A year on from our first book title the University of Westminster Press to celebrate international open access week is running a competition for a free print copy of any of our six published book titles* for two winners.…

Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of

most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the

internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives

for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just…

Why do authors choose to publish open access? In an ongoing survey by Editage Insights, many authors cite the main reason as “to increase research outreach”. But with more and more research papers being published every year, and more authors choosing the open access route than before, even open access is not enough to give your research the exposure it needs. Moreover, as a scientist, publication is no longer the end of your research lifecycle. It’s increasingly important for you to find…

It is Open Access Week! The scientific community is steadily moving toward open science. Thus, apart from open data mandates driven by governments, even publishers are joining this “open” trend. For instance, PLOS announced …

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what the academic world thinks of open access (OA) publishing and related topics, such as peer review, licensing, re-use, and metrics? I just read the results of a broad survey on this topic, conducted by Taylor & Francis and its parent company, Informa. The results are published here. Since it may be time-consuming and difficult to examine the…

Open in order to "bypass the publisher's rights"

What is Publisher's Rights and how this impacts the readers from reaching your research publication?

Publisher's right is the right adorned by the author, who is the owner of the Intellectual Property of the Content, to the publisher for transferring, publishing and distributing the research to the research and academic communities. To achieve this…

As a proud co-founder of Open Access Week, we hope you will join us in celebrating progress and promoting awareness to help make Open Access – the founding principle of PLOS – the new norm in scholarship and research globally. This year’s theme is “Open in Order to…” and invites the community to focus on what openness enables.

Since PLOS’ beginning, we’ve been open in order to accelerate…

The open access (OA) movement is gaining worldwide consensus as more and more countries are joining the effort to make research freely available. 

China has recently joined the ranks of the nations that are making a shift to OA. On May 15, 2014, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), a major basic-science funding agency, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), one of China's most prestigious research institutions, announced…

The open access (OA) movement is gaining worldwide consensus as more and more countries are joining the effort to make research freely available. 

China has recently joined the ranks of the nations that are making a shift to OA. On May 15, 2014, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), a major basic-science funding agency, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), one of China's most prestigious research institutions, announced…

The open access–journal publishing trend has hit the world of academic book publishing. The traditional business model for monograph publishing is lagging behind the others in the industry, and academic publishers are becoming more and more selective about the books they agree to publish. This, in turn, has a huge effect on first-time authors and…

All properly executed science deserves to be published as quickly as possible. One common frustration of scientists related to publication speed is the review-rejection cycle that in action resembles a cross between cycling on a hamster wheel and jumping through a hoola-hoop. To offer authors a way out of this cycle of delay, PLOS launched a journal transfer initiative earlier this year that provides authors an alternative to starting from scratch for papers not initially accepted by a…

Open citation refers to the practice of making papers in a reference list accessible. Open citations use a common, machine-readable format. The listed papers can be accessed independently of the main article and are freely available. This is an important way to share knowledge. The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) represents a new approach to scholarly publishing. It has…

The 2nd SPARC Japan Seminar 2017 entitled "Preprint and Open Access" will be held on 30 October, hosted by SPARC Japan, in keeping with this year’s Open Access Week theme of “Open in order to…”. We will review the role and management of the preprint servers in these 30 years and discuss how to contribute to the advancement of scientific research and the issues concerning the importance of the commercial publication, sustainable models of the publication and the quality…

As Open Access Week in October is not very convenient for our students and staff, due to examination time, our institution held our Open Access Week Seminar on 19 September 2017.   You can see our programme and the presentations at: http://libguides.wits.ac.za/openaccess_a2k_scholarly_communication/OAWeek…

Academic publishing is still largely the domain of traditional academic journals. Academics understand the impact of their work when published in an established and prestigious peer-reviewed journal. It means esteem for the work, for them, and for the universities they represent. It can also mean progress along the pathway to tenure or grant funding or a desired position within the university. Academic journals still command a great deal of influence. However, open access publishing (OA) is…

Open science is an effort that aims to make scientific research, data, and its distribution accessible to all. This involves practices like publishing open research and campaigning for open access. It encourages scientists to have an open notebook policy and make it less cumbersome to publish and convey scientific knowledge. Open science embodies an innovative way to conduct research, collaborate with other scientists and share information with a wider audience. Both digital technology and…

Invitation to a series of webinars on "Incentives for sharing research data" - An African Open Science Platform initiative 

The Open Science movement – focused on making research data, software code and experimental methods publicly available and transparent - is steadily gaining momentum. According to Gewin (2016), “[A]a spirit of openness is gaining traction in the…

https://www.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/service/elektronisches_publizieren/open_access_woche/open_access_woche.de.jsp