Florida State University and FSU Libraries are gearing up to observe Open Access Week, an international effort to educate students and faculty about the benefits of open access within the academic and research communities.
“Open in Action” will be the theme of this year’s Open Access Week, which runs from Monday, Oct. 24, through Friday, Oct. 30. The week will showcase the different ways in which FSU and the scholarly community can contribute to opening up the current system for communicating research and encouraging concrete steps to make researchers’ work more openly available.
“If our articles are behind paywalls and inaccessible sometimes even to us, how are we supposed to get the most — and how are our community members supposed to get the most — out of the activities that we are doing in partnership with one another?” said Xan Nowakowski, professor of medical sociology at FSU.
The core principle of open access is that all published scholarship and research should be accessible to the general public. Universities around the world are supporting this principle in different ways.
Over the past year, Florida State has shown commitment to the principle of open access through several actions:
- FSU Faculty Senate passed a university-wide open access policy, which calls for the open-access archiving of faculty scholarship.
- FSU Libraries launched DigiNole Research Repository, a platform for scholars to share the products of their research and creative output.
- FSU created openaccess.fsu.edu, a dedicated online portal for information about the open access policy.
“Policies like this have been shown to increase the impact of research by making it more widely available than restrictive publisher business models would allow,” said Mark Riley, physics professor at FSU. “Not only that, but if we all stand together on this, we can change the academic publishing model, retaining greater control over our own scholarship, reducing the strain on library budgets and freeing up money to reinvest in important research and learning services.”
This is the seventh year that Florida State has celebrated Open Access Week. For the occasion, FSU Libraries will host a number of workshops related to OA publishing starting Oct. 19.
For more information about open access or related events and initiatives, contact Devin Soper, FSU’s Scholarly Communications Librarian, at dsoper@fsu.edu or (850) 645-2600.
Join the Open Access conversation by following FSU Libraries on Twitter and Facebook and using #OAWeekFSU.