As academic librarians we recognise that open is everyone’s business. Academic librarians are essentially open education practitioners, well positioned to represent staff and students in their academic journeys and mindful of the cruciality of equable access to knowledge.
As members of educational organisations and academia we are not the only consumers of educational research and outcomes. Open education ensures that those outside our institutions, including those responsible for policy and information provision, have access to timely research. It also supports collaborative research without restrictions on a global scale.
In 2024 Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library launched its new Open Press. QUT Open Press offers support and guidance to QUT staff and students to publish open textbooks, open journals and other open educational resources. This initiative brings together the diverse knowledge and skills QUT librarians and research staff offer to improve access to educational resources. We posit open scholarship and open access in terms of maximising the sharing of knowledge across the entire research lifecycle, encompassing open access to research publications, open data, open educational resources, sharing of code, protocols, and other relevant research outputs.
But how did we get here? QUT has operated comprehensively in the open access space for several decades now. An institutional open access policy, believed to be the earliest university-wide open access policy in the world, was endorsed in 2003. QUT’s institutional open repository (QUT ePrints) was launched in the same year mandating the provision of author accepted manuscript versions for all peer reviewed articles published by staff. In 2004 QUT committed to the Creative Commons Project and in 2010 utilised open-source publishing software to host a number of open access academic journals. In 2016 the first institutional OER policy was approved. QUT Library continues to support a range of national and international open access advocacy activities with active membership in national organisations like Open Access Australasia and Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). QUT also supports a range of other open access initiatives including a research data and software repository and a suite of OER. Most recently, in 2023, QUT’s open access policy was updated to incorporate a ‘Rights Retention’ element based on the Plan-S initiative.
QUT Open Press represents more than a shop front for Library services in relation to open scholarship and open education. It is representative and inclusive of a long-term and broader body of activity, practice and advocacy developed with whole-of-institution support. QUT Open Press is open for business.
Included in
[Session 7C]: Open Publishing - the Australian ExperienceReferencesOpen Access for QUT Research Outputs (Including Theses) Policy / Document / MOPP. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2024, from
https://mopp.qut.edu.au/document/view.php?id=177 Open Educational Resources Policy / Document / MOPP. (n.d.). Retrieved May 16, 2024, from
https://mopp.qut.edu.au/document/view.php?id=148Author Keywordsopen access publishing, open repositories, open textbooks, open scholarship, open access
