Research News
This is Open Access Week
Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication.
This week, 19-23 October 2009, is the first International Open Access Week. It is seen as an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. It builds on the momentum generated by Open Access Days held in 2007 and 2008.
The week's events are being organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture with new key contributors for 2009: OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries). For more details, click here.
"There's no more certain sign of the momentum behind Open Access to research than an annual, global celebration of this scale," added Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "Occasions like this are the best possible way to attract attention from busy faculty members and administrators. It's SPARC's pleasure to be working with our partners to realize the event once again this year."
DFID Research and Open Access
DFID-funded research is publicly funded and essentially constitutes a global public good. DFID supports Open Access as a core component of its research commitment to ensure that research knowledge can be accessed, built upon and used in support of the objectives of the DFID Research Strategy. Research for Development (R4D) is an Open Access digital portal for DFID-funded research and DFID expects the research programmes it funds to make full use of the R4D repository. For more information, see the Research Programme Consortia: Guidance Note on Open Access.
A recent scoping study has looked at how DFID Research can develop an open access policy that will lead to greater public access to the research outputs it finances. Read the report 'Towards a DFID Research Policy on Open Access' and see the presentation based upon this report.
More information