OA Repository, Free Access to Academic Materials
OA Repository, Free Access to Academic Materials
  • Reporter Choi Na-youn
  • 승인 2015.03.18 09:47
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POSTECH held an Open Access Repository website naming contest from Dec. 29 2014 - Jan. 16 2015, and it announced the prize winners on Jan. 22. It was open to anybody who belongs to POSTECH. Shinyoung Soh (member of Research Planning Team) was awarded the first prize with the name “OASIS (Open Access System for Information Sharing)” and Hyunsouk Cho (CSE M.S.-Ph.D. integrated candidate) and Lee, Taesung (CSE M.S.-Ph.D. integrated candidate) were each awarded second prizes with the name “POASIS (POSTECH Open Access System for Information Sharing)” and “POSROAD (POSTECH Repository of Open Access Documents)”. A portable drive and USB were given to the first prize winner and second prize winners, and a gift certificate was given to every participant.
Open Access (OA) is a database for academic uses. Internet users can access it free of charge and without prior registration. Users can share the results of their research with anyone by publishing them on the internet anywhere and at any time, which is the ultimate goal of OA.
Without OA, it is very difficult for many users to access specific academic resources and to announce research in journals because of high costs, copyrights, and the nature of non-standard academic papers. These are big obstacles in academic activities. Academic information should be released freely to be helpful to others and to contribute to developing the fields. So, OA is very effective media in the development of science and technology.
One example of the difficulties authors face is ownership. Many authors don’t have rights to their own work. Once they announce findings in a journal, the rights of the work belong to the academy or publisher. They cannot post their paper to another homepage or journal by themselves without paying a subscription fee. This is ironic but common in the current academic environment.
In addition to the difficulties authors face, receivers of journals, especially libraries, also have trouble providing readers access to diverse information. Because commercialized publishers monopolize the rights to papers and increase the price of journals every year, it is getting harder to accommodate the cost for subscriptions in the budget of library. Universities and researchers believe libraries should preserve digital materials they produced, which gives big pressure of capacity to library with limit of budget.  If open access is realized, these problems will be solved. If the journals don't allow the authors to announce their papers on OA, they can post rough drafts of their papers on OA without allowance of journals and libraries will be able to satisfy the knowledge information demands of both readers and producers.
POSTECH plans to implement OA in March and expects it will help people outside the university access POSTECH research achievements and foster the development of POSTECH’s online resources site.