28 October 2022
Open Access Week 2022 takes place between the 24th and 30th of October. This year’s theme seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. We have reached out to four institutions to find out more about their plans for Open Access Week and what they hope to achieve through these events.
Open Access week at the University of Aberdeen by Lesley Macrae, Open Research Advisor.
International Open Access week presented the Open Research team at the University of Aberdeen with the opportunity to inspire our community locally by inviting ‘Fresh Ideas’ from a network of open research advocates. We decided that Aberdeen, while beautiful, is not always an easy location to reach, so we added two online events to make it easier to attract a broad range of speakers and a wider audience.
Our first online event ‘Fresh Perspectives: Open Ideas’ will be a call to arms for our speakers to present a positive case for engaging in open research practices. We hope that they will enthuse and inspire and that we can appeal to some of those researchers currently on the periphery of open research and convince them of the benefits to them and their institution.
The Aberdeen University Press will officially re-launch during OA week, so there will be an evening event to celebrate our Press becoming fully Open Access. AUP has an ethos of supporting innovative, interdisciplinary, and comparative research. In line with our Open research aims AUP publications will be free at the point of access and available across the globe, creating international impact with local relevance.
The University of Aberdeen has recently appointed five Interdisciplinary leads, so we are hosting a hybrid roundtable event to explore the challenges and opportunities interdisciplinary researchers have encountered in an open research environment. We hope that this will spark a thread of discussion that will carry beyond this session.
Our final online session focuses on data sharing in academia and in a public context. We will have a European perspective on open research, and we will hear from our recently appointed DORA implementation officer. This should be a nice follow-up to Stephen Curry’s Monday presentation and show the benefits this post can bring to our institution.
We are a relatively new team, keen to engage with our researchers, so one of our OA week event days will be a drop-in session. We’ve assembled a huge team across several areas to provide a one-stop information service. We hope that researchers drop in, chat, get to know us and help to evolve our service.
Why are we running this event?
The University of Aberdeen has an existing reputation for collections, spaces, and student support. We are now turning our attention to our research community and looking to significantly enhance our services. We hope to use our Open Access week events to begin a conversation with our own researchers that we can continue into the coming months. We have recently added new metrics and data posts to our team so our events and drop-in sessions will be a great way to create some buzz around these developing topics. We are grateful to all our high-profile speakers for agreeing to join us as we think it will really help educating and inspiring our academics locally.
What we hope to achieve from it?
This year has been about setting out our stall. In addition to our programme of Open Access Week events, we are also seeing the launch of our new user focussed website, built with the help of our community, and the launch of Aberdeen University Press as an Open Access Publisher. We are grateful for the input we’ve had from the University community in beginning to help determine how we develop our services. We have been inspired by the work of our peers in RLUK and we have drawn benefits from the networks we are part of. The team have learned a huge amount through the planning of our events week and perhaps if it’s successful we might even do it again.
Follow Lesley on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LesleyJMacrae
Open Access Week at Lancaster University - by Louise Zambianchi, Open Access Manager at Lancaster University.
International Open Access week takes place between the 24th and 30th of October and this year has the theme of 'Climate Justice'. Lancaster University Library has organized a range of events open to all staff and students, aiming to encourage connections and collaboration amongst the academic and open research community. This aligns very closely with one of the key aims of Lancaster University Library’s 2025 vision, which is to be a connected connector bringing our communities together to co-create and share knowledge.
We have engaged with a range of internal and external partners to develop our programme to showcase our library partnerships and bring our communities together within this space. For instance, Lancaster University's 'ReproducibiliTea' journal club, will be delivering a special Open Access week meeting in our library research engagement spaces, whilst Lancaster's new Digital Humanities Research Centre will be co-delivered by our library staff in our Digital Scholarship lab, further showcasing our work with our partners.
This year’s focus on Climate Justice has also seen us design events with the intension of encouraging connection and collaboration amongst the climate movement and open research community. Author and activist Matt Sowerby will be delivering a talk titled 'How to find hope in a climate crisis', featuring live poetry readings, which will be open to all of our staff, students and members of the public with an interest in this area.
Other events include: a seminar and discussion reviewing the current state of open science, how authors can navigate their open-access options with AGU (American Geophysical Union) via the Library’s Wiley Read and Publish agreement, and best practices for open data and software; drop-in sessions with Lancaster’s open access team; and a Lego based research meta data game aimed primarily at our PGR community.
