From October 25 to 31, 2021, the “International Open Access Week” is being held, which is named by the organizers “It matters how we get our knowledge: building structural justice”. The choice of this topic is related to the recently published UNESCO recommendations on public science.
Open science is designed to ensure equal rights of researchers from developed and developing countries, free exchange of scientific data, equal access to scientific knowledge of producers and consumers of scientific information regardless of their location, nationality, race, age, gender, financial status, socio-economic factors, level of education, language, religion, ability to work, ethnicity, immigration status, etc. It is assumed that the UNESCO recommendations will become a global system of standards in the field of open science and an effective guide to the practical implementation of public research at the government level.
The International Open Access Week is a format that brings together communities aimed at making accessibility and fairness the standard for research. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions and organizations around the world.
The BNTU Scientific Library supports the concept of the development of open science and contributes to the development of open access. With the support of the library, the BNTU scientific journals portal operates, which hosts the websites of five peer-reviewed journals published by BNTU. All scientific journals of BNTU are open access journals. To improve the visibility of university journals for the world scientific community, they are all included in the world catalogs and libraries of open access resources, such as DOAJ, ROAD, OpenAire, CYBERLENINKA, etc.
The BNTU repository, which the Scientific Library has been forming since 2012, provides open access to educational and scientific materials of the university for a wide audience of users. In August 2021, the BNTU repository reached 39th place in the general list (All Repositories) of the world ranking of repositories “Transparent Ranking of Repositories” that included 4353 repositories, electronic archives, electronic libraries, and 29th place among 4200 other resources–in the list of institutional repositories (Institutional Repositories).
The Open Science section on the website of the BNTU Scientific Library is a navigator that reveals various aspects of open science and provides information on how to find publications on your topic in open access, where open research data is stored, which teaching materials of the largest universities in the world can be used, and others.
For informational support of lecturers, students and university staff, the Internet “Infogenerator” digest is regularly published, which contains thematic surveys of publications from the library's electronic collections compiled in accordance with the curricula, as well as open access resources and other useful materials. A special issue of the digest was dedicated to open educational resources.
For the high quality familiarization of users with modern information trends in the world scientific environment, the Scientific Library has developed and posted the following resource guides on the website:
- “Patent Retrieval”, i.e. the guide that provides information in the field of intellectual property protection, strategies, resources and search tools;
- “Preprints”, i.e. the guide that provides information on the role of preprints in modern scientific communication, on specialized servers and international initiatives dedicated to preprints, on the possibility of placing a preprint in the BNTU repository;
- “Scientific Information Retrieval”, i.e. the guide that describes opportunities, tools and resources for the scientific information retrieval, including open access resources to scientific publications and data.
Open access provides a significant impetus for more effective development of science, provides equal opportunities for all interested groups of researchers, contributing to the fair dissemination of knowledge and cooperation in the global scientific community to solve urgent and essential problems.
