Open Access Australasia

Background: Founded in 2013 as the Australian Open Access Support Group, the membership organization expanded to include New Zealand and became Open Access Australasia in 2021.

Mission: Its goal is to make Australasia research outputs open for all. OAA is committed to advocating for and raising awareness of open access, open research and open science through regional and international collaboration. It endorses the FAIR principles of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable research outputs to ensure they can be part of the global research ecosystem. Its major focus is on open access to research publications – preprints, peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts, books, monographs and theses. It also contributes to initiatives in open research practices, data, software, open educational resources, reform of research assessment and copyright and open licenses.

Community over Commercialization:

“With the indigenous knowledge, community driven is really important, particularly with things like data for our communities, because we want the data to stay in community and country. It's an opportunity to have some of those conversations because that is completely different from the way that most of our universities work around data. It just provides an avenue to diversify the conversations around open, if you think about local contexts and the power of community.”

“For us, our impact is measured by what happens in our communities. Often, what research success means is that giving access to our communities and impact goes back there. So, ‘community over commercialization’ definitely resonates with the indigenous community because that's where they start everything—right from their research methodology based in community with us, never without us. That’s how we work in that space.”

“The strategies and priorities for Open Access Australasia are decided by the membership. We have a planning session, and we workshop what we feel our priorities are. It’s important to do with the leaders and with practitioners because they’re the ones who are working with academics, out there in the community finding out what are the pressing issues.”

-Kim Tairi, Chair of the Open Access Australasia Executive Committee and University Librarian at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.