Open Access Week 2019

This year’s Open Access Week runs from 21-27 October under the theme “Open for whom? Equity in Open Knowledge”. This is a direct follow up on last year’s theme “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge” and an invitation to deepen our conversations about inculsivity and to turn those conversations into action.

The pace of the transition to new forms of sharing knowledge accelerates: in 2019 alone there were more than 22,000 outputs uploaded to UCL Discovery, UCL’s institutional repository, contribution to the total of 83,000 outputs in the repository. Also this year UCL Discovery reached the milestone of 20 million downloads, while UCL Press, the UK’s first fully open access university press, reached 2 million downloads. This is a lot to celebrate, but also it is a good moment to consider this year’s theme, to think about strategies for opening knowledge and widening participation in research communication.

Follow #OAweek on Twitter to find out what UCL and other institutions are doing to celebrate this year’s Open Access Week. You can also attend one of the events that we’re running for UCL staff and students during the week:

Open access: a brief introduction

Start: Oct 22, 2019 12:15
End: Oct 22, 2019 12:45

Location: Science Library, room 106

This is an introductory session on open access, addressed mainly to UCL students. The session will introduce available options for making research outputs open access, and explain differences between different routes to open access. It will also provide an overview of open access services at UCL. Booking is available here.

Open publishing: sharing results and ideas

Start: Oct 23, 2019 14:00 
End: Oct 23, 2019 15:00

Location: Darwin Building, B05

Open science approaches are bringing major changes to scholarly communication, not only changing the process by which research is published, but what form it is published in, and what type of material is made available. The aim of this session is to introduce researchers to the various elements of open scholarly communication, helping them make more informed decisions about what to publish, how to go about it, and where to do so.

Further details and registration available here.

The Work of the Open Access Team – training session for library staff

Start: Oct 24, 2019 14:00 
End: Oct 24, 2019 15:30

Location: Science Library, room 417

This training session is for UCL Library staff who would like to find out more about work of the Open Access Team, open access in general, the REF open access policy, and the newest developments in scholarly communication. The session will explain research funders’ open access policies, the REF open access policy and how the Open Access Team helps UCL authors to comply with funders’ and REF requirements. The session will describe the work of the team and will take you through the team’s daily and weekly tasks.

If you would like to book contact the Library HR Team.

RPS and the REF open access policy training session

Start: Oct 24, 2019 11:00 
End: Oct 24, 2019 12:00

Fully booked – contact UCL’s Open Access Team for November dates.

Location: Malet Place Engineering Building, room 1.20

This training session will explain the REF open access policy and what to do to comply with its requirements. Using RPS, we will show you how to:

• set up name-based search settings
• use all the advantages of RPS’s automated claiming tool (including linking RPS to your ORCID ID)
• record a publication
• upload a file

This session will be a good opportunity to ask questions about RPS and the REF open access policy.

We’ll also be running some sessions about Plan S in departments. Get in touch if you’d like to know more about them, or to arrange a talk or discussion in your department.