Open Access Week is from 19 – 25 October this year. Open access to information—the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need—has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, innovation and for society.
To celebrate Open Access Week this year, Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) are running a series of free, online events presented by researchers and OA experts each day between 19 – 23 October, including:
Monday 19 October
Preprints: a practical guide presented by Jessica Polka, co-founder of ASAPbio provides an overview of issues and questions to consider when preparing your manuscript, making decisions about your submission and participating in review of preprints.
Open and FAIR Research Practices with Matthias Liffers will demonstrate practices that enable research to be open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) in line with international best practice.
Tuesday 20 October
Communicating a pandemic with microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles will discuss how important open access to findings is for specialist researchers like herself in a time of crisis, and what it could mean for building greater public trust in science and public health messaging.
Indigenous voices, indigenous research and open access panel discussion brings together Indigenous researchers and specialists and will explore the importance and the significance of open access.
Wednesday 21 October
Beyond open access – what should our aims be for full accessibility? with Alice Motion. Join chemistry researcher and science communicator Associate Professor Alice Motion from the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney for a reflection on the next directions for accessibility and democratisation of research.
Copyright and CC licensing for OA: Workshop presented by Elliot Bledsoe, presenting the practical fundamentals of copyright and Creative Commons as it relates to Open Access.
Thursday 22 October
Open Access and biodiversity knowledge with Siobhan Leachman will explore the wide applications of Open Access principles to research outputs such as data, metadata and images, and how they enable public participation in scientific research.
Connecting open data via Wikidata: Workshop presented by Thomas Shafee. Wikidata is an enormous multidisciplinary, multilingual knowledge base and has become a central hub of the open data ecosystem. Learn the basics of writing for and reading from Wikidata—assuming zero coding knowledge.
Friday 23 October
Open infrastructure with Kaitlin Thaney will speak to some of the critical issues and questions surrounding the open technologies necessary to meet the current demand for openness in research and scholarship.
Open Access advocacy in a pandemic. Join AOASG Director Professor Ginny Barbour and Katya Henry, University Copyright Officer at QUT and Creative Commons Australia Global Network Council Representative, for this workshop on delivering your message in this rapidly changing environment.
For more information and to register for Open Access Week events, visit the Open Access Week 2020 website.
