Meeting considers how open access could address inequalities - Research Information

"In most previous years, the annual meeting of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association has taken place in Eastern Europe. This year, however, the meeting moved west and was hosted at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in mid September. On the one hand, the collaboration with UNESCO is an indication of how far open-access publishing has come. Several of the contributions at the meeting also demonstrated where progress has been made, as well as the prospects for more radical developments in scholarly communication. But, lest we rest on our laurels, attendees were also given a wake-up call that there’s still a long way to go. The international dimension of open-access publishing, and its role in the post-2015 global development agenda, was highlighted in the opening remarks from Getachew Engida, deputy director general of UNESCO, and Indrajit Banerjee, director of UNESCO’s Knowledge Societies Division, who also emphasised UNESCO’s strong and growing commitment to open access. This theme was developed by Abel Packer of SciELO, who summarised the achievements of the SciELO journals platform in Latin America, where open access has reached impressive levels. For example, 27 per cent of Latin American articles indexed in Scopus are open access. Also at the meeting, Dominique Babini of CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences), Pierre de Villiers of AOSIS (African Online Scientific Information Systems Ltd) and Alwaleed Alkhaja of QScience covered developments in Argentina, South Africa and the Middle East & North Africa respectively.  The range of talks and geographical locations emphasised the diversity of approaches that exist in helping to open up scholarly communication. However, it also identified some of the toughest challenges to progress ..."