Open Access Week

What is open access publishing? According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative open access means making literature:

 "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

Essentially the main goal is to make research literature freely available to allow the rapid spread of the knowledge gained.

To acknowledge this effort the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) organizes Open Access Week to draw attention to open access policies and how they benefit research, researchers, and the spread of knowledge.

Here are some ideas to promote open access efforts by faculty/researchers, administrators, students, and librarians. 

Reference
Budapest Open Access Initiative. (2012). Budapest Open Access Initiative: frequently asked questions  Retrieved October 16, 2012, from http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm.

Open Access?

Open Access, Open Source, Open Data – What’s with all this “Open”!
Open Access, Open Source and Open Data are simply promoting the principle of “Openness” or:

· Open to contributions and participation
· Open and free to access
· Open to use & reuse w/few or no restrictions
· Open to indexing and machine readable
· From OPENNESS: CONTRIBUTE, ACCESS, USE By ACRL Workshop: Scholarly Communication 101 at http://www.scholcomm.acrl.ala.org/node/12

Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. - Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College. Why do you think there is such a push for “Openness”? What do you think about this principle? Agree or disagree…let us hear from all sides!

Scholarly Communication & what it is

What is Scholarly Communications?

It is the system of people, procedures, and tools through which the results of research and scholarship are registered, evaluated, disseminated, and preserved. The topics range from Open Access Publishing to Author Rights Retention to Digital Repositories. The library is interested in starting a conversation with everyone in the University community. As such, the library will be posting regular pieces that will discuss not only scholarly communications, but also the research support the library can provide.

So let’s start talking!