OA Week success continues

While much of our International Open Access Week activities have concluded here in Oz, our New Zealand cousins are continuing through November with more activities and advocacy.  This year’s theme of Open for Whom?  Equity in Open Knowledge has been the focus of many university activities with guest lectures, roadshows, workshops, and the creation of resources for academics and researchers the chief ways of getting the Open = Equity message across.

In October, Tohatoha launched a campaign for greater openness, sharing, and equity in the digital world, including open access and open reuse of government, scholarly, and scientific knowledge.  CEO Mandy Henk presented at the annual internet community talkfest NetHui, and spoke on Radio NZ’s afternoon program, and this week she spread the good OA word on 95bFM about democratising our digital world.  This was a great complement to the OA work of CONZUL.  Massey University live streamed a presentation:  Open Knowledge mātauranga Māori: contradictory or consistent and  the University of Otago ran a series of blogs around citation advantage for open access articles,  and the importance of depositing manuscripts in open repositories.

Some of our favourite activities in Oz have been the commissioned chalk art work by Armidale artist Nadia Waters at the University of New England (UNE) library, and its race to 100 challenge to get 100 new Open Access outputs into its RUNE repository during October.  University of Western Australia got on its bike with a pedal-powered tour with stops around campus everyday with OA giveaways.   Southern Cross University library ran a panel on Access and Indigenous Knowledge.  QUT and the University of Newcastle each ran a series of “Five things about Open Access” blogs.   La Trobe University ran a series of events, including a tweet chat on OA and activism. Charles Sturt and Flinders ran Open Access workshops for staff and researchers.  James Cook University created two great videos of academics advocating for Open Access.