'Open Access Bangladesh' begins journey

Open Access Bangladesh, an e-learning platform in the country, has begun its journey, aiming to provide free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.

The lunching ceremony held at Orange BD Office at capital's Karwan Bazar on Friday (17 February) morning where researchers, academicians, journalists, publishers, IT specialists and librarians were present.  

Initially a fifteen-member committee has been formed regarding the Bangladesh chapter of Open Access. Librarian Kanok Monirul Islam has been made the convener where Dr Susmita Das and Engineer Shuvra Rani Kar have been made as Joint Convener and as Member secretary respectively. 

In the opening ceremony, Kanok Monirul Islam highlighted the possibilities of open access in the country through a power point presentation.  

He said, “This is a platform for advocating open access and sharing success stories of open access movement in the world and Bangladesh. It invites everyone who is involved and interested in the open access movement to discuss and raise issues related to open access in general and in specific to Bangladesh”. 

The group would work for influencing the policy makers, managers, researchers, scholarly societies to adopt open access policy for their research and to take forward the open access movement in Bangladesh, he added. 

He said, “We advocate internet access in public and university libraries in furtherance of Open Access, Open Education & Open Data. Open Access is the free online availability of research articles and the rights to use these articles fully in digital”. 

Golam Mustafa, Publisher of Hakkani Publication, said, “Knowledge cannot be restricted by the walls. There are much authentic and useful information in the horizon but we need to access them for our betterment of the society”. 

Biologist Dr Anisuzzaman Khan said, “The age of hiding information has ended with the pace of new technologies. If we want to develop our nation, it is mandatory that the necessary information is available for the people”. 

Open Access Bangladesh is a local window of a broad international academic movement that seeks free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data. Open access is also the term for a new business model for academic publishing that makes research information available to readers at no cost.