Open Access in Australia: An Outsider’s Account

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I am doing advocacy on Open Access in India and following the activities related to Open Access around the world online. After writing a blog post on ‘Open Access India’, I thought of writing a series of country specific Open Access activities and decided to write about Australia’s Open Access activities. With the launch of  Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG)’s  website on February 2013, I see that the visibility of Open Access in Australia had significantly grown up.  The internet resources which I have collected for this blog post says that the AOASG was formed during the Open Access Week 2012 by Victoria University being its first member.

John Shipp, a University Librarian from the University of Sydney in 2006 had given an account of Open Access in Australia which can be accessed here. In his article, Mr. John mentions about the Australasian Digital Thesis Program (ADT) has 5,391 full text files were available in mid-January 2006. Currently Australia has 71,880 thesis online and available via the National Library of Australia, Trove.

When we look at the Open Access Movement in Australia with the growth of Open Access Journals, we can see that it all started in 2003  and every year very good number of Open Access Journals are being added to the Directory of Open Access Repository (DOAJ).

The OAK Law project which had ended in 2009 had set up a database of all the publishers open access policies and publishing agreements. A similar database known to SHERPA/RoMEO publishers’ copyright policies is also existing at Univeristy of Nottingham, UK. These lists are facilitating researchers about what and how to share their research outputs legally with the cosmos.

According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), approximately 82 repositories are existing in Australia with Australasian Digital Thesis Repository of Tasmania being the oldest and Monash University Research Repository the recent one.

The Australia Australian Research Council (ARC) had announced its Open Access Policy  in January 2013 which requires deposition of research outputs within a month from the publication date. However, according to the Creative Commons blog post, it appears that the Australian Government had already devoted to Open Access in 2010 for using CC-BY licenses for the  Australian Public Sector Information.10 for using CC-BY licenses for the  Australian Public Sector Information.

Support of Open Access in Australia is led by AOASG and Open Access Austalia group on openaccessweek.org

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