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Happy Open Access Week 2015! Open Access Week is an annual global advocacy event to raise awareness about the benefits of Open Access (OA). Put simply, “open access” is the free, immediate, online access to scholarship and the right to reuse that scholarship as needed (Peter Suber, 2004).
To honor the occasion, here are ten things the Scholarly Communications Office loves about Open Access:
- ONE: It democratizes information. Regardless of budget, anyone can access OA information.
- TWO: It brings down the cost of education. Open Access has manifested itself in the classroom as Open Educational Resources, or Open Textbooks. The concept lets teachers to use, reuse, and build upon information for their classes for free. Who doesn’t love free textbooks?
- THREE: It makes your research visible and viral. If you publish OA, the entire global public has immediate access to your research. This can lead to some seriously cool inventions. Just ask Jake Andraka.
- FOUR: It provides a simple means for academic check and balances. Open Access to research data allows others to reproduce your results. Reproduciblity is good. It means you were right!
- FIVE: It saves lives. Open Access medical articles give doctors immediate access to the most up to date information regardless of what their hospital can afford.
Interested in doing more? Get involved with Open Access by:
- Installing the Open Access Button on your browser to help you find OA versions of articles.
- Telling your lawmakers that you support Open Access and the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research (FASTR) Act
- Publishing your next article in an OA Journal. Not sure which to pick? The Directory of Open Access Journals can help you find open journals in your discipline.
- Registering for next month’s “Open Access & OERs Webinar Series” taught by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the Scholarly Communications Office.