The 8th Open Access Week themed "Open for Collaboration" kicks off

Open Access Week is an annual global scholarly communication event organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The main intent of this event, which started in 2008, is to create awareness in the academic and research community about the benefits of Open Access (OA) and to make OA a norm in research and scholarship. 

Earlier this year, SPARC announced the theme for this year’s Open Access Week to be “Open for Collaboration” with the aim of highlighting “the ways in which collaboration both inspires and advances the Open Access movement.” Lasting from October 19 to October 25, Open Access Week involves 230 events across the globe, including workshops, presentations, seminars, conferences, etc., that range from national level programs to university level educational programs, talks, exhibitions, and social media campaigns.

One of the highlights of OA Week is the announcement by SPARC and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library of a global edit-a-thon for Open Access-related content on Wikipedia “to improve already existing Open Access-related pages, to create new content where it needs to be added, and to translate Open Access-related pages into languages where they don't yet exist.”

International Open Access Week is free event and SPARC has invited the scholarly community to participate by registering for it.