Open Access Week is a global event, now in its tenth year. It is an opportunity for the academic, library and research community to learn more about the benefits of Open Access and to share their experiences with colleagues, and to inspire wider participation in making Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
At Birkbeck we usually organise a range of online and in-person activities, such as panel discussions and workshops, as well as opportunities to share your thoughts on OA topics.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this year we have opted for a series of blog posts written by our librarians. Through these we aim to highlight what Open Access means for the Library and the collections. We’ll focus on ebooks and ejournals, demonstrating the importance of making content available openly as well as offering some insight into the power of platforms and publishers. We’ll also provide an overview of the barriers we face as a library service in being able to truly participate and contribute to the Open Access movement.
We invite you to start the week by watching and listening to a short screencast from Professor Martin Eve on The Ethos of Open Access.
Other posts published so far this week include:
Lockdown research: how COVID-19 and Open Access shaped a new project: Dr Fiona Tasker, a Reader in Psychology at Birkbeck, discusses her research during the pandemic.
Surfing the free resource wave: managing temporary access to online resources during the COVID-19 pandemic: Karen Attar, our E-Resources Support Assistant, describes how she managed access to the online resources made temporarily free after the lockdown.
Birkbeck Open Access in numbers: BIROn visualised: a graphical illustration of the research deposited and available in Birkbeck’s institutional repository.
The road to open access: from journal subscriptions to transformative agreements: Emma Illingworth, Subject Librarian for the School of Science, explains how the move from traditional journal subscription models to transformative agreements could lead to more content being open access.
You’re welcome to comment on and share our blog posts. You can also tweet using the hashtag #OAweek.