UNESCO at the Berlin 10 Open Access Conference | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

" ... Scientific information is both a researcher’s greatest output and technological innovation’s most important resource. UNESCO promotes and supports Open Access - the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers - for the benefit of global knowledge flow, innovation and socio-economic development. As part of UNESCO’s Open Access strategy, which supports initiatives that further nurture the concept of Open Access and also put the concept in to practice, UNESCO gave patronage to Berlin 10, which was organized in Stellenbosch University in Western Cape, South Africa from 6 to 9 November 2012. In addition to sponsoring several participants from Africa to participate at the Conference, UNESCO was a part of several pre-conference workshops. With generous funding support to UNESCO in the form of a Japanese-Funds-In-Trust, UNESCO organized a pre-conference training workshop on Open Access publishing using Open Journal Systems (OJS). The training was attended by some 34 individuals from 12 African countries and several other countries around the world. It was based on the rationale that a new paradigm in the publishing arena influences the activities of research institutions to publish scholarly literature via open access forums. Such a publishing paradigm enhances the sharing of scholarly output to the largest possible audience. In this new paradigm, institutions become active partners in the dissemination of scholarly literature through publishing and hosting institutional content in repositories and actively engaging in open access publishing. Libraries in some of the leading research institutions have taken the bold and proactive step of becoming open access publishers and in the process assist researchers to publish their research output using, among other tools, the open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS). This open source software was developed by Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and is being used by academic institutions to publish scholarly content with no costs to the end user...  Another pre-conference workshop, “Open Access Advocacy through Academies of Science and other National Scientific Organisations”, specifically explored the role of UNESCO in the changing context of Open Access. The workshop discussed the experiences of and possibilities for Academies of Science and other national scientific organizations to influence researchers and policy makers in their countries to further the case of optimal sharing of scientific information and enhancing worldwide participation in the scientific endeavour ... "