Open Access Week 2011


Yesterday was the last day of this year’s Open Access (OA) Week.  A very nice “summary” of the history of OA by Tom Olijhoek is available on the http://www.openaccessweek.org site.  As a five years old initiative, I think it was great to hear about the number of activities -from conferences, workshops to twitter entries- that took place in hundreds of institutions from dozens of countries in the past seven days … perhaps one of the most significant (related) events is the upcoming 9th Berlin Open Access conference –to be held for the first time in America.

OA-at-MULThis year the Scholarly Communication working group at Miami also held an active awareness campaign which highlighted a pop-up image on the library’s homepage with the traditional OA Lock and the message “What if you had no access to the library?” Other activities included five blog posts on OA on the library’s News & Notes section, as well was the distribution of flyers on campus with links to the Scholarly Commons and the Scholars at Miami sites.

A quick look at the Directory of Open Access Journals, it appears that the top 20 countries remain to be almost the same as to what it was last year.  A couple of interesting changes include: Egypt was one of the only three countries that added/registered more than 100 journals in 2011; Iran is now in slot # 17 with a total of 113 journals; and (too bad) now there are only 5 Spanish speaking countries in the top list.
DOAJ - 2011
http://www.doaj.org/

Last but not least, as part of an upcoming “project” … in the last couple of weeks, I’ve reading some tutorials about Open Journal Systems  -which seems to be one of the most popular options out there –especially for “peer-reviewed” journals.  But just as I finish with this post, a new alternative has been published in the Code4Lib Journal Open Access Publishing with Drupal … anyway, I guess different choices for different needs :-)

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