Friday, October 24, 2014

uO Research is a leader in Open Access


This year is the 8th edition of the International Open Access week. This global event is celebrated each year with the goal of sharing, learning and inspiring others on how to make information more open and accessible. The term Open Access was first introduced a decade ago from the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which brought together existing projects. 

After ten years of experience, the BOAI has reaffirmed its definition:

By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

The University of Ottawa is this year celebrating its 5th Open Access Week. Much has been done at the University with regards to Open Access, such as the creation of uO Research. This open access digital repository of research and teaching materials allows users to search materials published by the University of Ottawa community and its affiliated partners.

When looking at communities, sub-communities and collections, users can search for published materials by specific research area. For example, users looking in the Geography sub-community within the Faculty of Arts can find recent submissions to the system that relate to that general field of research. Users also have the option of narrowing down their search by a more specific subject, author and/or year.  The system then allows users to download the file(s) for each specific article. At the present time, there are only minimal entries within this sub-community, but I suspect as time passes many more entries will be added, making this an abundant open access portal that will proudly showcase faculty research at the University of Ottawa.