OA week wrap for 2015: what’s next?

Director, AOASG

5 days of frenetic  #OAweek activity and then OA can go back in the closet for the rest of the year? That doesn’t seem a good use of the momentum that the week generates. Below are some snapshots of the week and some thoughts for what’s next. There is a lot more on the OATP. Did we miss anything important? Let us know.

OA events in Australia and New Zealand

A lot went on in #OAweek across the region – much of which was compiled here before the week started.
Highlights included the Tuesday NZ/AU tweetchat – see tweet reach analysis, above, There was good discussion, including how the timing of the event works (or doesn’t) in this part of the world.
The Brisbane tri-university event on Back to the Future day was, as  Sue Hutley from QUT noted, extremely eclectic, with examples of best practice in “openness” being shared across disciplines. And that seemed like a particularly important theme overall.

UTS had a blog updated each day of OA week Other events to highlight (not already on the AOASG page) were Charles Darwin University’s event which included Professor Lawrence Cram, Pro Vice Chancellor, Research and Research Training and Georgina Taylor, Co-lead, Open Access Button – as well as the presentation of an OA prize.
In support of Open Access Week the University of Newcastle Library offered UON staff and RHD students the chance to win an iPad. Simply by submitting a copy of their full-text, peer-reviewed manuscript (Final accepted version) to the NOVA repository during the promotion period they were entered into the iPad draw. All entrants also received a free coffee. The promotion was well received by current repository users as well as encouraging new open access supporters (approximately 25% of entrants this year had not previously archived).

The University of Queensland had librarians fanning out across the university to talk to researchers about OA in an OA Awareness campaign. And UWA library did a set of tweets of OA facts

OA videos and audio

If you haven’t already seen them – take a look at  these videos produced for OA week from Griffith University, UWA & Curtin Library. All are also listed on the AOASG video page. You can also listen to Designing for serendipity on ABC RN and how OA fits in.

Open Science Prize Announced

Big news of the week was that the Wellcome Trust has teamed up with the US National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to launch a new prize that will seek to unleash the power of open content and data to advance research and its application for health benefit. The prizes are substantial and are specifically aimed at stimulating international collaboration. Closing date Feb 29 (yes, it’s a leap year) 2016.

Australasian Open Research Video Competition

Our OA week competition was to partner with thinkableon a competition to highlight OA work.   The Australasian Open Research Video Competition will showcase the best video abstracts, as voted by the community. It is open to any researcher based in Australia or New Zealand, of work published in an open access journal or which is made freely available via an open access repository. The competition is open for submissions for another month – so get making your video.

Open Access roundups


In addition to the OA events from across across the world, there were some good roundups of the  history and state of play in OA notably from – Creative Commons Aotearoa, JISC in the UK, and also in the UK, the Wellcome Trust produced a timeline of its 10 years in OA – and released the code so anyone can use it. Stephen Pinfield reflected on the State of OA in 18 Statements Peter Suber posted his suggested readings for OA week

 New resources for Open Access

Creative Commons Australia produced a handy new resource on CC licenses “Know your rights“. Pasteur4OA project produced a set of OA advocacy resources.  ORCID officially partnered with OA week and had some new graphics to link the two. SPARC launched an OA Spectrum Evaluation tool which quantitatively scores journals’ degrees of openness.

Open Access and why it is important –  quotes from across the region

Alex Holcombe, University of Sydney “I’ve had friends at small tech companies ask, jealously, how they can get the access to thousands of pay-walled scholarly journals that I enjoy. It’s often the engineers at a small start-up company, or a suffering medical patient, who would get the most use out of a published paper, not we academics.”
Alice Williamson from Open Source Malaria.  “The Open Source Malaria Consortium publishes all research data and results online so that anyone can read about, contribute to or use the data generated. This has effectively lowered any barriers to participation in the project and means that we can collaborate with scientists from very different backgrounds – from highly experienced medicinal chemists to high school students!” ‪

David Jakabek, Editor in Chief, Australian Medical Student Journal

“Open access is exciting for medical students for both academic study and research projects. With increasing journal numbers, fewer library subscriptions, and limited finances, Open Access allow medical students to draw on a wider array of research output than would otherwise be possible. From a publishing point of view, Open Access at the Australian Medical Student Journal reduces barriers for medical student work to be accessible to the wider scientific community. Students and colleagues can see medical student work being read and cited, which encourages further medical research in our future doctors.”

Roxanne Missingham, ANU

“Open for collaboration gave the opportunity for Dr Dan Andrews and Dr Julia Miller to give terrific presentations to more than 60 at the ANU providing very important insights into the complex nature of genomic and language data, the important of managing data well, the importance of considering the role of researchers in curating rather than owing data and the challenging of working towards national and international alliances to make data open.  Globally sharing data as openly as possible, with appropriate protections,  is essential for the creation of new research within both science and the social sciences and humanities.”

Open Access (and open data – the next “open” week?) in the news

The week started off in the Conversation with an article on the “Battle for OA” which has attracted many comments  – and rounded off the week with a Q & A featuring Lucy Montgomery from Curtin and Knowledge Unlatched and Tom Cochrane from QUT. Alex Holcombe reflected back on the week in a piece which asked whether we need an open data week

OA Quiz

and finally.. test your knowledge with the 15 question quiz on OA from BMC.