4.3 Training and Development
promoting open access to knowledge. Infrastructure development is one of the
key strategies in promotion of open access. Capacity building of library,
information and publishing professionals through various training programmes
helps in infrastructure development in their respective institution or country.
Training is essential for strategic planning and maintaining open access
infrastructure in the institution or country concerned.
Nowadays, a number of open source software (OSS) are frequently used for
establishing open access institutional repositories, OA journals and OA
conferences. Examples of most popular OSS are namely, DSpace
(DSpace.org), EPrints (EPrints.org), Open Journal Systems (OJS). While
DSpace and Eprints are used in building OA institutional repositories, OJS is
used for establishing OA journal portals.
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system,
developed and launched by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) in 2001 to
expand and improve access to research. PKP also have developed two more
useful OSS for OA practitioners, namely, Open Conference Systems (OCS)
and Open Harvester Systems (OHS). OCS is a web publishing tool for
scholarly conferences. OHS is a free metadata indexing system that helps in
indexing the metadata from Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant OA digital archives or institutional repositories. A few other related software are
also available for maintaining open access knowledge repositories and OA
digital archives.
DSpace, EPrints and OJS have been already included in the graduate curricula
of many library schools and information schools around the world. However,
senior library and information professionals need to develop competencies and
technical skills in handling these software on day-to-day basis while
maintaining OA infrastructure in their respective institutions. Various
institutions, organizations and professional associations have introduced
continuous education or lifelong learning or professional training programmes
on use of these OSS in maintaining OA infrastructure. Recently, international
organizations such as INASP, EIFL.net, SPARC and UNESCO, have
supported organizing training workshops for capacity building of information
professionals and journal editorial staff members, around the world more
particularly in developing countries.
There are also instances of launching MOOCs (massive online courses), e-
learning courses, distance learning (ODL) courses, open courseware (OCW),
and open educational resources (OER) in the relevant areas for skills
development in open access and open science. Some courses are also planned
targeting academic researchers in improving their understanding on open
access to scholarly literature.
4.3.1 FOSTER – Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research
Recently, the European Union (EU)’s Seventh Framework Programme for
Research and Development (FP7) funded project FOSTER was launched in
2014, which aims to set in place sustainable mechanisms for EU researchers to
foster open science in their daily workflow. It is aligned with another FP7
funded project PASTEUR4OA “Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for
European Union Research” [Pasteur4OA.eu]. Two overarching objectives of
FOSTER are to (i) Integrate open access principles and practice in the current
research workflow by targeting the young researcher training environment, and
(ii) Strengthen the institutional training capacity to foster compliance with the
open access policies of the European Research Area (ERA) and Horizon 2020
(beyond the FOSTER project). Several OA practicing organizations, e.g.,
SPARC Europe, eIFL.net and LIBER (Association of European Research
Libraries) are associated with both FOSTER and PASTEUR4OA projects.
While FOSTER is facilitating the adoption, reinforcement and implementation
of OA policies in the European region, other regions across the world need to
have similar initiatives for engaging and nurturing young researchers towards a
larger global OA ecology.