Open Access

The topic for Tuesday's class was Open Access and Institutional Repositories. One of the advantages of doing this particular module is that I have started to read extensively on these topics. It has also deepened my understanding of the Open Access movement.

Open Access refers to  unrestricted, free, online access to scholarly material. It is seen as a way of improving the supply of scholarly publications, since closed access to scholarly materials is available only to those whose institutions can pay for it.

The demand for  open access has grown rapidly with the rapid pace of internet adoption and development and the movement gained momentum in South Africa in 2010. South Africa adopted O.A. practices by means of the development of Institutional Repositories (I.R). Institutional repositories are digital collections of the research outputs at a university, eg. SUNScholar at Stellenbosch University.  It preserves and  makes the institution's intellectual capital accessible while at the same time it becomes part of a global system of scholarly publishing.

The Open Access Movement removes barriers to academic literature and offers opportunities to participate in the wider research and teaching community, and in doing so, reducing the digital divide.

Published by Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen

Achieving Open Access is however not easy. Bjork (2004) discussed the barriers to open access in  "Open Access–Are the Barriers to Change Receding".

This quote by Bjork (2004) sums up the movement to open access perfectly: 

"Trying  to  get  researchers  to  support  the  move  towards  open  access,  which  most agree  would be  good  for  the  advancement  of  science  in  principle,  is  like  trying to get people to behave in a more ecological  way.  While most  people  recognize the need to save energy and recycle waste, it takes more than just awareness to get them to change their habits on a large scale. It takes a combination of measures of many different kinds, such as, technical waste, disposal infrastructure, legislation and taxation to get massive behavioral changes underway."

Looking forward to this afternoon's presentation on Digital Libraries & Heritage Sites by Prof Hussein Suleman of the UCT Department of Computer Science.