Open Access Week 2016: A Drumbeat for ‘Open In Action’

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Today kicks off Open Access Week 2016. Open Access Week is an annual week-long event that highlights the importance of sharing scientific and scholarly research and data. Its goal is to educate people on the benefits of open publishing, advocate for changes to policy and practice, and build a community to collaborate on these issues. This year’s theme is open in action.

For nearly 15 years, Creative Commons licenses and legal tools have been used to share scholarly articles and data on more open terms than the standard “all rights reserved” copyright. In addition to the legal machinery that helps communicate the rights to use and reuse open access research, the movement around Creative Commons and open access has spread through academia, libraries, science, education, and public policy.

What’s been going on in Open Access over the last year? Here’s a just a brief sampling:

  • The European Union continues to push ahead in support of open science, and the Commission wants scientific data to be ‘open by default’ as a requirement for future research grants.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation launched the Reclaim Invention project to push for reforms in university technology transfer practices. CC is supporting the project as natural complement to related open access and open education initiatives in higher education.
  • OASPA showed increasing growth of fully open access journals, and released an informative guide on best practices in licensing and attribution.
  • More research was published that showed that publishing under open access can help researchers succeed by increasing citations and media attention, inviting potential collaborators, and opening the door to future job and funding opportunities.

Be sure to check out openaccessweek.org for more information on this week’s campaign, and make a commitment to put ‘open in action’.

Follow along with the Creative Commons blog, Twitter, and Facebook this week, and be sure to tag and share your posts with the #OAweek hashtag. We’ll be supporting Open Access Week with posts, interviews, and other activities.

Here we go!