Open Access Week: What is Open Access?

pressable October 19, 2012

Open Access Week will be celebrated across the world next week, October 22 – 28, 2012. The Evans Library will be participating in this celebration with:

Open Access Panel Discussion on Wednesday, October 24th at 4 pm
“Celebrating Faculty Contributions to Open Access” Library Display

All this talk about Open Access may have you wondering what is Open Access or OA, as people tend to abbreviate it.

The idea of Open Access can be applied to many areas. Probably most commonly OA refers to digital, online, scholarly literature. If an article is Open Access it is offered free of charge and free of most copyright restrictions. This means that the research and scholarship described in the article is available to all interested readers with no barriers. Similar to subscription-based literature, most OA articles are peer-reviewed. In fact, all major OA publishers emphasize the importance of peer review.

OA relates to other Open movements: Open Source software, Open Courseware, etc

The Evans Library staff have prepared a Research Guide that explains OA and points you to many more resources.

Hopefully, your interest has been piqued and we will see you in the library during Open Access Week!