OA advocates like me have been waiting for this significant and riveting time of the year. The highlight of this year is definitely the International Open Access Week; a focal week, when the global community unites to celebrate the achievements of openness, organize different events around the world in collaboration with one another, plan for the future and eulogize the importance and need for open entities to a range of audiences.

Open Access Week, a global event is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what we’ve learned, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. This year’s theme is “Open for Collaboration” and what better way to celebrate that then to highlight some of the amazing event that Open Access Nepal has lined up for this much awaited week.

Open Access Nepal has been successfully organizing advocacy and grassroot campaigns in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. But with time, we felt the strong need of expanding our work outside the capital targeting larger scale of students and researchers. In regards to this, OANepal is running a project “Open Access: Greater Reach for Research” wherein we are travelling to all the universities of Nepal and some acclaimed colleges. We’ve targeted all the 5 development regions of Nepal and we are advocating Open Access in major universities and colleges within each development region. During the Open Access Week 2015, OANepal will be organizing events as an extension to this project. During the OA week we will be focusing our events in two districts of the country. It will be a two day event in each district. The first day will witness an event where orientation about Open Access, Open Educational Resources and Open Access Repository will be provided to the participants who include researchers, students, librarians, authors and faculties. The second day will provide an opportunity for students to get into action and engage themselves in different workshops (such as OA advocacy at local level, OER, Finding and Accessing Open Resources, Issues and Challenges related to OA and establishment of OA repository). Along with these events, we have also planned a separate event with advocates and experts of Open movement in Nepal to assist us in drafting a national Open Access Policy. A final report of our event and a National Open Access Policy draft will be submitted to the Ministry of Education for further study and consideration.

I hope that these series of events can inspire even more work around Open Access in future and that our community will use this week to get involved both locally and globally. Open Access Nepal hopes to keep the momentum going and come up with even more creative and innovative ideas for Open Access Week to attract more attention and address a larger pool of audiences.

Roshan Kumar Karn
President, Open Access Nepal