Open Access Week – Why should you be excited?
It’s October! For the last seven years and this being the eighth, month of October has been particularly exciting for Open Access lovers, who continue to look forward to Open Access Week.
Open Access as a movement has been evolving rapidly; many startups are leveraging the movement, some of the significant startups of the last year are RockYourPaper.org an Open Access search engine, Openaccessbutton and Open Access publisher PeerJ.
Open Access Week celebrates the success of the movement and sets the tone. The whole week remains exciting and full of activities which include talks, seminars, symposia, or the announcement of milestones in open access. For instance, the Royal Society chose Open Access Week 2011 to announce that they would release the digitized backfiles of their archives, dating back from 1665 till 1941.
Open Access Week provides an opportunity for Academics, researchers, and curious minds to take positive action and to keep this momentum moving forward and make open access the norm in academic and research.
This year on October 20th, from 3:00 to 4:00pm EDT, SPARC and the World Bank will co-host the official kickoff event for International Open Access Week 2014. Open Access Week is from October 20th till October 26th.
Theme for the year 2014 is “Generation Open”. Discussions will focus on the importance of students and early career researchers in their transition to Open Access and how changes in scholarly publishing affect scholars and researchers at different stages of their careers.
“A truly open research literature and scholarly communication system will not only benefit the individual researchers but society as a whole, inducing the seed of knowledge.” says Neeraj Mehta – Co-Founder of RockYourPaper.
Graham Steel, a tireless advocate for Open Access who believes in sharing information as widely and as easily as possible. He firmly believes that paywalls stifle innovation and progress in science.
“At the very moment that most of us carry access to a global information network in our pockets, our ability to tap into the world’s knowledge is eliminated. And it’s not an accident. It’s on purpose. This situation is known as the “price crisis” in scholarly publishing, and it’s hurting the average citizen.” says Steel.
So let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen. Click here to register with OpenAccessWeek and start contributing.
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Author Nadeera Nilupamali is the Co-founder and the Community Manager of RockYourPaper . She can be reached on nadeera@rockyourpaper.org
www.rockyourpaper.org 