Roundup of Open Access Week

As Open Access Week 2010 draws to a close, here is a quick summary of some activities that sought to increase awareness of Open Access:

The Repository Support Project highlights promotional activities in UK institutions

The University of Salford’s VC, Martin Hall, gave an excellent presentation at the Future of Research conference in which he suggested that the university of the future might be built around the repository. Video of the session is available under Strand Two Plenary: Efficiency and Effectiveness. Appropriately, the slides are already available in the University's digital repository.

Neat animated map has been created by the ROAR/Eprints team at Southampton; the Overview of Open Access showcases repositories around the world.
(NB. works best in firefox)

OA Mandate Adoption Challenge for Institutions and Funders - invitation from Steven Harnad to register Open Access policies at ROARMAP

Chats, tweets, forums and blogs at the Open Access Week website and elsewhere, for example contributions from the Directory of Open Access Journals and the useful OA Answers from the RSC.



Not forgetting 18 new deposits in Research@StAndrews:FullText

and of course there were the free cakes

Toolkit addresses researchers concerns

In the midst of Open Access Week the JISC Scholarly Communication Action Handbook has been released:

"This handbook addresses scholarly communication concerns and provides actions that individuals can take to help make positive changes. These actions are targeted for use by key stakeholders, such as researchers, librarians, research mangers, and senior managers, and can also be used by advocates to recommend actions to those they are lobbying."

With helpful navigation and full of useful, practical suggestions this guide is well worth a look. You might want to start with the hot topics section.

Open Access (free) cakes

We gave away free cakes in the library this afternoon to encourage people to come up and ask about Open Access.

Students were pleased to hear about how they can easily view electronic theses or see what our researchers are publishing in our repository. They were also interested to find out about funding models for Open Access journals, as well as all the material they can access without depending on subscriptions or interlibrary loans.

JISC Open Access site

JISC explores a hot topic in the area of Open Access each day this week. Visit their Open Access Week site to find out about policies, funding, exploring the benefits of Open Access and copyright issues.

Celebrating Open Access Week

18-24 Oct 2010 - expanding awareness of Open Access.

To start the week off we have created a display area in the main library with loads of information about Research@StAndrews:FullText and how to benefit from Open Access.

Our new web pages are also live, with information on 'self-archiving' and Open Access publishing, complying with Wellcome Trust requirements and our BioMed Central membership.

A New Model for Scholarly Communications

SPARC Europe provides a very short guide to Open Access, and how to achieve it, called An introduction to the new model for scholarly communication.


They note the benefits for authors: "Rather than their paper being seen by readers at the few hundred institutions lucky enough to have a subscription to the journal, the paper can now be seen by all interested readers. This increases the dissemination and impact of the papers and so raises the profile of the authors and their institutions."

The guide also highlights the 2 routes to Open Access: Self-archiving and Publishing in Open-access journals

A useful resource supported by SPARC Europe, is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).