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The UOC's on the open access train

Subject:  Multidisciplinary
A girl sitting on the floor using a laptop
Tue Nov 07 10:30:00 CET 2017

Vice president Pastora Martínez was invited to participate in the ECA 2017 conference, organized by the University of Salamanca and REBUIN. Aida Camps, Rosa Padrós and Gema Santos – from the UOC Library – were also there taking part in working sessions.

To coincide with Open Access Week, from 25 to 27 October the University of Salamanca (USAL) hosted the ECA 2017 conference (on open knowledge ecosystems), which this year brought together the REBUIN Workshop on Digital Projects and the Jornadas OS-Repositorios workshops.

Organized by the University of Salamanca (USAL) and the Red de Bibliotecas Universitarias Españolas (Spanish University Library Association, REBIUN), ECA 2017 was an opportunity for reflection on open knowledge with relation to research and development fields. As such, it was a key date for open access specialists, professionals and researchers from around the world, as of course it was for the UOC, with its strong commitment to the open access movement.

Getting aboard the open science train

Pastora Martínez, the UOC's Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation and a representative for Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) in the European University Association's (EUA) group of experts on Science 2.0/Open Science, gave the keynote speech for the programme for 26 October, offering a critical reflection on open access policies in Europe. She used this opportunity to highlight how open science is not so much a tool for conducting scientific work, but rather a way of understanding science, and that all actors must be included and moving together on the open science train.

The Library talks about OERs at ECA 2017

Gema Santos, subject librarian and coordinator of the group of experts on Knowledge Resources for the international EMPOWER project (run by EADTU), gave a presentation on one of the areas covered by the REBIUN Repositorios working group, that of Open Educational Resources (OERs). The goals of this work were to make a comparative analysis of OER contents and services in different settings and university repositories, and to then make a good practices guide relating to this topic. Results from a survey being conducted will illustrate the situation regarding OERs in Spanish repositories. According to a past study conducted by the UOC, "only 40% of these repositories include teaching materials created by the teaching staff (whereas 84% contain academic work created by students)".

Permanent beta phase

Also attending ECA 2017 were Aida Camps, a subject librarian for the Faculty of Law and Political Science, and Rosa Padrós, a research support librarian, who are jointly responsible for the O2, the UOC's institutional repository, and are also members of REBIUN's Repositorios working group. Both of them emphasized one of the main ideas that arose during the conference: that we are in a "permanent beta phase", in which repositories and their capabilities are constantly developing to improve services for users. The goal is to achieve interoperability between systems and to provide a definite boost for open access.

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