Open Access (OA) Week
is being celebrated from October 21 – 27, 2013. The entire week is dedicated to
celebrate a successful movement that has culminated into various tremendous fully
accessible OA platforms critical for researchers and communicating scholarly
works. Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) noted that the 2013 celebrations
of the global annual event
are in the 7th year that promotes open access as a new norm in scholarship and
research.
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| This picture shows the efforts of Bindura University of Science and Education (BUSE) of promoting Open Access (OA) to its community. The OA observarence are going on until the 27th of October. (Picture taken from the BUSE Library Facebook page) |
The official theme for 2013 observance is "Open Access:
Redefining Impact" which reflect the remarkable transition that OA
has brought to publishing models and access methods. Prior the OA movement
access to research was becoming a nightmare due to budget cuts and high expectations
from patrons that naturally paralysed the profound roles of libraries. In its 7th
year a number of declarations that made the OA movement a successful have been
signed that started with the signing of the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in 2002 in Budapest. That meeting which was
convened by the Open Society Institute (OSI) brought together a number of leading OA
proponents to forge a holistic approach towards the OA
initiatives. This very meeting lead to the signing of the BOAI, which OSI
was the first signatory, defined OA as "the free availability on
the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute,
print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for
indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful
purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." Several other
definitions have been published supporting the concepts in this founding definition
given by BOAI. Through the years numerous other declarations were signed across the globe to support the fastest growing publishing initiatives.
Recently efforts to
support OA have increased with several governments working towards making OA an
acceptable publishing model that has incredible rewards in development and
research output. Notable efforts have been noticed in the US where the Obama
Administration that has signed an agreement to show “committed to
ensuring that, to the greatest extent and with the fewest constraints possible
and consistent with law and the objectives set out below, the direct results of
federally funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the
public, industry, and the scientific community. Such results include
peer-reviewed publications and digital data.” This is a tremendous response to
the OA movement since most research is government sponsored; literary meaning
that tax payers are funding the researches.
What then are
the benefits of OA? Peter Suber a renowned OA writer, enthusiast and the de facto leader of the Open Access movement,
currently the Director of the Harvard Open Access Project has written
extensively on the movement to create awareness and understanding of the
movement. He noted several benefits of OA which are well documented in his OA book published last
year. Suber noted that OA is problem solving, providing no restrictions, free access and
available 24/7 outside the library walls. It is important to note that OA has
potential to increase visibility of authors and institutions. EIFL observed that “Open access benefits
researchers, institutions, nations and society as a whole. There are
significant economic, social and educational benefits to making research
outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access.”
Zimbabwe has
made tremendous progress in OA with university librarians on the forefront.
Several noteworthy projects are at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), National
University of Science and Technology (NUST) and Zimbabwe Open University (ZOU).
The main mode is through the Institutional Repositories (IR) that form part of
the growing University libraries infrastructure. As the world commemorate OA
week, Universities in Zimbabwe take the opportunity to market the idea to
faculty, researchers and potential authors on the significance of OA for
research and scholarly communication. Basically the main thrust is calling for
all stakeholders to be involved in OA.
I hope next year
the impact of OA in Zimbabwe would have grown and participation would have
increased. To date a few institutions from Zimbabwe have registered their IRs
with Opendoar the
global IR directory.
Peter
Suber on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?
Availalbe at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2013/07/peter-suber-on-state-of-open-access.html.
A list of OA
articles by Peter Suber. Available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~psuber/wiki/Writings_on_open_access.
