Open Access Week 2015: A Roundup

2nd November 2015

It’s just over a week since International Open Access Week 2015 ended, and we’ve seen some tremendous enthusiasm for the OA movement from voices around the world. Spirited evangelism, sharp analysis, and dissenting criticism were all present in the debate that crowded our inboxes and social streams. Here’s a small selection of articles and discussions that we enjoyed during the week.

  • A video lecture from Cameron Neylon visiting City University London, arguing that ‘knowledge is not, and never can be, a true public good’: The limits of “open”: Why knowledge is not a public good and what to do about it (text version available here)
  • A blog from 2012 that was tweeted around last week entitled ‘If it’s not online and free, it’s not published’ – a short but passionate polemic on Open Access in the humanities.
  • A short review of the last 15 years from BioMed Central, one of the earliest Open Access publishers.
  • An entertaining, alternative timeline infographic of the history of research publishing from Randall Munroe, author of the XKCD comic, along with a fascinating examination of his What If  blog as a clarifying intermediary between the non-academic public and OA research.
  • An OA-centred ‘ask me anything’ session on Reddit, with PLoS authors answering questions on how “more comprehensive reporting in scientific research can lead to more study replication, stronger statistical methods, and improvements to scientific standards, all of which are hallmarks of open access publishing.”
  • A thoughtful piece on the unnecessary complexity of some academic writing, with a nod to OA publishing, in The Atlantic.
  • Storify curation of tweets from ORCiD’s involvement in Open Access Week 2015

Our own contribution to the celebrations was the Open Access Timeline. This interactive page shows an exhaustive history of the Open Access movement, with key dates and events from the 1970s to the present day. We enjoyed putting it together and hope you like it.

We look forward to seeing how things have changed in a year’s time. See you then for Open Access Week 2016!