Thankful for Repositories and OA advocates

It’s American Thanksgiving this week, and we sure are thankful. We’re thankful for so many people and what they do — those who fight for open data, those who release their software and photos openly, the folks who ask and answer Stack Overflow questions, the amazing people behind the Crossref API…. the list is long and rich.

But today I want to shout out a special big thank you to OA advocates and the people behind repositories. Without your early and continued work, it wouldn’t be true that half of all views to scholarly articles are to an article that has an OA copy somewhere, and even better this number is growing to 70% of articles five years from now. That changes the game. For researchers and the public who are looking for papers, and for the whole scholarly communication system in how we think about paying for publishing in the years ahead in ways that make it more efficient and equitable.

I gave the closing keynote at Open Repositories 2019 this year, and my talk highlighted how the success of Unpaywall is really the success of all of you — and how we are set for institutional repositories to be even more impactful in the years ahead. It’s online here if you want to see it. We mean it.

Thank you.

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