The Open Access Week 2011 at the Worldmapper Project

[Pablo de Castro]

Benjamin D. Hennig is a researcher from the Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) Research Group at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, UK. Benjamin, through SASI, is also a member of the Worldmapper Project, a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

Since last year activities organised along the Open Access Week have received attention from the Worldmapper Project as a way of both examining the progress of Open Access as a worldwide movement for changing ways in scholarly communication and to also examine worldwide inequalities in access to knowledge and education (see "Mapping activities at the Open Access Week 2010".

Last year, the Open Access Week activity worldmap was published after the event itself was finished, providing an unusual image of the involvement of different countries in the organisation of Open Access advocacy activities. On 2011, and thanks to the collaboration from Jennifer McLennan and SPARC for providing the data, Benjamin has published a post on OAW2011 at his Views of the World blog, where not only the updated OAW2011 activity map is featured, but also a number of reflections on Open Access from his research environment.

Finally, when discussing with him about how to include international OAW activities on a country-based map as suggested by comments after previous release of the map, Benjamin suggests "creating an 'island' on top or bottom of the actual map that transforms the whole shape of the land area according to the global activities together with the other data" (with Antarctica having been used as example on other maps) and calls for keeping the cooperation and trying it next year.