This last week of October, we are once again celebrating Open Access Week!
What is Open Access?
Open access is all about distributing scholarly research without financial or other access barriers. This helps readers, especially those who don’t have access to institutional subscriptions, and it helps authors, who can gain a broader audience for their work.
Open access can be achieved in many different ways. While you may have heard that many publishers offer open access, either by default for all publications or selectively via a “hybrid” model, open access can also mean making your work available in an institutional repository, like CUNY Academic Works, or a subject repository, like arXiv (or one of many others, depending on your field!).
Open access does not always involve paying a fee as the author.
- Many open access publishers do not charge fees
- Open access via self-archiving in a repository is free, and almost all publishers allow it
You can learn more about open access in this set of guides covering related issues, or you could contact the library’s scholarly communication librarian! I can answer questions about publisher policies, evaluating prospective publishers, depositing to CUNY Academic Works, making yourself and your work more visible, and more.
International Open Access Week 2022
The theme for International Open Access Week 2022 is climate justice. How does open access promote climate justice?
In the words of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition):
Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.
This year’s focus on Climate Justice seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.
Keep an eye out for CUNY events related to open access and climate justice. While schedules did not align in a way that allowed these events to happen during the designated Open Access Week, these issues continue to be relevant, and we plan to offer something soon.
Events: Understanding New Guidelines for Federally Funded Research
The library is holding an event on October 26, 2022 on the new guidelines for federally funded research! Please join us. There is more information in the event blog post.
