In September, Ethiopia adopted a national open access policy for higher education institutions. In a guest blog on the EIFL website, Dr Solomon Mekonnen Tekle, librarian at Addis Ababa University Library, organiser of the Open Knowledge Ethiopia group and EIFL Open Access Coordinator in Ethiopia, celebrates the adoption of the policy. This is a repost […]
The following blog post is an adaptation of a talk given at the OpenCon 2018 satellite event hosted at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Slides for the talk can be found here. When I started medical school, I had no idea what Open Access was, what subscriptions were and how they would […]
In light of this year’s Open Access week, Michele Marchetto of Wikimedia Italia shares the story of how they helped authors to make their open access articles more widely available. This post has been cross-posted from Wikimedia Italia. Wikipedia is probably the most effective initiative in the world to increase the readership of academic literature: for instance, wikipedia.org […]
Scholarly communication has undergone a seismic shift away from closed publishing towards an ever-growing support for open access. With closed publishing models, academic libraries faced a so-called “serials crisis” and were not able to afford the materials they needed for their researchers and students. Partly in response to this problem, open access advocates have argued […]
During the past 2,5 years Open Knowledge has been a partner in PASTEUR4OA, a project focused on aligning open access policies for European Union research. As part of the work, a series of advocacy resources was produced that can be used by stakeholders to promote the development and reinforcement of such open access policies. The final two briefing papers, written […]
If you are interested in Open Access and Open Data and haven’t hear about ContentMine yet then you are missing out! Graham Steel, ContentMine Community Manager, has written a post for us introducing this exciting new tool. ContentMine aims to liberate 100,000,000 facts from the scientific literature. We believe that “The Right to Read is […]
Applications to attend OpenCon 2015 are now open. OpenCon 2015 is the student and early career academic professional conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data and will be held on November 14-16, 2015 in Brussels, Belgium. It is organized by the Right to Research Coalition, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), […]
This blog post is cross-posted from the Open Access Working Group blog. Details of OpenCon 2015 have just been announced! OpenCon2015: Empowering the Next Generation to Advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data will take place in on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium and bring together students and early career academic professionals from across […]
France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers. While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the Ministry of Research has decided, under great secrecy, to pay EUR 172 million to the world leader in scientific publishing Elsevier […]
Following last week’s Open Access Week blog series, we continue our celebration of community efforts in this field. Today we give the microphone to Dr. Salua Nassabay from Open Knowledge Ireland in a great account from Ireland, originally posted on the Open Knowledge Ireland blog. In Ireland, awareness of OA has increased within the research […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. It is written by Celya Gruson-Daniel from Open Knowledge France and reports from “Open Access Xsprint”, a creative workshop held on October 20 in the biohackerspace La Paillasse in Paris – as announced […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. It is written by Miguel Said from Open Knowledge Brazil and is a translated version of the original that can be found the Brazilian Open Science Working Group's blog. Nature Publishing Group reported […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. Open Access Week was celebrated for the first time in Nepal for the opening 2 days: October 20, 21. The event, which was led by newly founded Open Access Nepal, and supported by […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. Despite the huge amounts of public money spent on allowing researchers to access the published results of taxpayer funded research [1], there is little fiscal transparency in the scholarly publishing market and frequent […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. It is written by Alma Swan, Director of Key Perspectives Ltd, Director of Advocacy forSPARC Europe, and Convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship. Whither the humanities in a world moving inexorably to open values […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. Push Button. Get Research. Make Progress. If you are reading this, I’m guessing that you too are a student, researcher, innovator, an everyday citizen with questions to answer, or just a friend to […]
This post is part of our Open Access Week blog series to highlight great work in Open Access communities around the world. To coincide with Open Access Week, Open Knowledge is launching a new initiative focusing on the future of open access in the humanities and social sciences. The Future of Scholarship project aims to […]
This week is Open Access Week all around the world, and from Open Knowledge’s side we are following up on last year’s tradition by putting together a blog post series to highlight great Open Access projects and activities in communities around the world. Every day this week will feature new writers and activities. Open Access […]
This is a post put together based on great contributions on the blogs of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Adi Kamdar & Maira Sutton), Creative Commons (Timothy Vollmer) and the Open Access Button project (David Carroll). Join the global Open Access movement! In July the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote about the predicament that Colombian student […]
At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]
Last month we asked the Open knowledge community to start sharing more details about the events we all run, to discover how many people are rocking Open Knowledge events all around the world! The community has been great at responding the call and now we’re glad to feature some of the April events we got […]
We’re excited to share with you a few upcoming Community Sessions from the School of Data, CKAN, Open Knowledge Brazil, and Open Access. As we mentioned earlier this week, we aim to connect you to each other. Join us for the following events! What is a Community Session: These online events can be in a […]
This is a guest post by Ranjit Goswami, Dean (Academics) and (Officiating) Director of Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Nagpur, India. Ranjit also volunteers as one of the Indian Country Editors for the Open Data Census. Developing nations, more so India, increasingly face a challenge in prioritizing its goals. One thing that increasingly becomes relevant […]
This post is a guest post by Michelle Brook and Tom Olijhoek from the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Access Working Group. This week has been proclaimed Copyright week by the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and today, Wednesday Jan 15, is Open Access Day 2014. It is almost exactly 1 year ago that Aaron Swartz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz) […]
This guest blog post has been written by Marc Joffe, of Public Sector Credit Solutions. Open government data is valuable only to the extent that it can be used cost-effectively. When governments provide “open data” in the form of voluminous PDFs they offer the appearance of openness without its benefits. In this situation, the open […]
