October 21 - 30 is open access week

This month of October feature the Open Access Week, from October 24^th through the 31^st that seeks to recognise the importance of free access to information for research and communication. It is an important week for librarian’s world over who have been involved in the movement since its inception. A number of activities are lined up to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

According to McLennan (2010) in her blog  “Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.”  She further noted that Open Access (OA) 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.

Libraries can plan a number of activities to promote open access and to bring awareness to the user community. Plan events that create awareness and do presentation of some of the open access resources the library has. It is also beneficial to do group discussion on open access pinpointing on the benefits to users and scholars. The library also benefits through having access to free full text content that would have a positive bearing on budgets.

Library association can also take the opportunity to promote open access materials to librarians. Probably the association can organize a march to make the event which is running for the fifth year. Zimbabwe will definitely need to promote the open access movement through promoting establishing functional institutional repositories (IR) that are a convenient mode for open access. The challenge lie in academic community that is reluctant to deposit their research output with the IRs. Students too should be engaged in the promoting of open access so that they understand the concept and to participate in the open access to support the publishing and likely foreseeing the continual of the movement through their publishing participation.

The user community does have a role to play in the open access week. Firstly they should see that they effectively use the open access content for research and development. Secondly, they have to tell some one about the usefulness of open access content to promote its adoption.

The Open Access week give librarians, users, publishers and writers an opportunity to share ideas on developing the movement and see continuity with participation from all sectors. Take this opportunity to organise something at your school, college, library and community as the information is key for development and sustainable livelihood.

More resources on Open Access

http://www.eifl.net/openaccess

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/