By Morwen Johnson

This week has been Open Access Week – an annual global event which is a chance for the academic and research community to discuss the benefits of Open Access, and inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

We’ve a particular interest in how the open access agenda is evolving. As an information service, one of our aims is to support evidence-based policymaking and increase the availability and uptake of research within practitioner communities. We also have a lot of librarians and information professionals in our research team – so understanding what’s happening in the publishing world is something we follow as part of our own CPD.

With this in mind, here’s the five blogs we’ve seen this week which our team found most interesting …

• Your questions answered on Open Access

The Conversation blog is one of our favourites for pithy, accessible commentary and insight from academics on hot topics. They invited readers to submit questions on Open Access and this blog article gives a great intro to some of the key issues.

• Open for Collaboration

In the UK, JISC is one of the main organisations driving the response by higher education to the Open Access agenda (along with other initiatives such as SHERPA).

They’ve published a few interesting resources this week, including a guest blog from the Coalition for Networked Information looking at progress towards openness in scholarship and research around the world. It reminds us that “The movement towards openness is about much more than publishing. It includes being open about methods, tools, software, and data.”

• When sharing isn’t as open as it might seem

Another favourite blog of ours is LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog. The article “What does Academia.edu’s success mean for Open Access? The data-driven world of search engines and social networking” looks at the rise of research sharing platforms. The author, Professor Gary Hall from Coventry University argues that “posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository”.

• Research use by parliament

This blog by Caroline Kenny The impact of academia on Parliament: 45 % of Parliament-focused impact case studies were from social sciences caught our eye as it ties in nicely with what we try to do at the Knowledge Exchange. (*Don’t get us started on how much public money is spent on evaluations where the findings just sit in a report and never feed back into either policymaking or delivery!)

The use of research within Parliament (for example, in evidence to Select Committees) is good to hear about but academics need to do more to engage different stakeholders.

Another academic exploring this issue is Mark Evans – see his June blog Evidence-Based Policy Making: What Westminster Policy Officers Say They Do and Why for more on this.

• The limits of “open”: Why knowledge is not a public good and what to do about it

Finally if you’ve got a bit more time to spare then this video from the Centre for Information Science at City University features a lecture from Dr Cameron Neylon (Professor of Research Communications at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University).

A couple of quotes which struck us – “As we deepen, and harden, the shared sense of what is excellent work within a discipline, we necessarily fortify precisely those boundaries where the web could bring us into contact with differing conceptions, precisely those that might bring the most benefits.” And we have the opportunity to see “Openness as a process or practice, not a binary state of an object, something to work towards rather than something that we fail at achieving.”

(* As it’s 58 minutes, you may prefer to read the draft transcript available on his own blog.)

---

Follow us on Twitter to see what developments in policy and practice are interesting our research team.