Open Access Week 2016

Every year, Open Access Week highlights the developments and innovations surrounding the Open Access movement.  The theme for this year is ‘Open in Action’ and will focus on sharing successes, actions, and ideas for implementing Open Access (OA).  The idea is to move beyond theoretical concepts to more tangible examples of what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be done.

Image: h_pampel  (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Perhaps the most pressing concern regarding OA for universities and other scholarly institutions is HEFCE’s requirements for the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise.  To be eligible for the next REF, authors must deposit the final, author-created manuscript of all published journal articles and conference papers in SURE within 3 months of acceptance.  Promotion of HEFCE’s requirements, how SURE can be used to meet them, and a general raising of awareness of what OA is, and why it’s so important, now constitute a large part of my role as institutional repository coordinator.  Beyond this though, OA has been a catalyst for the preservation and dissemination of so-called Grey Literature: PhD theses, working papers, reports, community-based projects, artworks, and much more, research that is often difficult to access but that represents an important body of work demonstrating impact and value for money.

Open Access Week is a great opportunity to focus attention on all of this, and I’ll be blogging all week with my own thoughts on the various aspects of OA, as well as showing the range of OA resources available to researchers.

I’d be really happy to read your thoughts about any of the issues raised this week, so please leave your comments.