8/28/2013
Concept paper
Sustainable infrastructure for scientific communication – global and
local perspectives on open access
Open access-workshop
During 2014 a three-parted workshop, involving two steps, will be conducted in collaboration between
the SLU University Library and Makerere University. The overarching theme of the workshop is Open
Access (OA).
The aim is to contribute to – and develop knowledge and skills about OA. The workshop will be about
OA both as a phenomenon and how OA initiatives change the landscape of scholarly communication and
the consequences for researchers and the library.
Depending on the participants (doctoral students, researcher’s librarians, and administrative staff)
different roles in the scientific communication the workshop will be on different perspectives on OA:
1. Open Access and the researcher
2. Open Access and the library
3. Open Access and the scientific communication
Within this three-parted thematic frame work there will be an exchange of experiences and knowledge
to drive the development towards a sustainable infrastructure for scientific communication. A more
detailed content will be worked out together with the Makerere University.
The planned workshop will be open to participants from other universities (see step 2 below), provided
that they have their own funding for accommodation and living expenses. One aim with the workshop is
to network and to build long-term collaboration opportunities. A recently finalized EU project VOA3R
(Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository. Sharing Scientific and Scholarly Research),
has created a digital platform that harvests open access resources from open archive in the field of
agriculture, aquaculture and environmental research. The opportunity for Makerere University and
other African universities to deliver data to this portal will be examined as part of this workshop (Open
Access and the library) and can help to visualize the effect of open access for researchers and at the
same time contribute to a long-term networking.
Together, these three themes help provide common goals for how the OA will continue to evolve to
support research collaborations, networking and infrastructure, both locally and globally.
Global and Local perspectives on Open Access
Preliminary themes in the three-parted workshop:
Open Access and the researcher
- Dissemination, Highlighting and Exposing Research
- Researchers' attitudes towards Open Access
-The VOA3R-platform
Open Access and the library
- Contribute to the infrastructure of publishing
- Support and Policy (How to work locally)
- Technical systems and metadata (OAI-PMH, Dublin Core)
Open Access and the scientific communication
- Dataset - Open Access to datasets
- Impact and Metrics
- Infrastructural changes (business models, transparent research processes)
The workshop will be activated in two steps during 2014
The workshop will be conducted in two steps and in connection to when the PhD course Information
retrieval and scientific communication is held.
Step 1: Takes place in order to make it possible to combine with the library's first course (Spring 2014).
Here the themes will be initiated and developed. It is done in collaboration with stakeholders at the
University of Makerere. Miriam Kakai (The East African School of Library and Information Science,
College of Computing and Information Sciences) who is writing a proposal for a PhD can use this forum
for her survey and also report preliminary results from her ongoing study Strategies for Developing Open
access institutional repositories in Ugandan public universities.
This opportunity is therefore primarily intended for SLU and Makerere University to identify local needs
and knowledge around open access and digital university repositories. The results of step one also
generates knowledge about attitudes towards open access, existing infrastructure, publication patterns
and more. In this first step, it is mainly the local perspective and the conditions of open access that is in
focus.
Step 2: Run in combination with the library's second course (Autumn 2014). On this occasion, a larger
invitation made to reach representatives of OA on the African continent and other key stakeholders in
the field of OA. The workshop's three specializations can to some extent be parallel since the themes are
involving different stakeholders. As a result of step 2 the workshop develops knowledge of how the
process of open access changes the requirements of the scientific communication for both the library
and the researcher.
Documentation
Step 1 and 2 will be documented and published in a report.
-----Sincerely
Urban Ericsson, PhD, Senior Librarian
Division: Scholarly communication/Publishing team
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
SLU University Library
PO Box 7071, SE-750 07 Uppsala
Visiting adress: Almas allé 12
Phone: +46 (0)18 67 23 14, +46 (0)705 64 21 99
urban.ericsson@slu.se, www.slu.se