THE WEEK IN LINKS — SEPTEMBER 12

“What has been happening in the world of Open Access in the last week ?”

Ernesto Priego, a lecturer in Library Science, City University London and Open Access advocate, pointed out at his interview with the Open Access Button the importance of libraries in Open Access. “Libraries are at the forefront of both access to information and, online, to academic publishing”.

An online protest took place on September 10 in support of net neutrality, “the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks equally”. The response that came from hundreds of thousands of individuals as well as from numerous sites demonstrated the users’ powers in the “battle for the net”!

Glyn Moody, a technology writer and open source specialist, explained that the real debate regarding open access publishing lies on choosing the appropriate licensing option. Talking about copyright agreements he says that “giving up the copyright on your creation is just folly, and academics need to think about why it would be better to stop doing so. After all, publishers don’t need copyright assigned to them — they just need a licence from the authors — but it’s something they routinely demand because they know that doing so puts them in the driving seat”.

The Open Access Repository Ranking (OARR) was launched September 9, 2014 during the Open-Access-Tage conference in Cologne, Germany.This ranking will list all German open access repositories according to a defined metric. The goal of OARR is to help “researchers identify the best open access repositories in Germany and the best repository managers to build them”.

Denmark has set some rather ambitious goals regarding Open Access. According to the Danish Minister of Higher Education and Science, Sofie Carsten Nielsen, the country will reach Open Access to 80% of all publicly funded peer reviewed articles in 2017 and concluding this with 100% in 2022.

The General Assembly of the International Council for Science in New Zealand endorsed Open Access principles and provided key recommendations guarding against the misuse of metrics in the evaluation of research performance.

If you are a librarian interested in open access, today is the last day for the call for poster proposals for the The Greater New York Chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries 2014 Symposium, taking place December 4, 2014. This year’s symposium title is “The Academic Librarian in the Open Access Future” and it “will consider new opportunities and real challenges for academic librarians as the movement toward open access (OA) begins to impact our users and our institutions in increasingly complex ways”.

Finally, if you are a developer looking for ways to contribute to the open access community, the Open Access Button is looking for volunteers to work on some cool improvements.