We are thrilled to announce that Emma Juniper, the Director of Informit, will be presenting at Open Access Australasia’s free online seminar on Community Control (what is it and why does it matter?) on Tuesday 24 October, as part of this year’s Open Access Week.
Presenting alongside the distinguished Professor John Wilinsky, a long-time advocate for open knowledge and the brain behind the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Juniper will tackle this year’s Open Access Week theme of Community over Commercialisation, through the lens of ‘community control’, emphasising the importance of fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and community-driven approach to academic research accessibility.
Emma Juniper shared her enthusiasm for the event, saying:
“I’m so excited that Informit is participating in Open Access Week for the first time. We believe Informit can play a unique role in helping the Australian academic publishing community navigate the transition to open access over the next few years.”
Open Access Week is an international program of seminars and events that celebrate the achievements of the Open Access movement in its mission to make academic research more widely accessible for all.
As a not-for-profit, university-based research platform, Informit is strongly committed to supporting the goals of open science and open scholarship, and a diverse publishing ecosystem.
Informit provides access to over 700 small to medium publishers, and houses Australia’s largest source of authoritative humanities and social sciences content.
Informit currently hosts over 110 open access journals and 7 books, including some of its most popular titles, demonstrating a commitment to advance the cause of OA. Leveraging our comprehensive publishing, indexing, and hosting services, open access content on Informit is not only easily discoverable but also seamlessly integrated into various discovery platforms, search engines, and library catalogs, amplifying its reach and impact.
Informit’s content library is extensive, which means there’s room for growth and expansion on the OA front. To better understand what is needed, this year Informit embarked on a comprehensive review of existing Open Access models, to gain insights into how we can more effectively support the research and publishing communities in Australia.
The call for open access to publicly funded research has been gaining momentum over the past two decades, receiving support from various sectors across the Australian and international communities.
In 2021, Australia’s Chief Scientist nominated Open Access as one of her key priorities and UNESCO adopted the landmark Recommendation on Open Science. Universities across Australia are also developing open access policies, including Informit’s host institution, RMIT University, which adopted an open scholarship policy in July 2023. However, despite this momentum, the transition to open access has been challenging for numerous reasons, particularly for small to medium publishers.
The successful transition to open access is not only critical for the advancement of Australian research and innovation, but also for our social and economic success. It is crucial that we continue to support a diverse ecosystem of journals, along with a wide range of publishing models, and that we maintain some national sovereignty in our research publishing system.
Informit is committed to playing a role in shaping a national open access strategy.
While there are no simple solutions, Informit is eager to share the progress we have made so far in this space. We invite you to join Emma Juniper online on Tuesday 23 October to hear more about Informit’s transition to open access.
Register for the free seminar here: Open Access Week 2023 Australian and New Zealand program
Visit about.informit.org.au/open-access
For media enquiries contact:
Ally Scale, Marketing and Communications Manager – Informit
ally.scale2@rmit.edu.au
