Open Access Week 2016 at QUT

As many of you know, last week it was Open Access Week.

Open Access Week is a global event, and it is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access (OA) a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – that is the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need. And it has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship (see http://www.openaccessweek.org/page/about).

Typical activities during the Open Access Week include talks, seminars, symposia, or the announcement of OA mandates or other milestones in OA.

In Brisbane the research support team of QUT organised a seminar with researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), University of Queensland and Griffith University. The researchers were talking about why Open Access and sharing data is important for their research. This was really interesting, in particular since the three researchers came from different disciplines.

Since 2012 the Open Access Week has an official motto every year and in 2016 it was "Open in Action."  It was all about taking concrete steps to open up research and scholarship. At the seminar everybody got a sheet of paper  that had possible actions for OA on it that everyone can do and that you could tick off. The organisers also disseminated a sheet of paper  that said "My Open Access action is ..." and you could write your action down. Afterwards someone took a photo of it. Really great ideas!
We should do something similar at NTNU next year!


I also attended a great seminar at the Kelvin Grove campus of QUT. Besides experiences by researchers there were also talks by someone from AOASG, the Australasian OA Strategy Group, by the University Copyright Officer (employed at QUT Library!!!) and the Scholarly Communications Librarian at QUT. All were fantastic and I have got the slides of all talks, so if someone is interested to have a look at the slides, please tell me.

I also got to know that QUT has an OA Publishing Planning Too. It is "only" a sheet of paper or rather a table, but with all the important questions to ask before deciding where to publish. I love it and will use it back in Trondheim.

In addition I heard about Think. Check. Submit., a campaign to help researchers identify trusted journals for their research publications. It is a simple checklist researchers can use to assess the credentials of a journal or publisher. See http://thinkchecksubmit.org/
Colleagues from Norway, does someone use this tool/campaign? I think it's great.

Someone also talked about the Open Science Framework, a scholarly commons to connect to the entire research cycle. Check it out here: https://osf.io/

And here you have the title of an article that must be interesting for everybody working in medicine and health sciences: "Beyond open data: realising the health benefits of sharing data". It's in BMJ 2016; 355.

Thanks again to the fantastic staff of the research support team from QUT library and other organisers. I enjoyed the seminars very much and learned a lot!

Read a bit more here:
https://blogs.qut.edu.au/library/tag/international-open-access-week/

https://www.qut.edu.au/about/events/events?news-id=110819

https://blogs.qut.edu.au/library/2014/10/15/access-all-areas-with-open-access-week/