Lesson Overview - 11/04/2017

• The Open Access Movement

• What is Open Access (OA)?

Open access (OA) is free, immediate, permanent, full‐text, online access, for any user, web‐wide, to digital scientific research and scholarly material.

What is it?

• Research is fundamental to the knowledge society. 

According to the New Zealand government’s Digital Strategy, a knowledge society is “a society that creates, shares and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people” (New Zealand Government, 2008). 

Developing countries are lagging behind developed countries with regards to access to information and, thus, cannot adequately contribute to the ethos of information and knowledge sharing. 

The open access movement aims at narrowing the knowledge divide between developing and developed countries through widening access to research and knowledge. 

• Two currents in OA movement 

• Institutional Repositories (IRs)

An IR is a central digital database of an institution’s research work. It might include material such as research papers and electronic versions of documents such as theses, but may also include many of the digital assets, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects. The intention is to store, index, preserve and redistribute scholarly research in electronic formats (Barton & Waters, 2004).

• Ways to use Institutional Repositories

• Storing learning materials and courseware
• Electronic publishing
• Managing collections of research documents
• Preserving digital materials for the long term
• Adding to the university’s prestige by showcasing its academic research
• Knowledge management
• Research assessment
• Encouraging open access to scholarly research
• Housing digitized collections

• Types of material?

• Research (scholarly) articles (published peer‐reviewed postprints)
• Conference papers & proceedings
• Image collections
• Audio and audio‐visual material
• Technical reports
• Inaugural addresses
• Newspaper clippings, Etc.

• Institutional Repositories’ role in our knowledge society

• Institutional Repositories (IRs) offer universities an improved way to store and disseminate knowledge. 
• IRs are able to make significant contributions to research.

·         Reflection 

Today’s class focused on Open Access (OA). According to Wikipedia, “OA is free, immediate, permanent, full‐text, online access, for any user, web‐wide, to digital scientific research and scholarly material.”

There are two ways which researchers can share their research. The “Green Road to OA” is when a researcher self-archives their work using institutional repositories like SHERPA/ROMEO. The second method, known as the “Gold Road to OA.” In this method, the authours publish in an open access journal that provides immediate OA to all of its articles on the publisher’s website, for example the Directory Of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

OA has benefited students and academics from around the world (myself included) while doing research, by allowing them free access to research papers, databases and journals.