Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) is celebrating Open Access Week (20-26 October) with this year’s theme being “Who Owns our Knowledge?” Emory has historically been a pioneer in the development of sustainable academic-owned Open Access publishing.
The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week asks us to consider the changing landscape of digital scholarship and information, encouraging communities to preserve and defend their knowledge systems. Accordingly, this year’s theme follows the Open Access principle of “Community over Commercialization” denoting the significance of institutions reclaiming their ownership and sharing knowledge through non-hierarchical means.
At Emory, the principle of Open Access has been ingrained into our institution for fourteen years. In 2011, Emory University passed the Open Access policy, which has enabled the works of Emory scholars to be publicly disseminated and preserved through Open Emory.
Open access (OA) publishing at Emory is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” But producing it is never “free.” At ECDS, the digital journals and projects we publish do not have processing charges, which means that they operate without cost recovery. ECDS’s staff time is supplemented by our support of graduate student professionalization through participating in the digital journal production process. Together, staff and student coordination allows us to produce the Center’s robust portfolio of OA publications. At Emory, publishing has also benefitted from external funding, such as the Mellon program (DPH) which supports digital monographs. Together ECDS and DPH are pioneering approaches to supporting OA publishing.To date, OA scholarship has taken the form of digital articles, monographs, journals, textbooks, archives, and data repositories, as well as other forms of scholarly output—all products of the collaborative relationships among authors, publishers, videographers, reviewers, and other key OA supporters.
International Open Access Week is an annual advocacy event organized by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which works across the globe to encourage open access publishing. Created as a virtual replacement for Emory’s in-person annual OA Week event in 2020, this site continues to provide a sampling of the collaborative work done to support inclusive open access publishing across the university.
Hear from Emory faculty whose books were published open access with support from Digital Publishing in the Humanities; learn about the open access digital journals and publishing platforms developed at and supported by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship; and explore recent articles by faculty, staff, and students supported by Emory’s Open Access Publishing Fund.