DWLresearch

Open Access Week has traditionally focussed on Open Access to publications, which has been a catalyst to address the transformation of scholarly communication more broadly. Our OA Week celebrations included a screening of Paywall: The Business of Scholarship , a very insightful film that reminds us why so many people across the globe believe what a difference Open Access will make to knowledge, getting us closer to an equal society. Many significant figures from the OA movement are included in the film, and it struck me that some are willing the discussion to broaden out , to transform other aspects of research in need of also being open. Terms used to capture the broader need for openness beyond publications include Open Science / Open Knowledge / Open Research . In the interest of keeping this post as inter-disciplinary as possible I'm going to opt for using the phrase Open Research here. Those who have stepped one foot into a University or research environment knows tha...

International Open Access Week 2018 celebrates 10 years of promoting open scholarship worldwide. Let’s go back to basics and see how the publishing landscape has changed over the last decade. Open Access was defined in the Finch Report (2012) stating that ‘research outputs arising from publicly funded research should be freely accessible at the point of use with minimal if any limitations on how they can be used’. In fact, Open Access is all about reaching wider audience and increasing the impact of your research. According to Universities UK Report on transition to Open Access (2017) the proportion of UK-authored, open access articles increased from 12% in 2012 to 30% in 2016. Currently 37% of research outputs in UK and 25% worldwide are freely available at the publication date. The movement supporting discoverability and accessibility of research outputs sparked a change in policies of the HEI, funders and most scholarly publishers. Two options for making publicatio...