End Of the Year Open Access Highlights – Personal Selection

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” However, Open Access initiatives which have distanced themselves “from the said beginning”, although the year is nearly coming to an end, do not tend to stop, and the OA community is very optimistic about what to expect in 2011.  In order to summarize in a numbered list from 1 to 10, what has been the cream of the crop for the year’s OA harvest, I have made a selection of what I have been discussing on this blog.

The chart obtained from: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/11/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-brief.html

One. Dramatic growth of Open Access journals. 5,864 journals are listed in DOAJ to date with more than 1,300 titles added over the past year at an annual growth rate of 30%. More than 22% of the world’s peer-reviewed journals are now open access journals.

Two. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research has joined COPE and the CERN library has released its book catalog comprised of more than 20 million bibliographic records into the Public Domain via the Creative Commons Zero license.

Three. 16 new Open Access mandates were adopted during the Open Access Week 2010.  This was the most fruitful and most successful OA Week celebrated so far.

Four. Alma Swan and Leslie Chan from OASIS announced the launching of the Open Access Map which will include all Open Access projects, services and initiatives. All of the content will be made available by CC licence at http://openaccessmap.org/.

Five. The British Library released nearly 3 million bibliographic records into the Public Domain using the Creative Commons Zero license. The ongoing Growing Knowledge exhibition at the library presents the tools which will be available to actually use the available data.

Six. Canada’s Simon Fraser University signed up to COPE. The university’s library is a partner to the larger Public Knowledge Project which should enable Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Conference Systems (OCS), Open Harvester Systems (OHS) and soon, the Open Monograph Press (OMP).

Seven. The Stellenbosch University became the first African university to sign the Berlin Declaration of Open Access to Knowledge. The University designed Africa’s first microsatellite, SUNSAT, and today, ‘Maties’ are the proud users of SUNScholar, a freely accessible electronic archive for the collection and distribution of the university’s material.

Eight. JINR became the first organization in Russia to pledge financial support to the SCOAP3 project, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. There are 7 Laboratories at JINR, by the scope of scientific activities each being compatible with a large research institution. JINR’s staff totals about 5,000 people, including more than 1,200 scientists, 2,000 engineers and technicians.

Nine. Ireland’s oldest, and consistently ranked as its best, Trinity College provides Open Access to its research. Journal articles, TCD research theses, peer-reviewed conference papers, reports and working papers, photographs, videos, dissertations, and other intellectual property in digital form will be deposited in TARA, Trinity’s digital repository, with more than 12,000 items already freely available.

Ten. The High-Level Group composed of twelve top-level European experts in different fields of science released a document “Riding the Wave: How Europe Can Gain from the Rising Tide of Scientific Data”, which is the result of six months of intense brainstorming and consultations with experts around the world to prepare a “Vision 2030″ for Scientific Data e-Infrastructures. The focus of the paper and the group is on scientific data and the emerging field of data scientists, since the very nature of research is starting to change.