Asia Advances Open Access Research | The Huffington Post
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-03-30
Summary:
"While research access is clearly a sought after commodity, the need for open access within Asia is far from a one size fits all solution. 'There are so many differences in the economic situations, budgets of universities, and funding that is available from governments,' says Kostas Repanas, head of the Office of Science Communications & Open Archives at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore. 'I can’t imagine anyone in Singapore saying, ‘I want to access this journal and my university doesn’t subscribe.’ But if you go to a different level: Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, the situation is really completely different.'
Repanas details that there is a decisive effort from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to try to collaborate for broad reaching open accessand adds that BioMed Central drove efforts for an Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference in Thailand in 2014. Working with colleagues from Japan, Repanas and others worked to create the Asia Open Access Summit to serve that region with its first conference in November 2016 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which resulted in an increased awareness and desire for more open scholarship resources.
Although Repanas and Kumar are clearly pulling their respective weights to further promote a conversation of open access toward research, Repanas believes that other nations are doing a better job at circumventing some of the reasons for high price research journals in the first place. "