Open Access Week, an international event that is now entering its eighth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
This year Open Access Week was held from 19th October to 25th October 2015, and the theme was “Open for Collaboration”. The theme explores how cooperation and collaboration between the various stakeholder communities helps to advance the Open Access movement and provide new avenues for research between scholars. In line with this theme of “Open for Collaboration”, Singapore institutions and academic libraries (ASTAR, NIE, NRF, NTU, NUS, SMU) worked together to plan a bigger and buzzier OA week, to bring greater awareness of Open Access and its benefits to the research community in Singapore.
To kick off Open Access Week in Nanyang campus, NTU Libraries and NIE Library jointly organised 2 seminars in the Lee Wee Nam Library Seminar Room on 20 and 21 October 2015. The first seminar entitled “Open Access (OA) publishing in quality journals with no fees!” was about Open Access publishing covering topics such as finding self-archiving policies with the use of Sherpa Romeo [http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php], locating Open Access journals via DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), and tips on making their publications more visible and discoverable through Open Access.
The second seminar entitled “Discover and Be Discovered! – Open Access & Your Thesis” focused on Open Access and theses, such as the benefits of making their theses Open Access, finding Open Access theses from other institutions via OATD (Open Access Theses and Dissertations), and preparing their theses to be made Open Access by clearing copyright through automated rights management systems like RightsLink.
Both seminars were well-attended and included hands-on sessions to give participants a chance to work on the scenarios and tools introduced right away. The sessions were lively and interactive, while the participants were forthcoming with their enquiries on Open Access.
In general, the participants for the first seminar were interested in learning how to locate the self-archiving policies on Sherpa Romeo, and using Google Scholar to find Open Access publications that have been indexed from OA institutional repositories in NTU and NIE, which are DR-NTU [https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/] and NIE Digital Repository [https://repository.nie.edu.sg/index.jsp] respectively. Participants in the second seminar were interested in learning how to locate other Open Access theses through OATD, and how to perform copyright clearance for their theses. Their suggestions for future sessions included topics such as an introduction to Creative Commons licenses and how to select high quality Open Access journals for publishing.
Holding these seminars on Open Access has also helped us realise the theme of collaboration as it was a joint effort between NTU Libraries and NIE Library. Through the sharing and discussion with participants, we have been able to learn more about the research needs of our communities and what users sought to know about Open Access. This will help to inform and guide our future efforts at spreading awareness about Open Access throughout Nanyang campus.