Open Access on the World Wide Web

Open Access Week – celebrated internationally during the third week of October – is a highlight on the LIASA calendar. Libraries have always been and still are about providing access to quality information for a better educated nation, which in turn leads to an empowered society with a higher life expectancy. Information needs to be kept open, for people to remain informed and to engage in self- and lifelong-learning, and to empower themselves.

Through Open Access Week LIASA supports publicly funded research being open at no cost to the public. Openness of information is important for all citizens, and not only for researchers at research and/or academic institutions. Information connects researchers, society and development. Quality information is unfortunately not always open, and information has in many cases become expensive and unaffordable. Still fresh in our minds are the protests on SA university campuses against the increase in student fees, fuelled by the poor rand/ dollar exchange and the very expensive international research information to databases libraries subscribe. For a university to remain a high profile, high impact institution when benchmarking against other universities worldwide, it is crucial for its researchers to remain players on equal ground with researchers internationally.

A variety of activities were hosted at libraries and institutions worldwide to create awareness and to advocate for information to remain open. Public, school, special and academic libraries in South Africa all participated. The theme for this year was “Open for Collaboration”. In the spirit of collaboration libraries, researchers, school children and more got together and participated in competitions, activities, seminars, online webinars, exhibits, digital storytelling and more.

LIASA has further initiated SPARC Africa, which was launched at the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Academic and Research Libraries (ARL) Satellite Meeting on 14 August 2015. SPARC Africa will be running alongside SPARC USA and SPARC Europe, and will focus on capacitating Africans in academic and research sectors to champion free access to scientific knowledge as a means to alleviate Africa’s lack of access to quality scholarly content. At the same time, knowledge produced by Africans will be shared internationally as open access, contributing to the international knowledgebase (Nyahodza 2015). SPARC Africa would like to invite academic and research institutions, library and information profession associations, funding bodies, student representative organisations and parastatal organisations located in South Africa and African to become members.

According to Nyahodza (2015) SPARC Africa will prioritise creating a development forum, which will assist with capacity building and infrastructure to open up the African continent’s scholarly output; making it accessible and discoverable for the international community. The Chapter will create this developmental forum, by tapping into the Ubuntu nature, which is an African meaning, ‘humanity to others’.

This forum seeks to achieve:

• Development of training programmes to address open access activities, for example, the creation and management of repositories and publishing.
• Adoption of relevant open source software and the development of a support base for the optimal utilisation of such software.
• Promotion of the exchange of ideas and experience among members. The organisation also aims to establish global collaborative efforts by cooperating with international groups and organisations (such as SPARC) in the advancement of open access.

Open Access is growing from strength to strength, and LIASA would like to see all members contributing to an open World Wide Web (WWW) – a Web We Want for the World We Want.

– Ina Smith