Open Access Discussion in the Library | Dundalk Institute of Technology

"The Library celebrated Open Access Week on Tuesday October 20th with a panel discussion on how Open Access to information affects local and global development issues. Speaking were Gillian Marmelstein, EU Research Officer, Andrew Clarke from Computer Services, Alec Rolston from Freshwater Studies and Suzanne Linnane from the Water is Life Project. The debate centred on Open Access’ role in promoting community engagement and within academia. One of the reasons we were interested in opening up the debate is the huge gap between the southern and northern hemispheres in terms of research, and how this affects societies in all sorts of ways including health and development. Those who can’t pay huge prices for ‘closed’ high-impact prestigious journals, often in the developing world, are effectively debarred from the current state of research on a topic. This further skews the global research agenda in a world where Africa produces only c. 2% of the world’s research despite having 15% of the world’s population. Suzanne Linnane gave an overview of how the Water is Life project in Uganda specifically addressed this issue through the participation of local researchers and communities and publishing the research output via an OA model. The discussion included the barriers to free access to research output in academia and the need for accelerated Open Access for students and the general public. This led to a debate on how academic quality is determined in the traditional publishing model and the confirmation that it is still very much defined by journal impact factor, citations, and peer review. We looked also at some of the different financial models for open access, Green (through repositories) or Gold (the author pays) and access on demand ..."