As part of Open Access Week 2018, UCL Qatar, Qatar University and Qatar National Library will host a series of talks, lectures and events that will underpin the country’s position at the forefront of the accessible research movement in the GCC and Mena.
UCL Qatar jointly with Qatar University Library will hold a practical workshop entitled “Marketing Campaigns for Promoting Open Access in Academic Libraries and Museums”.
The workshop will be held tomorrow from 8.30am to 12.30pm at the Qatar University Library.
Since the 1990s, the global open access movement has played major roles in helping reshape academic communication and research practice.
It has championed opening-up academic publications for use by anyone who is interested. This has huge benefits for academics, but also for the public. By making research findings accessible and transparent, and the data sets behind them, open access has accelerated research and innovation which has advanced global society, and national economies.
It means very low barriers for those wishing to access research. For example, scientists and researchers everywhere in the world, even if on a low budget, have the freedom to access the latest developments in their field made in the Gulf.
Researchers are also better rewarded – due to the increased accessibility, open access articles receive 18% more citations than closed access ones.
Qatar has been at the forefront of the open access movement in the GCC and Mena and the country’s higher education and knowledge economy institutions continuously
advance in this area.
For instance, Qatar University’s open access repository – known as Qspace – has been used for 870,000 searches from a global base of users. The figure demonstrates the international interest in the research of Qatar University academics and has contributed to the success of the University in the world academic ranking, where it now sits inside the top 500.
This not only has the benefit of projecting onto the world stage the valuable and diverse research being done in Qatar, but also helps accelerate the country towards becoming a knowledge-based economy, one of the central goals of Qatar National Vision 2030.
Qatar National Library has also launched two nationally funded schemes that remove financial barriers for authors wishing to publish articles.
