oaweek

It’s soon upon us: the Ninth Open Access Week

It’s soon upon us! The ninth Open Access Week. This year, the theme is Open in Action, about taking ‘concrete steps to make … work more openly available and encourag[ing] others to do the same’. The theme corresponds nicely with our IDRC-funded Ambassador project where we have Ambassadors working around the world to promote the values of open access and the DOAJ.

On Facebook, over the coming days, I’ll be listing the details all the DOAJ-associated activities that are being held across the globe. I’ve started with a list of links to some of the DOAJ Team’s profiles on the Open Access Week web site. Here’s the post:

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDirectoryofOpenAccessJournals%2Fposts%2F1295485780463658&width=500

Need a flyer or a poster?

What are you doing for open access week? Let us know. If you need any DOAJ promotional material for your event, we have an A5 flyer for printing out, an A4 information sheet (more suitable for a North American audience), and we have a flyer and a poster in French, and the same in Chinese. Don’t forget that we have a collection of presentations on Slideshare, too, which are a great resource for “clipping” (saving a slide), downloading etc. If you need something else, get in touch!

The Open Access Week web site itself also has a great Resources section, where you can download logos, handouts and posters.

International open access week 2014: some useful hashtags

Whether you are studying, researching, teaching, publishing—or simply interested in the open web, open knowledge, open learning and open data—it won’t have escaped you that next week is International Open Access Week. All over the world, groups are pulling together some fantastic events: there are webinars, seminars and competitions, many of them freely open to anyone who can attend.

I will be doing my bit for the DOAJ, presenting at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden on why the DOAJ is such a useful tool for researchers who want to publish in quality, open access journals. It was recently estimated that there are at least 114 million scholarly papers on the web. With that much information available, consumers of scholarly information need as much help as they can get to find high quality, relevant material in as little time as possible. That figure also implies that there are a huge amount of journals out there, so finding the right journal to publish in can be difficult.

However, DOAJ is a useful tool within the open access movement in other ways too:

Open access publishing is not only about freeing up research for use by all but is also an extremely important medium for those smaller publishers who need to keep overheads to a minimum. DOAJ has a longtail of single-journal publishers and indeed those “publishers” are sometimes one man- or one woman-operations putting out a journal because they have a passion for the field that they work in. DOAJ’s aim is to raise the profile of all high quality, peer-reviewed, open access journals. We want to give equal visibility to the small alongside the large, the obscure alongside the popular, with equal footing and on a neutral platform.

Open access also allows developing nations to have access to life-saving research, and join in topical research debates, that otherwise would have been unavailable to them. DOAJ sees a consistently high amount of traffic from developing countries and providing an entrance to this content is just as vital as the exposure that we provide for the publishers.

If you’d like to find out more about some of the events for open access week, try searching in Twitter, Facebook or Google using these hashtags:

#openaccess
#AccesoAbierto
#openaccessweek
#OAWeek
#OAWeek2014
#OAWeek14
#OAWfr14
#OAWLyon