Happy Open Access Week! Open Access week is a global event, celebrating open access. Taking place in the last full week of October every year, there are many events taking place online and offline which bring together people who care about Open Access, and provide opportunity to spread the good word. There’s a lot going […]
The European Commission held a public consultation on open access to research data on July 2 in Brussels inviting statements from researchers, industry, funders, IT and data centre professionals, publishers and libraries. The inputs of these stakeholders will play some role in revising the Commission’s policy and are particularly important for the ongoing negotiations on […]
Here at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we know Open Science is tough, but ultimately rewarding. It requires courage & leadership to take the open path in science. Nearly a week ago on the open-science mailing list we started putting together a list of established scientists who have in some way or another made significant contributions […]
Recently Science Europe published a clear and concise position statement titled: Principles on the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications This is an extremely timely & important document that clarifies what governments and research funders should expect during the transition to open access. Unlike the recent US OSTP public access policy which allows publishers […]
The OKF Open Research Data Handbook – a collaborative and volunteer-led guide to Open Research Data practices – is beginning to take shape and we need you! We’re looking for case studies showing benefits from open research data: either researchers who have personal stories to share or people with relevant expertise willing to write short […]
On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will “accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits […]
Earlier this week the Guardian and the BBC reported on a landmark ruling in India which will hopefully pave the way for greater access to lifesaving generic drugs in developing countries. The Indian supreme court has rejected a new patent on a “slightly altered” version of Glivec, a cancer treatment drug developed by the pharmaceutical […]
Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, gave a talk earlier this week renewing the EU’s strong, principled support for open science. Speaking at the launch of a new global Research Data Alliance, she said that we are entering a new “era of open science”, which will be “good for […]
We’re really pleased by this week’s announcement from the Society of Cultural Anthropology that their influential journal, Cultural Anthropology will become open access by next year. The plan is that from the first issue of 2014, the journal will be available online globally under an open access license, along with 10 years’ worth of the […]
On Friday 22nd February, 2013 the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a statement to say that the “Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for”. This was accompanied by a new policy memorandum and a long-awaited response by OSTP […]
On February 15-16 we are updating the Open Research Data Handbook to include more detail on sharing research data from scientific work, and to remix the book for different disciplines and settings. We’re doing this through an open book sprint. The sprint will happen at the Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London EC2A 4JE. […]
Hot on the heels of the recent House of Lords inquiry, there is also a separate Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee inquiry into the new Research Councils UK open access mandate focusing on economic aspects. There were only 70 or so written evidence submissions to the House of Lords inquiry and few were from active researchers. Other […]
This blog post is written by Esther Hoorn, Copyright Librarian, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. It is cross-posted from the Open Economics Blog. If Roald Dahl were still alive, he would certainly be tempted to write a book about the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. For not only did he make up the research data […]
The first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the […]
The following post was originally published on Alex Leavitt’s website. Fed Up I have been a PhD student for less than two years. On the other hand, for six years, I have been a member of the free culture movement, which emphasizes the importance of access to and openness of technology and information. Recently, […]
News just in that Boundless, the open source digital textbook provider, is releasing all of its 18 open source textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license. We covered the progress of this brilliant initiative mid-way through last year. Boundless leverages open content on the web, whether that’s information on Wikipedia or digital copies […]
Last week Tim Gowers, Cambridge University mathematician and open access advocate who led the recent boycott of Elsevier, announced an exciting new open access initiative for mathematicians on his blog. The project, called the Episciences Project, will make it super quick and easy to set up open access journals called “epijournals”. Epijournals are electronic journals […]
This month, the House of Lords science committee is hearing evidence on the likely effects of the new Research Councils UK (RCUK) Open Access policy that will come into force in April this year for all RCUK-funded researchers. The UK, and many other countries around the world are making this bold move to allow everyone […]
Aaron Swartz, coder, writer, archivist and activist, took his own life in New York on Friday. Aaron worked tirelessly to open up and maximise the societal impact of information in three areas which are central to our work at the Foundation: public domain cultural works, public sector information, and open access to publicly funded research. […]
Earlier today we received a strange and intriguing press release from a certain ‘Marmaduke Robida’ claiming to be ‘Director for Public Domain Content’ at Gale Cengage’s UK premises in Andover. Said the press release: Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is thrilled to announce that all its public domain content will be freely accessible on the […]
You can follow all the goings-on today and tomorrow through the live stream. On 17-18 December, economics and law professors, data publishers, practitioners and representatives from international institutions will gather at Emmanuel College, Cambridge for the First Open Economics International Workshop. From showcasing the examples of successes in collaborative economic research and open data to […]
Horizon 2020 is the EU’s proposed new programme for research and innovation, which would run from 2014 to 2020. The programme would create an “Innovation Union” with a budget of €80million, bringing together current research and innovation funding available through a number of sources. On 28th November MEPs are set to vote on the proposals, […]
The BMJ Open Data Campaign has been attracting a lot of attention. Here Dr Tom Jefferson, one of the people whose attempts to provide reliable information on the anti-flu drug Tamiflu kicked the campaign off, tells the story of how we got here. We started working on a Cochrane review of neuraminidase inhibitors in 1998. […]
“The big problem in economics is that it really matters in which journals you publish, so the reputation factor is a big hindrance in getting open access journals up and going”. Can the accepted norms of scholarly publishing be successfully challenged? This quotation is a line from the correspondence about writing this blogpost for the […]
This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog Ever since BioMed Central (BMC) published its first free online article on July 19th 2000, the Open Access movement has made significant progress, so much so that many different stakeholders now see 100% Open Access to research as inevitable in the near future. Some are […]
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