Open Access Week - 10/22 -10/28

Open Access Week, Oct. 22-28, is celebrated globally and provides an opportunity for academic communities to learn about open access to information and its potential benefits, and to share what they know with others.

What is Open Access precisely? Open access is the free and immediate online access to the results of scholarly research. Open access initiatives remove the price barriers of traditional academic publishing model. The intent is to create a model that makes scholarly works freely available by eliminating the cost associated with obtaining and using them. Other open initiatives, such as open educational resources and open publishing models, also work to reduce permission barriers, allowing users to copy, redistribute, and adapt the works. Open access has many benefits for students and researchers, as well as the public. It increases the ability of anyone to find, use, and distribute knowledge, alleviates some cost burdens, and enables innovation and cross-collaboration. 

As part of Open Access Week, the University Library recommends the documentary, “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship” which can be viewed here:

“Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. 

Staying true to the open access model: it is free to stream and download, for private or public use, and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone regardless of their social, financial or political background will have access.”