This year’s International Open Access Week takes place from 24–30 October, and the theme is Open For Climate Justice.
This year’s theme seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.
12 Month Highlights
At Imperial College London, we provide advice and guidance on an ever more rapidly changing open access landscape. The last 12 months have seen:
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- the successful results of our REF 2021 submission. A significant proportion of published research was made available on open access as a result of the 2018 REF OA policy to deposit the manuscript within 3 months of acceptance into a repository.
- the start of a new UKRI open access policy from 1 April 2022 which requires immediate open access, without any embargo, under an open licence which applies to peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022. We created a UKRI Open Access Policy YouTube video to explain the workflow.
- the start of a new NIHR open access policy from 1 April 2022 which requires immediate open access, without any embargo under, an open licence which applies to peer-reviewed research articles submitted for publication on or after 1 April 2022
- for published research that is funded by UKRI, Wellcome Trust, NIHR, and Horizon Europe a new Rights Retention Statement requirement on submissions “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising”
- the increase to 33 of new publisher agreements and discounts, many of which cover open access fees in full for Imperial corresponding authors. This includes a three-year agreement with Elsevier the largest publisher of Imperial research
- the Library’s support for several publishing initiatives within Jisc’s open access community framework (OACF) 2022-24 which aims to provide financial support for innovative open access content models
- our first ever training session for all researchers new to Imperial covering open access and research data management (RDM)
- the launch of an open research education for doctoral students webpage that includes a roadmap for open research courses and support
OA Week 22 Activities
The upcoming Open Access Week will allow us to announce several initiatives and news items relevant to Imperial researchers and the wider community.
They will include the following:
- daily tweets and Yammer posts highlighting statistics on OA and climate justice related publications held in Spiral using the hashtags #OpenAccessWeek #OAWeek2022 and this year’s theme is #OpenForClimateJustice.
- the launch of a new journal search tool for open access publisher agreements
- a revamped publisher agreements and discounts webpage, which has also been reformatted to ease navigation as the number of agreements grows
- a blog post on Transformative Agreements that we have signed with publishers and includes statistics on the number of papers published
- a blog post on UK negotiations with the publisher Springer Nature written by our Director of Library Services, Chris Banks
- a blog post on the Imperial Open Access Fund and how many publications we support
In the meantime, for open access advice, guidance and updates, email openaccess@imperial.ac.uk or visit the open access website. You can also request a one to one either via Teams or in person, or a training session for your group or team. You can also sign up to the Imperial Open Research Newsletter (requires an Imperial email address), and follow us on Twitter at @OAImperial and Yammer at Open Access publishing – LI.