Open Access Week 2010 - EPT's collection of your OA stories

Open Access Week is here! As a contribution to the festivities, the EPT has been collecting and harvesting stories and short reports, and making links to blogs and videos that provide insight into the way the Open Access developments have affected research and researchers around the world.

This is an on-going activity and we will continue to add new stories to the 'OA Stories' page on the EPT web site. To link direct to the stories click here.

Please continue to send short stories to ept@biostrat.demon.co.uk. Sometimes individual experiences make a greater impact on people's understanding of Open Access than would a presentation or article.

Sincere thanks to all who have contributed so far - your stories will stay in people's minds!

Open Access position with UNESCO

Colleagues, there is an Open Access consultancy post now available at UNESCO in Paris. See announcement below:

Dear Open Access colleagues,

The overarching objective of UNESCO is to build inclusive knowledge societies and we have identified Open Access (OA) to scientific information as a key implementation strategy. Our programme is highlighted here.

We are urgently looking to engage a highly skilled and experienced Open Access expert as a temporary consultant to advance our 2010 - 2011 Workplan. A Brief Terms of Reference (TOR) is provided below and the Extended TOR will be provided on request.

We would greatly appreciate it if you could please recommend possible candidates including their e-mail address or (mobile) phone number, and if you could forward this message to your OA networks.

We look forward to hearing from you, please reply all.

Regards,
Abel Caine (a.caine@unesco.org)

ICT in Education, Science and Culture Section
Information Society Division
Communication and Information (CI) Sector
UNESCO

==============================


The UNESCO Communication and Information (CI) Sector is looking to urgently engage a temporary consultant with high levels of skills and experience in the area of Open Access (OA) to scientific information.

An ethical issue for research authors

Here is a powerful comment on the recent announcement by a number of publishers to make their publications free for a limited period to readers in areas suffering from natural disasters. Dr Neil Pakenham Walsh (co-Director of the Global Health Information Network and the respected coordinator of the Health Information for All Network – HIFA2015) welcomes the move, but also queries the ethical reasons for restricting access to essential information. He refers to health information, but the argument can be extended to research publications and data necessary for overcoming all global problems – in climate change, agriculture, clean energy developments and so on.

This is not the problem of publishers who have a right to run their businesses on a fair commercial basis, but it is the problem of researchers themselves - those that without financial reward provide the information for the publishers. Authors should recognise that they have an ethical as well as a self-advancing reason for making their research knowledge available free to all. They should ask themselves whether their research findings are important to other researchers around the world for the advancement of science. If the answer is ‘Yes’, they can instantly remedy the situation (without cost, and while continuing to publish in their chosen journal, whether open access or not) by archiving a copy of their refereed and accepted article in an open access repository. See OASIS for all information related to open access and how it works for the research community.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Neil Pakenham-Walsh"
To: "HIFA2015 - Healthcare Information For All by 2015"

Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 1:00 PM
Subject: [HIFA2015] Forward: [DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB ] Full-text material for
Pakistan


> Dear HIFA2015 colleagues,

The message below is forwarded from the email forum [DISASTR-OUTREACH-LIB ]. I think this move by restricted-access journals - to open access for a few weeks in response to major disasters - is welcome. *But* it also raises interesting moral and ethical questions about the status quo: the world's scholarly journals and other knowledge
resource continue to be mainly restricted-access, while the silent and ongoing disaster continues: tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily each day in developing countries - while policymakers, healthcare providers, and citizens lack access to the information they need to support policymaking, health care, and the capacity to make vital decisions for themselves and their loved ones.

Best wishes,
Neil

> HIFA2015 profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is the coordinator of the HIFA2015
> campaign and co-director of the Global Healthcare Information Network. He
> started his career as a hospital doctor in the UK, and has clinical
> experience in rural Ecuador and Peru. For the last 20 years he has been
> committed to improving the availability of healthcare information for
> health workers in developing countries. He has worked with the World
> Health Organization, the Wellcome Trust, Medicine Digest and INASP
> (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications).
> www.hifa2015.org neil.pakenham-walsh AT ghi-net.org

Portuguese-speakers have an OA Blog

Professor Helio Kuramoto, working until recently with IBICT in Brazil, maintains a valuable Open Access Blog, see here. Kuramoto has been instrumental in working towards an OA mandate in Brazil and in introducing and distributing software packages for setting up Institutional Repositories in the country.

A comprehensive introductory Powerpoint presentation on the benefits and mechanisms of introducing OA is provided in a link from the blog, see 'Ciencia abierta Un desafio regional'.

Good advice from Mozambique

“We are always getting information about Mozambique from outside. Why can’t people have information about Mozambique from Mozambique?” asked Aissa Mitha Issak, Librarian at the Universidade Pedagógica and EIFL Open Access Coordinator. “The lack of visibility for African research is frustrating”. She was speaking at the recent IFLA Gothenburg conference, at which she received the Henning Mankell Conference Grant, 2010. On the advice of Iryna Kutchma, EIFL OA-programme manager, a shared repository has been set up, linking several organisations. Aissa described the shared Mozambique Institutional Repository, launched at the end of 2009 and now holding 2,234 items of research, including theses and journal articles.

Advice for others starting up a repository? “Just do it!”, says Aissa. “Our first approach in 2006 was to make a formal proposal to university management. This strategy didn’t work, because they needed to see the repository to understand its value”. The potential is now recognised and a committee has even been established to re-evaluate students’ work. Identifying IR champions to help advocate to university management and faculty is also an important factor for success.

Congratulations to all in Mozambique who have worked to achieve this valuable resource. And congratulations to EIFL for their continuing support and advice. Link here for the full report.

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!