The theme of this year’s
International Open Access Week, “Open in order to…”, highlights the multitude of reasons why Open Access is important to researchers, students, funders, patients, and everyone else who benefits from increased sharing of knowledge. This year marks the 10th celebration of International Open Access Week, held during the last full week of October to advocate for fewer barriers between people and the information they need.
At Snell Library, we support Open Access in lots of ways. In 2016, our staff adopted an
open access policy for our published research and presentations – you can find them in our
Digital Repository Service. These materials have been viewed almost 2,000 times and have been downloaded by readers more than 1,000 times! If you’re a researcher at Northeastern and would like to get started using the DRS to make your work more accessible to readers around the world,
it’s easy. Also of interest to researchers: we’ve recently updated the
page on our website about Open Access, and it now includes a list of publishers that offer Northeastern-affiliated authors a discount on the article processing charges for publishing open-access with them.
Snell Library also supports Open Access journal publishing on campus through
Open Journal Systems (OJS). We currently work with four journals being published at Northeastern – including
NU Writing, which recently moved over to our OJS system from the platform it was previously using.
NU Writing just released their first issue using OJS!
And, we support Open Access publishing and sharing through our memberships in initiatives such as the
Digital Commonwealth, the
Digital Public Library of America,
HathiTrust,
Knowledge Unlatched, and
SCOAP³.
In October 2008, we celebrated the first international Open Access Day at Snell Library. Since then, as the Open Access movement has grown, we’ve expanded our programming as well – first, with Open Access Week, and then in the past two years with Open Access Month in October. This year, we’re expanding the concept even more – we want to highlight openness in research, teaching, scholarship, and creativity throughout the academic year. After all, at this point, open access is something that we should be acknowledging as an established facet of the scholarly ecosystem, rather than a special topic that only gets attention once a year. So, stay tuned for open access–related news and events to come.
Banner image and poster openly licensed by SPARC, CC BY 4.0