Community in Collaboration: International Open Access Week 2024

This International Open Access week (21-27 Oct, 2024), we want to celebrate the communities that support, champion, and enable White Rose Libraries to engage with open access to serve the academic and public communities. Community through collaboration is at the heart of the services WRL offer, highlighting the
commitment to the open distribution of knowledge as a resource for all.

Celebrating institutional community

Our parent institutions, the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York, all have support for open scholarship embedded in their cultures, prioritising approaches that serve the best interests of the public and of the academic community. A “university for public good”, the University of York champions partnerships in research, education, and engagement to demonstrate that collaboration, not competition, is the key to progress. At Leeds, community is one of the university’s three strategic aims, fostering a culture of collaboration both internally and externally, to facilitate exchanges and encourage innovation and discovery in research. The University of Sheffield’s “One University” vision prioritises creating a collaborative, inclusive and supportive culture, to transform not only the lives of graduates, but the world we live in. The collaborative spirit fostered by our institutional communities facilitates the work of White Rose University Press (WRUP), as well as our two jointly-managed repositories.

Repositories for public good

Our two repositories, White Rose Research Online and White Rose Etheses Online, provide green open access routes to research and theses. These community-supported platforms allow OA outputs to be widely disseminated and freely downloaded by the global academic community and beyond. Alongside our own scholarly communities, WRL has developed strong relationships with the wider repository community to facilitate this. Our current Repositories Renewal Project, implementing the next stage of the repositories infrastructure, has allowed WRL to strengthen connections across the sector.
Through the decision to remain with EPrints, WRL will continue developing these ties, and also engage in conversations across the community around the ongoing development of open access repository systems. WRL colleagues were excited to attend the Open Repositories Conference in Gothenburg this year, where we were able to join the global repository community in celebrating open research and open infrastructure. This conference helped further consolidate our relationship with EPrints, and our work together facilitates ongoing contributions to community discussion and our investment in the future of open repositories.

White Rose University Press (WRUP) is our non-profit, open access digital publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. WRUP is committed to an open future for academic publishing, and offers OA publication routes that disseminate high-quality scholarship to the widest possible audience. Our community is central to achieving this, and we’re delighted that academic and library colleagues from Leeds, Sheffield and York collaborate on our Editorial and Management Boards to support WRUP’s contribution to the open scholarship community. WRUP is integrated as part of the scholarly comms support for the three institutions, supporting these communities through knowledge exchange and sharing our practical OA publishing experience WRUP also engages in wider community discussion, working with a network of organisations that champion developments in open access.

We’re proud to work with the Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA) that brings together the community of those involved in small to medium-scale publishing activity at UK HE institutions. WRUP was privileged to host the inaugural OIPA Symposium this year, which allowed WRL to connect closely with open access partners from across the UK. Working as part of OIPA to provide a collective voice for this community in sector discussions about open access publishing is a compelling example of community over commercialisation. WRL is delighted that our Executive Manager, Kate Petherbridge, is Chair of the OIPA Committee, to further support this important movement.

In looking to support community-driven and community-focused sharing of open scholarship, WRL demonstrates a real commitment to community over commercialisation, and we hope to build on this moving forward.