There will be a series of tweets throughout the week promoting and discussing these events using the official hashtag of #OAweek.
Follow Louise on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LouiseZambi
Open Access week at University of Sussex - by Sam Nesbit, Open Access Librarian
The theme for Open Access week this year is a difficult one – the urgency of discussions around Climate Justice (and the Climate Crisis more broadly) have lent proceedings an unusually sombre air, as if, through closer scrutiny (or, more accurately, pulling our collective heads out of the sand), the scale of the Climate Crisis has really hit home. In response to this, though, our team at Sussex have been heartened to explore some of the amazing research being done on Climate Science at the University. Strangely, the huge, somewhat-unapproachable theme this year has led us to engage even more with the actual research being done on our doorstep.
To that end, our focus throughout the week will be primarily on promoting the wonderful work of our colleagues. Sussex has a proud history of related research, coming from a cross-section of Schools and Departments, such as the Institute for Development Studies (whose working paper series is particularly pertinent), Social Policy Research Unit, and the School of Global Studies to name a few. We’ll be sharing open access research throughout the week on @SussexOpenResearch, so please do follow us on Twitter.
Excitingly, we’ll also be launching our Library Open Research Seminars series with a fascinating panel discussion on Open Research and Climate Justice, online and open to all. We’ve got some fantastic speakers lined up and it promises to be an enlightening start to an ongoing series developed by colleagues across the Library.
Our Open Access week programme includes broader sessions on the fabulous SPARKLE project, OA and RDM introductory sessions, and an interactive quiz aimed at demystifying the work our Research & Open Scholarship team do for other Library staff – we’ll be approaching these in light of the week’s theme, with a particular focus on how Open Research helps foster the collaboration required to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.
It promises to be a fascinating week and we can’t wait to see what others are doing!
Open Access Week at the British Library: Open and Engaged Conference - by Ilkay Holt Scholarly, Communications Lead and Susan Miles, Scholarly Communications Specialist
The British Library’s mission is to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone, for research, inspiration and enjoyment. On the way to achieving this ambitious mission, we recognise the value of open access to our collections, research and data as well as non-traditional objects like artefacts. We take every opportunity to raise awareness on a range of open scholarship topics to engage with the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) community, to create discussions, to learn from others, and to share knowledge and experience. International Open Access Week is one of those great occasions to act locally while being part of a global momentum around open sharing.
With this in mind, since 2018, our Open and Engaged Conference has been organised either virtually or in person at the British Library to coincide with International Open Access Week. Open and Engaged conferences bring together cultural heritage organisations with higher education institutions on the axis of research to share knowledge. This is particularly valuable in the context of communicating research outside academia and its social impact, while learning from each other’s vast amount of experience.
Open and Engaged 2022 takes place online on 24 October, Monday afternoon. In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open for Climate Justice; we will address intersections between cultural heritage and climate research through use of collections, digital infrastructures and skills.
As was well said in the International Open Access Week’s theme, “Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.” Over decades, cultural heritage institutions have enlightened a variety of climate studies with their historical collections and datasets by helping to make observations, create modelling and analysis on climate issues. Openness and accessibility of such collections and the infrastructure that they have been stored, preserved and made available are crucial to reduce inequities and for better sharing. Equipping and upskilling professionals involved in organisations is equally important to ensure openness and run services. At Open and Engaged 2022, we would like to seek answers to these questions with our speakers and contributions from the audience:
- What is the role of library collections, historical datasets to understand the impact of climate change?
- How to use digital infrastructure for more equitable knowledge sharing?
- What roles and skills are needed to make research from heritage organisations openly available?
The event will be recorded, both slides and the recordings will be made available through the British Library’s Research Repository like past years.
As part of our International Open Access Week activities, we are also pleased to announce that our monthly Scholarly Communications Newsletter will become available to a wider audience. Our monthly Scholarly Communications Newsletter has a focus on open research news of particular interest and relevance to the GLAM and cultural heritage communities, although all are welcome to sign up for it.
Each month we select a handful of items that address topics within open access; scholarly publishing; research data; scholarly infrastructure or discovery services. Regular listings of upcoming conferences and webinars (as well as their recordings) and longer publications to read provide further opportunities to deepen understanding and knowledge within these areas.
We invite you to sign up here to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox, starting from the November 2022 issue. Please contact us at openaccess@bl.uk with any queries.
Follow Ilkay and British Library Open Research on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ilkayholt and https://twitter.com/BLopenresearch