Your wish list for Open Access Week

On February 22 SPARC organized a webcast "The (OA)Week ahead: Getting started on Open Access Week 2011 - How to deepen faculty engagement on your campus". Heather Joseph and Jennifer McLennan, representing the OA Week organizing coalition (SPARC), presented participant feedback from last year and invited suggestions on how to take the Week to yet another level in 2011.

OA Week is organized to raise awareness, celebrate the progress, share experiences and inspire wider participation. Open access is the free, immediate, online access to the results of research, coupled with the right to use those results in new and innovative ways. And this year's focus is on how does open access facilitate/enhance the conduct and communication of science and scholarship?

The OA Week organisers encouraged exploring open access impact on

• Generation of results
• Generation/sharing of articles (and/or books and other text/packets), etc.
• Generation of nontraditional outputs/cultural heritage objects, etc.
• Translation into the teaching/learning process
• The communication of the above material/information to the public
• The interaction of the public with this material
• The creation of innovative opportunities for new science/scholarship, new businesses.

In 2010, OA Week was the largest and most successful yet. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, a lot of enthusiasm, creativity and innovation the last year's event was no less than three times larger than it was just a year before. 

What worked well last year and some lessons learnt (from the results of the last year's participant survey):

• Start planning and publicising early.
• Free webinars, podcasts, and videos made it easier for small institutions without a lot of staff to participate.
• A panel discussion with scientists was successful, as well as handing out the SPARC author addendum.
• One campus has an ongoing activity of collecting and posting 'OA stories' on its Web site.
• Hosting a debate on key questions attracts a lot of attentions.
• Tying to actions works well. The week was used to leverage the announcement of open access policies and new initiatives, such as an open access to University Press titles.
• Among remarkable examples of national activities: Bozena Bednarek-Michalska, Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Torun and EIFL-OA country coordinator in Poland, interviewed Under Secretary of State, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education Professor Maciej Banach (in Polish language, available online here). In the Czech Republic, librarians collaborated on making a national open-access web Open Access in CZ.

What to avoid:

• Last minute rush, late marketing.
• Perhaps better to have one event with a good turnout than a few smaller ones.

Visions for the OA Week ahead:

• Go for high-level support: more buy-in from library administrators and "peer pressure".
• Focus on the right message: move educational events to next step, how to incorporate in to day-to-day work.
• Be in the right place: meet researchers in their labs, rather than asking them to come to the library; target more specific populations: individual departments, faculty, and administrators; schedule sessions at larger faculty training events; hold more low key, one-to-one sessions rather than larger events; move information booth from the campus libraries into the colleges.
• Develop partnerships: build alliance with national associations of faculty members, higher education institutions, research institutes, and funding agencies.
• Focus on action: include awareness on open access in library orientation programs; have a faculty declaration that publications should be open access unless the individual opts out; sign Berlin declaration and prepare article about why it's important.
• Promote: make videos of researchers supporting open access; look for and celebrate local champions; celebrate local open access leadership, say thank you to local OA champions, self-archiving authors, OA journal publishers, librarians, too; have a party!

We will be happy to assist you in your preparations to OA Week 2011.

Just let us know what is your wish list!