It’s Open Access Week, a week when the potential for sharing scholarship widely is promoted and celebrated. If you aren’t entirely sure what “open access” means, it’s essentially putting scholarship online so that anyone can benefit from it. This has, of course, some implications for the traditional ways that scholarship is shared – through publishing books that are then sold to readers (or to libraries on behalf of readers) or through publishing articles in journals that need a subscription. Scholars committed to making their research open can either negotiate with publishers for the opportunity to post a version of their work online for free or can choose publishers who find alternative funding models to the usual pay-to-read.
If you are interested in this concept (as we in the library are), here are a few useful links from Peter Suber, a philsopher who first found his passion for open access while teaching philosophy at Earlham College. He is now the director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University and a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Peter Suber, Open Access Overview (a short introduction to the idea)
Peter Suber, Open Access (available online for free or in paper format via the library at Z286.O63 S83 2012.
Peter Suber, “Open Access: Six Myths to Put to Rest,” The Guardian October 21, 2013
photo courtesy of Iain, who shared his photo under a Creative Commons license because he’s in favor open, too.