Open Access in Australia

Lucy Montgomery's slides on Open Access in Australia, presented during the OASPA Webinar On track or off the rails? Australia's Open Journey on 22 March 2022. Chair: Dr Danny Kingsley. "In the early 2000s Australia was seen as a leader in open initiatives – with one of the first OA university presses, the first country to systematically make PhD theses available, having the first institution with an OA policy as well as enormous investment on research data infrastructure. But the last decade has seen universities increasingly relying on the income from international students. While the pandemic has dramatically undermined this strategy, it has left a legacy of a clear Australian focus on university rankings. During the same period, the UK and the Netherlands have introduced strong national open policies, translating today to over 75% of research outputs being open access. The Plan S push is happening in Europe and US institutions are dramatically changing the nature of their subscription negotiations. So, how is Australia faring comparatively? The webinar will be chaired by Dr Danny Kingsley who will also speak about a research project she is undertaking to analyse Australian university open access policies. We welcome our speakers: Professor Lucy Montgomery who will place Australia into the global context in relation to the meta-research their group has been doing on progress towards open access globally, Emeritus Professor Ian Chubb will be talking about his decision to establish one of the world’s first fully open access university presses and Martin Borchert will conclude with the recent approaches that have been made in Australia towards an end goal of open access/ FAIR/ open science. The panelists will each speak for 10 minutes, and then we will open it up to questions from the audience and discussion."Full details and event recording available at: https://oaspa.org/webinar-on-track-or-off-the-rails-australias-open-journey