October 23 - 29, 2023 | Everywhere

how should we make open access reach more people

Its just recently that I knew about Open access. From my observation so far I have noticed that open access has not reached as many people as we would like.Having also seen the benefits of it especially in the country i come from(Kenya),i see the need of the open access groups to be more vibrant in showing the need to enhance it. in order to bring global ideas in a platform where they can be shared and accessed, there need to be more smooth infrastructure to arrive to more fruitful results, but the big question is not when it will be done, but how?

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Permalink Reply by Anne Powell on October 15, 2012 at 9:57pm

It is very true that people need to know about the resources for Open Access content to be used. You will be encouragedi if you look at http://www.inasp.info/oa-week-competition-winners-2012 to see the efforts that 3 Kenyan institutions are making to raise the awareness of OA resources.

They all have profiles on this site:

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology has been an active participant in Open Access Week for many years. The JKUAT Institutional Repository Policy has been launched and what remains is creating awareness of both the policy and Institutional Repository (IR). Our key objective this year is to populate the repository and launch it online by the end of the year. We will use the OAW as a climax of all the promotional activities.

http://www.openaccessweek.org/profile/JKUATLibrary

Medical Students' Association of Kenya (MSAKE)

The grant will be a launching pad to recruit 50 health science students as advocates of OA to their colleagues, lecturers, librarians and policy makers. The training will not only equip students but also give them morale to organise for other OA events in future. Beyond the targeted participants, posters, bookmarks and banners will be used to widely publicise the event within the entire College of Health Sciences, University of Nairobi. The facebook groups managed by the student organisations will also bear the same message throughout the Open Access Week.

http://www.openaccessweek.org/profile/DanielMunyambuMutonga?xg_sour...

University of Nairobi

University of Nairobi will conduct workshops on issues on open access; open access publishing, search skills, plagiarism & detection, and referencing software. There will be exhibitions of Open Access resources, open air displays, speeches, presentations, entertainment and demonstrations of access to the e-resources. The aim is to enhance awareness of Open Access resources and other online resources available to the library users; to equip users with Open Access searching skills to enhance access and usage and to connect library users to global information resources.

http://www.openaccessweek.org/profile/UNIVERSITYOFNAIROBILIBRARY