International Open Access Week is a global, community-driven week of action to open up access to research. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions, and organizations across the world. Each year, the ASU Library takes this opportunity to promote open access activities and initiatives.
Open access means providing unrestricted access and re-use to scholarly research and has the potential to transform traditional publishing models and how people connect with information.
This year’s theme is “Community Over Commercialization,” encouraging us to critically consider the tensions we face during this cultural shift towards more open systems of research. For-profit publishers have dominated academic publishing for decades, increasingly consolidating ownership and publishing power within a handful of major companies. Many incentive structures, such as university promotion and tenure policies, continue to reward publication in specific journals, making it difficult for authors to explore other options. On the other hand, research funding agencies are increasingly requiring public access to research articles and data as a condition of funding, academic institutions are examining ways to realign incentives and support structures, and researchers around the world are considering new ways to communicate and share their scholarship.
This Open Access Week, we are focusing on community access, community ownership and community infrastructure, looking beyond the research community to our local, national and global communities. By working with and within our communities, we have the power to enact wide-spread change in how we create, share and act on our research and scholarship. I encourage you to take time this week to learn more about open access and consider one action you can take:
- Think about who would benefit from your research, and deposit a version of your articles in an OA repository (such as our KEEP Institutional Repository).
- Publish your next article in an open access journal.
- Deposit your data openly with the CC0 public domain dedication to a data repository (such as the ASU Research Data Repository).
- Upload your scientific code/scripts/models openly in a code repository.
- Learn more about journal editorial board actions in support of open access in their communities.
If you’d like more active engagement, join our Research Support Conversation on Thursday, October 26 at noon for Pitfalls and Strategies for Open Access Publishing, or join our Open Access Publishing panel on Friday, October 27 as part of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Just an Hour series. If that is not enough for you, there is a wealth of community events around the world listed on the Open Access Week website. Of course, stay tuned here for more posts throughout this week!
Read our other posts from this series:
A 'diamond' in the rough: no cost open access