Open Access Week 2017

The International Open Access Week is held annually to celebrate and further promote the principles of the open access movement. Local events and online activities are organized by a variety of organizations, including universities, publishers and societies. This year’s theme is “Open in order to…”, which asks us to think about the concrete benefits of making research available open access. These benefits may include reaching a wider audience (which may include non-academics), boosting the academic and societal impact of scholarly work, and making it more likely that research findings are adopted in to policy and practice.

Image: openaccessweek.com, available under a CC BY 4.0 license

To help celebrate Open Access Week 2017 (23-29th October), the Library’s Research Publication Team invite you to participate in a variety of online and in-person events. There will also be plenty going on around London, so be sure to follow the #OAWeek hashtag on Twitter.

 

Film Screening: The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz 

The Internet’s Own Boy presents the life of Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer, writer and activist who campaigned for a free and open internet. This film is particularly pertinent in its exploration of access to information, as Swartz was indicted by US courts on various charges relating to accessing scholarly articles. It features interviews with key figures and colleagues, as well as his friends and family, telling the story of his work, campaigns and legal battles up to the end of his life at age twenty-six.

The film will be shown between 12-2pm in the John Snow Lecture Theatre (Keppel St.) on Friday 27th October. All welcome. Please register here: bit.ly/2xW8iiX

 

Competition: Emoji Your OA Research 

To help celebrate Open Access Week, we are running a competition to find the best emoji-based tweet about open access LSHTM research. To have a chance of winning a £25 Amazon.co.uk voucher, tweet a summary of your research only using emojis. See more details and rules here.

 

Open Access Drop-In 

Members of the Research Publications Team and the Research Data Manager will be available in the Dean’s Office in the Faculty of Public Health and Policy, Tavistock Place, between 10am-12pm on Tuesday 24th.

We will be available to answer any questions about open access and open data, including securing funding for open access fees (“gold open access), and how to make your work open access if you do not have funding available (“green” open access). We will also be able to provide information on related issues like promoting your research online and ORCID.

 

Marketplace Stand 

During the LSHTM new staff induction day on Thursday 26th between 1.45pm-2.45pm in the South Courtyard, Keppel Street, members of the Research Publications Team will be able to answer questions on open access for new staff.

 

Blog and Twitter 

Visit our blog during International Open Access Week to read a range of views from the Research Publication Team and others on the various benefits and impacts of open access. We will explain how open can help you to better promote your own research, improve the scientific process, and better research non-academic audiences. We will also present some of our favourite tools and resources to help promote and disseminate your open access work.

Universities, research organisations and publishers around London tend to hold free-to-attend events during open access week. So also visit our Twitter (@LSHTMopenaccess), where we will retweet some of the international goings-on, as well as local events and news you may be interested in.