Open Access Bangladesh started its journey on February 17, 2017 with a vision to work as a platform for advocating open access, open data and open education in Bangladesh. During its two and half year journey, Open Access Bangladesh gained the strength of solidarity as an organization working to promote openness in scholarly works by organizing events, workshops and seminars. Some programs worth mentioning arranged by Open Access Bangladesh are – ‘Workshop on Open Access- A useful tool for education and research’, ‘OpenCon 2018 Dhaka’, ‘Learn Research with Fun’ among others.

The mandate of Open Access Bangladesh is to popularize open access in Bangladesh through the engagement of scholarly community.

Plans for the Future!

From our perspective in Bangladesh, the main obstacle in the way of popularizing open access is the vague concept on it. The concepts on open access, especially open access publications, aren’t clear among the researchers in our country. The majority of them consider publications in open access journals as low quality scholarly works. The introduction of a national policy can help to encourage scholarly communities to make their works OA and benefit through advantages open sharing provides. It is now an urgency for Bangladesh to formulate open access policy on research and publications. Open Access Bangladesh is working with stakeholders like UGC, universities, policy makers, researchers, scholarly societies to initiate a policy in university and in national level.

Open Access Bangladesh will continue its endeavors in spreading open access awareness through open access carnivals, scholarly meetings and international seminars, by publishing articles on open access in Bengali for more effective impact, introducing BanglaXiv, the first ever pre-print service in Bangladesh by the end of this year. With the help of its strong national committee, Open Access Bangladesh will continue to leverage the awareness and raise issues related to open access in general and in specific to Bangladesh.

Open Access Week 2019

Open Access Bangladesh will observe Open Access Week 2019 on October 26^th at Sufia Kamal National Public Library in Dhaka, Bangladesh. For observing this week, the team at Open Access Bangladesh translated this year’s theme “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge” in Bengali as Ó কার জন্য? সমতার জন্যে মুক্ত জ্ঞান ÓThe program will be inaugurated with a colorful procession and a panel discussion held afterward that will include the participation of professionals from diverse area including academicians, researchers, librarians, government officers, teachers and students. The Dhaka University Researcher Society (DURS) and Society for Leadership Skills Development (SLSD) are our strategic partners for the event, and a prominent TV channel and a few online news portals will work as media partner of the event.