking level by becoming ‘internationally recognised’ through OA?
• Has your OA repository now been filled with all your organisations’ research output and do your colleagues find this useful? Useful for what purpose (we already have a lovely story from India about unusual IR usage!)?
• Has your OA repository got a statistics facility that records how your articles are being accessed from around the world? Who has the top access/download level? Was it you?!
• Has your OA journal improved its publishing frequency/full text downloads/impact factor rating/sales of hard copy through increased OA visibility?

A short piece is all we need - one or two sentences or a short paragraph will be enough to help tell other non-OA authors what they are missing!

Tell your colleagues we are waiting to hear about and share their OA-experiences!

Rich OA material from two meetings in Sweden

Two important OA meetings took place between August 6 -12th, 2010, in Sweden.

The first was the 2010 General Assembly of EIFL.

The programme of the EIFL meeting is available here.[The presentations are all available from the very bottom of this web page, below the programme. Don’t miss them!]

I intended to highlight presentations most likely to be of interest to EPT Blog readers, but this is not possible as there is such a very rich programme of material. But do not miss Iryna Kutchma’s (EIFL) presentation on plans for OA Week, or those of EPT Trustee Leslie Chan on the Bioline International service, or an important report of the openAIRE programme (in which all publications from the EU’s FP7 research programmes are mandated to be made OA), or an important presentation from Alma Swan on the economics of OA, or reports from Ukraine, Zambia, Nepal, or . . .

The second meeting was a satellite IFLA meeting on ‘Open Access and the changing role of libraries’

This meeting had an equally rich programme and this and the presentations are available from here [The presentations are available down the right hand side of the web page.]

Again, there is a wealth of important material both for libraries and researchers. But don’t miss Professor Tom Cochrane’s report on experiences of OA at the Queensland University of Technology - the impact of OA on authors shown here is awesome!

Happy reading!

UNESCO supports Open Access

A recent announcement from UNESCO, and made available by EPT Trustee Daisy Ouya (currently working with UNESCO in Paris), said: "UNESCO promotes and supports Open Access — the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers — for the benefit of global knowledge flow, innovation and socio-economic development." It further stated, "Scientific information is both a researcher’s greatest output and technological innovation’s most important resource."

Not only is UNESCO supporting OA, but promoting it too. This is a most valuable development as UNESCO has the outreach power to inform and support researchers in all regions of the world, and particularly those in economically constrained countries. It is much to be hoped that this announcement will encourage other inernational organisations to adopt a similar approach in their support of the free exchange of essential research information. In practice, it must be hoped that UNESCO's programmes will focus on the development of low cost Institutional Repositories in research centres as these can archive and make available articles arising from the institution's support, thus providing international visibility for its research and ensuring its incorporation in the global knowledge base.

For further information, see here.