Open Access Week is an international celebration of the benefits of Open Access to scholarship. The theme this year “reflects a scholarly system in transition. While governments, funders, universities, publishers, and scholars are increasingly adopting open policies and practices, how these are actually implemented is still in flux. As open becomes the default, all stakeholders must be intentional about designing these new, open systems to ensure that they are inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community.”
Although a recent major driver to open access is the requirement for the next REF, that accepted manuscripts should be deposited in an institutional repository (Pure) no more than three months after acceptance, examples of good open access practice can be found in many places: depositing preprints in repositories such as arXiv; creating and publishing Open Access journals, such as the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity (IPED) journal, published by the School of Social Sciences and using Open Journal Systems software; and creating and sharing open research data.
The Research Support Team in Information Services provides support to research staff and students on making their research more openly available. We provide advice via webpages and Power Hours, and individual tailored advice. We can help you:
- maintain your research profile in Pure, including adding publications
- publish your research outputs as Open Access, to meet REF Open Access Compliance
- with advice on article processing charges (APCs) and open access requirements for all funders
- with research computing solutions
- manage your research data – data management planning, data storage and sharing
- publish open data, including obtaining dois for data
- copyright and licensing
Throughout this week, we will post on different aspects of open access: how to create unique identifiers (ORCID IDs, digital object identifiers (dois)), how to publish open data, meet REF Open Access compliance, and on digital theses.
We are keen to hear your experiences, questions and opinions on what open access means for you and your research. There will be a competition with a prize!
The first resource we are sharing is the film Paywall: the Business of Scholarship, a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google.
Get in touch
The Research Support team in IS is:
- Linda Kerr, Research Support Librarian
- Lesa Ng, Research Support Assistant (pictured)
- Marko Mlakar, Research Support Assistant (pictured)
- Jose Manuel Menendez Montes, Research Computing Manager
We can be reached on open.access@hw.ac.uk
For advice on Pure – purehelp@hw.ac.uk
For advice on open data – openresearchdata@hw.ac.uk
InformS 