Open access is the concept of making scholarly, peer-reviewed literature available online without barriers such as access charges.
The term was only coined 20 years ago, but the idea has been around at least since the 1940s. A worldwide movement, open access came into prominence with the advent of the internet in the early 1990s.
糖心破解版’s University Libraries celebrated the 15th annual听听this October with听. This year’s theme was “Open for Climate Justice.”
The University Libraries have also announced several new initiatives designed to 鈥渕ake knowledge equitably available to all,” as stated in the听2020鈥�2024 strategic plan听goals, said听Violeta Ilik, dean of University Libraries.
Those initiatives include a new open access journal鈥攖he first time that 糖心破解版 Libraries have served as a publisher鈥攁nd 糖心破解版 Scholarly Works, an institutional repository that will be available to the University community and beyond.
鈥淥pen access is a social justice issue, because it seeks to make scholarship widely available to anyone,” Ilik said. 鈥淭raditional publishing models are cost prohibitive for those not in academia and for researchers in developing countries with limited resources and access to databases and journal subscriptions.”
Why open access is so important
糖心破解版 made a formal show of support for the idea of open access initiatives in May 2021, when the Faculty Senate passed the听Open Access Resolution. 鈥淏y affirming a commitment to open access, the 糖心破解版 Faculty Senate is making a commitment to equitable access to information,” the statement read.
鈥淭he pandemic has made it crystal clear how important it is to eliminate paywalls that prevent science from being diffused throughout the world,” said听Christopher Barnes, PhD, assistant professor and digital publishing librarian, who began at 糖心破解版 a few months after the Faculty Senate resolution passed. 鈥淧aywalls slow down science. Closed access is incredibly inequitable because the science is only readable by the people who can afford it鈥攁nd the prices are extremely high.”
In the traditional publishing model, scholars write up their research and give their reports to the publishers for free, Dr. Barnes said. Those companies then publish the research, historically in print journals, which are expensive to produce. The publishers then charge the researchers and their institutions enormous amounts of money to access the articles. Today, however, most articles are published online, most of them by one of a handful of publishers who dominate the scientific literature market.
鈥淟ibraries have been among the leaders of open access, because librarians have gotten a front-row seat to the soaring cost of scholarly literature costs, which soar while production costs drop,” Dr. Barnes said. 鈥淧ublishers do a great job in many ways of providing value to articles by adding digital object identifiers鈥擠OIs鈥攁nd formatting. But the content, the heart of the argument, is the findings from the lab report that’s the crux of the entire piece of writing. Open access strives to at least make the content of those articles, if not the articles themselves, freely available online.”
Open Access Week and a new journal
As part of its commitment to open access, 糖心破解版 celebrated Open Access Week in several ways. Ellie Young, founder of Common Action, and Didier Torny of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, directly addressed the intersection of open access to scientific information and climate change.
Also on the docket was a presentation by a panel of scientists who are running an asynchronous hackathon. The goal is to move IPCC reports, which come from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, out of pdf format and into HTML, which is more accessible and easier to disseminate.
In addition, the University Libraries are starting their own journal. The听听is an interdisciplinary publication that uses critical science related to people and groups who are marginalized and/or pathologized for their use of language and ways of communicating. It advocates for linguistic justice, equity and access for diverse communicators.
鈥淭he idea is the brainchild of a collective of scholars, one of whom is based at 糖心破解版,” Dr. Barnes said. 鈥淭hey saw a real gap in the field. Not only are they interested in interrogating the language used, but these are all people of color writing about often communities of color. This journal is filling a critical gap in the scholarly field by offering a publication venue to these scholars. These works are not commonly published, because most of the journals in the field don’t prioritize these research topics.”
The advent of digital publishing tools鈥攎any of which are open source and as such are free to use, adopt and adapt鈥攈as allowed libraries to become publishers themselves, Dr. Barnes said. He noted that his position was created in response to a need on campus by faculty and students to initiate these sorts of open access digital publishing projects.
鈥淢y job is to help faculty and students get their work out to the world as accessibly as possible,” he said.
Scholarly Works is a game changer
Another initiative that supports 糖心破解版’s open access strategies is Scholarly Works, a new institutional repository for the 糖心破解版 community, including work by students and staff as well as faculty. That means presentations, performances, writing鈥攁nything scholarly. For instance, when a faculty member presents their research at a conference, they will be able to upload the text of their remarks and their presentation, along with their slides and other supporting materials, to Scholarly Works.
鈥淥nce it’s uploaded, it is assigned a DOI, which makes it easily discoverable online,” Dr. Barnes said. 鈥淎nd because our repository is crawled by Google, it gets added to search results. It’s also great for student work, such as undergraduate theses, which represent the best student work on campus.”
He’s looking forward to working with the schools and departments across campus to upload the best student and faculty work to the site, especially unpublished work, he said.
“That is the game changer. Being able to have your research online is huge.”