The theme of the International Open Access Week–2020 is “Openness with a target: taking steps to create structural equity and integration”. This format provides an opportunity for the scientific community to learn more about the benefits of open access and inspires further development of the concept of open access to make it the norm in the field of academic research. The Belarusian National Technical University and the BNTU Scientific Library actively develop open access to scientific information and support a number of special resources for this purpose.
The Belarusian academic community faces the problem of accessibility and openness of information. Joining the open access movement can help Belarusian scientists and researchers to get acquainted with the achievements of world science; also it can serve as an incentive to improve the quality of their own publications and to promote the results of scientific activities. The Belarusian National Technical University (BNTU) and the BNTU Scientific Library support the concept of open science development in our country and contribute to the development of open access. All the journals published by the University are open access journals, which contributes to a more effective exchange of scientific ideas and research results. The library supports not only the BNTU journal platform, but also the University Repository, which provides open access to educational and scientific papers of the University for a wide audience of users. In the issues of the electronic digest entitled “InfoGenerator” we offer you to get acquainted not only with educational and scientific resources provided for the University community by subscription, but also with authoritative public resources on the Internet. The Open science section of the website of the BNTU Scientific Library focuses on various aspects of open science in general.
Openness and accessibility of information are powerful tools both for improving the system of scientific communication and for providing equal opportunities for all members of the world scientific community. This is exactly what the organizers–the SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the experts of the Advisory Committee Coalition–say. In their opinion, diversity, equality and inclusiveness should be further factors in the development of the scientific sphere.
Open access has a great potential for further development of science and contributes to disseminate information about research among all interested groups of scientists, thus creating equal opportunities for them and promoting cooperation and uniting the world scientific community to solve urgent and significant problems.