This week is International Open Access Week 2019. The aim of this global event is to raise awareness about open access and open science and to contribute to promoting and mainstreaming open research practices. To mark this year’s OA Week, we’ll be publishing a series of short blog posts exploring different aspects of the debates about open access and open science that are happening here at PRIO.
Photo: Sylvia Yang CC via Unsplash
PRIO has long been a pioneer of open science, particularly of open data. In this week’s first blog post, Research Professor Nils Petter Gleditsch gives us a flavour of the history of efforts to make peace research open and available beyond the academic sphere.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, we focus in on open data. Tomorrow, Senior Researcher Håvard Strand will reflect on the importance of open data for social science, for peace research and for PRIO. On Wednesday, the Coordinator of PRIO’s Migration Research Group, Research Professor Marta Bivand Erdal, will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of an open science approach to qualitative social research.
The theme of this year’s OA Week is equity in open knowledge. On Thursday, PRIO’s Special Adviser on Project Development and Publications, Lynn P. Nygaard, will focus in on this theme, reflecting on the ambiguous role of open access in facilitating greater inclusion of scholars in the global south.
Finally, we’ll end our OA Week series with a post by myself, David J. Allen, Adviser to the Director here at PRIO. I’ll be taking a looking at the state of the current open access debate and consider whether we may be at risk of drifting off topic.