OPEN ACCESS: THE KEY DRIVER TO ADDRESS GRAND CHALLENGES

Abstract

Open Science plays an essential role to tackle the grand challenges that we face today. Open Access to scientific output has tremendously increased the R&D process during the Covid 19 pandemic whereby we have witnessed the fastest ever development of a vaccine against any health menace in the history of the world. The main theme of this year's International Open Access Week, "Open for Climate Justice", aims to stimulate cooperation and collaboration in the climate change research community so that the consequences of the looming climate crisis can be prevented before it is too late. In this presentation, I will summarize the recent developments in the Open Access domain and underline the current issues that the Library and Information Science (LIS) community is facing nowadays. More specifically, I will address the issue of transformative agreements and point out some of the open questions such as the widening equity gap with regard to access to scientific information across the globe.