Open Access Week 2010

What is Open Access Week?
The aim of Open Access Week is to promote greater awareness and understanding of the importance of free and unfettered access to research and information.

What is "open access"?
Open access literature is defined as "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions" (Suber 2008). One particular target of the open access movement has been peer-reviewed research that is usually reported in scholarly journals. Subscription costs and copyright restrictions have meant that those with the most to gain are effectively excluded from accessing the knowledge disseminated in these publications.

To overcome these restrictions, two types of delivery mechanisms have been developed to facilitate greater access to research literature: open access journals and open access archives or repositories. A variety of resources have been developed to make it easier to locate both of these literature types. For example, this listing from the British Columbia Electronic Library Network compiles peer-reviewed scholarly journal collections and freely available serials. This tool was developed to facilitate searches within open access journals. And openDOAR serves as a searchable directory of open access repositories.

For more information about open access generally, read Peter Suber's "A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access" (available in multiple languages) or his longer "Open Access Overview." Another great resource is the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), which covers the "concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving" open access.

This week, I will focus on different OA issues from a forced migration perspective, and showcase a variety of OA resources.

Tagged Events & Opportunities.