Open Access Week

Northeastern Celebrates Open Access Week: October 21-27, 2013

The seventh annual International Open Access Week is upon us! What is Open Access?
“Open Access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole. Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year.” — SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition
Snell Library has several events planned to celebrate: Monday, October 21 3:00-4:30 DMC Circle 2 (blue) SPARC/World Bank Webcast Panelists representing a diverse set of stakeholders – scientific researchers, publishers, technologists and policy makers – will examine the potential positive impacts that can result when research results are shared freely in the digital environment. The panel, moderated by SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph, will feature:
  • Stefano Bertuzzi, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology
  • Brett Bobley, Chief Information Ocer for the National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association
  • Michael Stebbins, Assistant Director for Biotechnology in the Science Division of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy
  • Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director for Public Library of Science
Tuesday, October 22 3:00-4:00 421 SL Panel Discussion: Open Access in the Digital Humanities Faculty members Ryan Cordell, Ben Schmidt, and Julia Flanders will lead a discussion on the impact of open access on humanities research and publishing, leading off with some examples from their own work in digital humanities:
Ryan Cordell will talk about “Building With/Building On” and his use of open-access data from the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, William G. Thomas’s “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” and David Rumsey’s celebrated map collection. Ben Schmidt will talk about the process of working in public through open-access research methods and publications like the Journal of Digital Humanities, and will also offer perspectives on open-source and open-access approaches to code and software development that might provide models for the humanities. Julia Flanders will talk about the tools and methods that underlie Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open-access digital journal now housed at Northeastern University.
Wednesday, October 23 12:00-5:00 90 SL Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Join us to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of under-represented groups in local Boston history. This hack-a-thon style drop-in session will focus on editing and updating Wikipedia pages in a group setting. Bring a laptop and a power supply, and go on a tour of Northeastern’s archives and special collections. More information available here.
And on Friday, October 25, Snell Library will be playing host to several of the DPLAfest’s open workshops – see the full schedule here. All Open Access Week events are open to the public (photo ID required to enter Snell Library) and refreshments will be served.

Welcome to Open Access Week!

"OA Open Access Week is a global event that highlights the movement to provide worldwide access to scholarly literature without the need for expensive journal subscriptions. You’ve probably heard of “think globally, act locally” in regard to environmentalism, but this way of thinking can also be applied to open access. By promoting a worldwide event like OA Week, we hope to inspire members of the Northeastern community to adopt an open access mindset where possible in their research, teaching, and campus activities. I’ll be writing a new blog post each day this week highlighting some of the work we’re doing here at Northeastern to support open access as well as the amazing things that are going on at other colleges and universities. I hope you’ll get inspired to learn more about how open access can dramatically improve the availability of information to everyone. IRis First, you probably know about IRis, our digital archive of scholarship, publishing, and preservation. (And if you don’t know about it, now’s the time to find out!) But did you know that IRis contains over 1,700 items, from doctoral dissertations to undergraduate capstone projects to Faculty Senate meeting minutes? It’s like a time capsule for the university that keeps getting more and more comprehensive each week. And all the materials in IRis are intended to be openly accessible to the entire world — so it’s not like one of those databases that asks you to sign in with your myNEU username and password from off-campus. That means we — well, you, since it’s your material in IRis — get visitors to IRis from all over the world. It’s a fantastic way to showcase your research to a global audience, and anyone at Northeastern can participate. Visitors to IRis in 2010 In a previous blog post, I highlighted the impact IRis can have — an article on Wired.com cited an undergraduate engineering capstone project, bringing the student group 300 downloads of their project in a single month!