This week, several universities and institutions in Australia and around the globe will promote the idea of open access to scholarly publications through special seminars, talks and presentations as 24-30 October is the International Open Access Week, now in its 5th year and initiated by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition http://www.arl.org/sparc/about/index.shtml

There are more than 25 thousend scholarly journals published around the world and only 10% of them are open access. As open access journals are relatively new, several questions are still hotly debated. Should open access complement or replace traditional scholarly publishing? What are the advantages of it? Who benefits? There is more that one model of open access and not all them secure the same benefits for the author. For example, researchers can publish their own journal with a host university using open source software; journals can operate on an open access model based on subscriptions, publishing fee, or a combination of both with the added value of selection, peer review, editorial revision and formatting; and also researchers can add the outputs of their research in the form of accepted manuscripts to institutional repositories.

The Transactions for Engineering and Technology Education (WTE&TE) and the Global Journal of Engineering Education (GJEE) are open access, peer-review journals and authors are encouraged to add the published versions of their papers to their institutional repositories. For authors, the benefits of open access include the immediate availability of their publication through a whole range of search tools, unrestricted exposure, greater impact, and often the fulfilment of their research grants’ requirements. Visit the Open Access Week site for more information for about this promotional event: http://www.openaccessweek.org/