Open Access Week 2016: Our Stories #OAWeek16

Open Access Week is coming to a close – what a week it’s been! We’ve all been busy celebrating so here are some of our key highlights:

• Kate Byrne, the Repository Platforms Product Manager at Symplectic who is responsible for open access and repository related product development and community engagement, sat down with us and talked all things open access!
• Through the medium of art we encouraged people to think about what open access means to them – what does a world with free access to information look like? Let’s find out together.Our portfolio company at Altmetric released two blog posts highlighting reasons and citing an example why open access is king!

Understanding open access content usage as it occurs written by Dylan Parker, Associate Publisher at BioMed Central, provides a good example of open access content in action.

Stacy Konkiel’s blog post: ‘A Surprisingly Obvious Way to Incentivize Openness in Academia‘ talking about her experiences at the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute, where she had the chance to think through what “humane” metrics (HuMetrics) for the humanities and social sciences might look like.

“I’m starting to see that academia’s been approaching evaluation metrics from the wrong angle: most institutions simply measure what can be easily counted, rather than using carefully chosen data to measure their progress towards embodying important scholarly values.”

The HuMetrics team came up with a list of five core values that they believe are common amongst humanists:

Image CC-BY Nicky Agage / Medium

Overall ‘Open in Action’ has brought some important issues to light! Rather than simply regurgitating the benefits of an open world, let’s start applying what we’ve learnt and practice what we preach.

“There are a lot of opportunities in this conversation but its got to start with a conversation.” Kate Byrne