International Open Access week falls this year October 21st – 27th . 

 

International Open Access Week is an annual word-wide initiative, organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), with the aim of facilitating the open sharing of knowledge, and a chance to connect the efforts of individuals, institutions, and organizations tasked with furthering the global drive to make research freely available. 

 

The theme this year, “Community over Commercialization”, a sentiment many of us would like to see applied to many areas of life, both academic and beyond, continues that of last year.  In the context of Open Access, however, the event hopes to “[…] prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.”

 

Recent developments, such as the integration of AI into academic systems at an incredibly rapid rate, will certainly inform the responses of HEIs to ongoing critical questions going forward.  These, according to the Open Access Week website include:

 

  • What are the consequences when a small number of corporations control knowledge production rather than researchers themselves?
  • What are the hidden costs of business models that entrench extreme levels of profit while exacerbation inequity?
  • When does the opaque collection and use of personal data by commercial platforms begin to undermine academic freedom?
  • When and in what ways can commercialization align with the public interest?
  • What community-governed infrastructures already exist that better serve the interests of the research community and the public (such as preprint servers, repositories, and open publishing platforms)?
  • How can we shift the default toward using these community-minded options?

 

While some of these questions are levelled squarely at the academic publishing industry, others are more positive, and forward-thinking, and I’m certainly interested in how other institutions use the web in a more open and, let’s be honest, responsible way when it comes to sharing knowledge. 

 

There have been some really inspirational academic publishing initiatives, such as the White Rose University Press (non-profit, open access), which are both academically rigorous and community-minded, and it strikes me that this has to be the way forward given the enormous problems associated with the current methods of subscription-based or gold OA publication.

 

A huge series of free (and open!) events are planned, and can be found here [Events — International Open Access Week].

 

We’re hoping to attend some of these sessions, and we’ll write about our experiences later in the week.