Open Access Week

Academics worldwide will soon be celebrating International Open Access Week, from October 24 to 30. When I first blogged about Open Access in 2012, the movement had been likened to the Arab Spring, having been referred to as an “Academic Spring”. Since then, it has picked up momentum, as can be seen from the Web site of International Open Access Week.

Events are taking place globally in celebration of this movement opposing traditional, commercial publishing. Workshops, presentations, seminars, discussions and conferences are actively promoting Open Access, and a number of Arab countries have become involved over the years, including Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Online groups have formed in celebration - from Egypt to Taiwan, and from Portugal to Tanzania. In Glasgow, Creative Commons UK will be launched as part of the celebratory week, another interesting development.

New terms are gradually being coined to refer to various aspects of the open access movement: gratis open access versus libre open access; gold open access; hybrid open access; delayed open access, etc. I will not bore you with the differences now as some readers may not care and others may find this unnecessarily complicated. For those interested, these concepts may be worth following up.

The Directory of Open Access Journals has a news section where you may read up on the various developments. Currently, for example, it shows an article on the open access strategy in Algeria: academic researchers are involved, and the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research is in favour. Interestingly, the Directory includes the Lebanese Science Journal, published by the National Council for Scientific Research, which was added in July 2016, including articles in English and French, and this journal is not the first. UNESCO notes that the DOAJ indexed a Lebanese journal in 2015, Journal of Numerical Mathematics and Stochastics published by Euclidean Press, and that a few other OA journals are published in Lebanon. Additionally, UNESCO states that the Lebanese Library Association supports the OA movement through a variety of activities that promote it among faculty, students and librarians (Global Open Access Portal). However, UNESCO identifies challenges for the Arab world, including lack of OA journals in Arabic, lack of staff qualified to manage OA databases, insufficient government regulation and donor mandates, and general lack of awareness.