The Open Access Week is promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It goes into its 5th year in 2011. The community claims that

Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.

Following up the Open Access Africa 2010 conference in Nairobi/Kenya Rania Baleela and Pablo de Castro Martín have created a presentation the global development of Open Access (and draw a special focus on the situation in African countries). They used a number of worldmapper maps to make their case. In addition I created a new map for them that shows the number of activities by country along the SPARC-organised 4th edition of the Open Access Week (Oct 18-24th, 2010). This is the newly created map on the OA 2010 activities (the full presentation can be accessed online in the e-archive of the University of Madrid, Pablo has also written a brief report about OA Africa at the BioMed Central Blog):

It is pleasing to see that Open Access has also reached the general debate of science and politics, such as the Conference of Academic Publishing in Europe (see also a summary of the event on the SONEX blog). This has this year been organised under the patronage of German Minister of Education and Research. Despite reservations by the publishers, Jos Engelen claimed in his keynote that open access will become the future of scientific publishing – until then, of course, there is still a long way to go and many publishers (and scientists) to convince.
The content on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig. You are free use the material under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); please contact me for further details. I also appreciate a message if you used my maps somewhere else. High resolution and customized maps are available on request.