The 14th annual International Open Access Week runs from October 25–31, 2021, and this year’s theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.” This theme was chosen to align with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (see “UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science”), which “powerfully articulates and centers the importance of equity in pursuing a future for scholarship that is open by default” (Fandel 2021).
Open Science and the UNESCO Initiative. Scientific inquiry has long been a self-organized enterprise. Governments, funders and universities may all, from time to time, have prescribed priorities for scientific inquiry, but scientists themselves have largely determined how inquiries should be conducted. In the process they have created and stewarded their own organizations: learned societies, academies, and centres within the generally flexible framework of their universities.
In March 2021, The University of California (UC) announced a “breakthrough” open access (OA) agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher (2021). Under the agreement, all articles with a lead author based at UC will be OA upon publication, and researchers at UC will have access to read articles in Elsevier journals.
In March 2021, the Government of Canada announced the release of the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy (RDM Policy). A draft of this policy for consultation was released in May 2018 (see “Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy”).
As the international open access (OA) movement gains momentum, the question of how to make the shift to OA for monographs is becoming more pressing and, in recent years, efforts to determine a sustainable model for publishing OA monographs have increased.
cOAlition S launched on September 4, 2018, with the support of Science Europe, the European Commission and 11 member organizations, national research funders in Europe and the UK (Science Europe 2018)