Open Access Week 2021 is here!

Kyle Brady
Monday 25 October 2021

It’s that time of the year again when the world celebrates and promotes open access! Institutions across the globe will be sharing knowledge, running events, webinars, and seminars – so follow the OA Week Twitter handle to find out about all the ways the international community is marking the occasion, and be sure to follow the St Andrews Open Research Twitter too for more local OA news and resources. And remember to use #OAWeek so you can join in the conversation!

Open Access Week 2021
OAWeek.org. CC BY

“International Open Access Week is a time for the wider community to coordinate in taking action to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work. This year’s Open Access Week will be held from October 25th through to the 31st” (OA Week)

Each year the week is given a theme to help galvanise progress, this year the theme is:

It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity

The theme is aligned with a recent UNESCO recommendation on Open Science:

“The Recommendation is expected to define shared values and principles for Open Science, and identify concrete measures on Open Access and Open Data, with proposals to bring citizens closer to science and commitments to facilitate the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge around the world.”(UNESCO)

“[T]he practice of open science, anchored in the values of collaboration and sharing, builds upon existing intellectual property systems and fosters an open approach that encourages the use of open licensing, adds materials to the public domain and makes use, as appropriate, of flexibilities that exist in the intellectual property systems to amplify access to knowledge by everyone for the benefits of science and society and to promote opportunities for innovation and participation in the co-creation of knowledge”(UNESCO OS Draft Text)

St Andrews Open Access Week 2021

At St Andrews we will be marking the occasion with a series of blog posts, covering a wide variety of themes but with ‘equity’ of knowledge as a guiding principle. No one publisher, or research output is alike, researchers and institutions also differ in their capacity to pay for certain types of open access, and in their various research funding portfolios. What this means is that multiple business models and opportunities are required to ensure true ‘equity’.

  • We will discuss a recent Diamond Open Access report  –  ‘diamond’ describes a type of OA business model where final published versions of research articles are Open Access, but without costly article processing charges (APCs)
  • We will also announce another high profile OA publisher agreement that St Andrews has signed up to!
  • Linked to the above we’ll also post a summary of some of the publisher agreements in place that provide opportunities for OA publishing, these reduce financial and/or administrate barriers to OA for St Andrews corresponding authors
  • For the end of the week, and with COP26 on the horizon, we will take a look at some of the OA research related to the Energy Ethics project.
  • And finally, still with COP26 in mind, we’ll be announcing a collaborative project with The St Andrews Network for Climate, Energy, Environment and Sustainability (STACEES)

Happy OA Week!

 

 

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