Open Access Week: 18 – 24 October 2010 October 19, 2010
Posted by Andrea in : Open Access Scholarly Publishing , add a comment
The week of 18-24 October is global Open Access Week.
- What Open Access is: The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes.
- What Open Access is not: It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.
- How is Open Access provided? A researcher can place a copy of each article in an Open Access archive or repository (known as the green route), or can publish articles in Open Access journals (known as the gold route). In addition, a researcher may place a copy of each article on a personal or departmental website. Whilst all three routes to Open Access ensure that far more users can access such articles than if they were hidden away in subscription-based journals, the first two constitute much more systematic and organised approaches than the third and maximise the chance of other researchers locating and reading articles.
2010 is the 4th time Open Access Week is being celebrated.
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) invited Prof Robin Crewe, the President of the Academy of Science of South Africa, to create a video clip for their Open Access Week initiative.
Click here to open the Word transcript
The Academy of Science of South Africa, through its Scholarly Publishing Programme, has created the SciELO South Africa platform to promote open-access publishing of the best South African journals. This online platform is free-to-publish and free-to-access and will benefit both authors and readers by increasing the visibility and accessibility of research outcomes.
