Thing 8 - Open Access
July 2nd, 2009 | by Kate MakowieckaThing 8: Open Access: Webcam Conversation
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2. What is Open Access (aka OA)?
‘Open access’ is an approach to knowledge that says it should flow freely: metaphorically and literally.
It’s an approach driven by consideration of increasing the Public Good as well as enhancing the impact of research.
Open Access journals, repositories, and collections publish and/or archive peer-reviewed full text scholarly works from all disciplines. They distribute these online using Open Content Licences such as Creative Commons (Thing 11) - free for anyone anywhere to access and use, whether to inform a community or in response to their own research.
Until very recently, much publicly funded research output has been available only through increasingly expensive subscription-based journal databases. The high cost of such subscriptions means access to such databases has been limited, mostly, to well-funded first-world institutions.
Now, however, more and more research institutions and funding agencies (including the ARC) either require or expect that publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public either in online Open Access journals or through institutional or disciplinary repositories.
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3. Why are we learning about Open Access?
What we mean by “publishing” is changing. Web tools such as wikis, blogs, google docs and Creative Commons licences can enhance research communities’ ability to communicate and cooperate; rss feeds and Libx can enhance your ability to find new output; whilst Google Scholar can enhance the world’s ability to find your output.
The expansion of the internet means that publishing is no longer limited by the demands of physical printing and distribution – timely, free, online dissemination of research work to anyone who has an interest can become the norm with the development of web tools such as open source publishing software.
Whether you are general or academic staff, under- or post-grads, you will need to become aware of the principles behind Open Access, and how the principles affect your use of online materials as well as your own future publications.
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4. What you need to do to complete this Thing
1. Have look at a specific OA journal, an OA database, and an OA repository.
2. Write a short post to your blog linking to an article you have found in the Public Library of Science .
5. How to complete this Thing
1. Look at JASAL - the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature - a highly respected peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
2. Look at Murdoch University’s recently created Open Access research repository .
3. Add a link from an article in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to your blog. PLOS is one of the best known collections of scientific and medical information, journals, and all sorts of other materials .
How to do this:
1. Go to the search page on PLOS
2. Search for a topic that interests you.
3. Click through to the full text of an article.
4. Copy the URL for the article’s page from the address bar. (You may need to use Select All to do this)
5. Start a new post in your blog.
6. Enter the text that you would like to link.
7. Select the text you would like to link.
8. Select the “add link” button.
9. Copy the URL to the “Link URL” box.
10. Select Insert.
6. If you want to try more….
Watch the brief videos by contributors and users of PLOS at http://www.plos.org/index.php. Comment in your blog on the differences OA may make to your current research or work - or the differences that it is already making.
PLOS has a list of Other Open Access Resources (have a look especially at SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition - “an alliance of academic and research libraries and organizations working to correct market dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing system”)
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a free software program - used by JASAL amongst others - for the OA publication of peer reviewed journals.
