Open Access Symbol
by Jody Bailey
On March 15, 2011, the Emory faculty passed an open access policy, joining a growing number of institutions making a commitment to share the results of their faculty research with audiences across the world. Through the policy, all Emory faculty members proactively grant permission to the university “to capture and make available his or her scholarly articles the author has chosen to distribute as open access and to reproduce and distribute those articles for the purpose of open dissemination” (Emory Open Access Policy).
The policy also calls for the creation of a digital repository to house these works. Two Emory Libraries units, the Scholarly Communications Office and Library Technology and Digital Strategies, followed through on this charge by collaborating on the creation of an institutional repository of faculty-authored scholarly articles, OpenEmory, launched in 2012. Now, almost a decade later, OpenEmory is celebrating the milestone of surpassing 20,000 total works in the collection.
Initially, OpenEmory housed only journal articles, but in 2016, other types of scholarly work began to be included, including books, book chapters, conference papers, presentations, posters, reports, and working papers. Staff members in the Scholarly Communications Office (the unit that manages the repository) mediate most of the deposits through automated searches of PubMed Central. When we find content by Emory faculty in PMC, we verify that we can legally share it in OpenEmory and ingest that content on behalf of faculty members. We also work one-on-one with faculty members to review their curriculum vitae for content that we can include in the repository. If you are interested in this service, please contact the Scholarly Communications Office at scholcomm [at] listserv [dot] cc [dot] emory [dot] edu.
As mentioned above, OpenEmory is now 9 years old – quite young in most lifespans, but ancient for a technology platform, even one that gets periodic updates. Plans for the repository’s future are still evolving, but what we can say for now is that its contents will be migrated to an updated, modern platform that will complement Emory’s new faculty-activity reporting system, Facet. In addition, we hope to expand deposit activities to include, through mediated deposits, more works from Emory faculty in the humanities and social science disciplines. Our plans also include expanding our collection by ingesting content created by Emory graduate students and depositing more categories of works by all Emory authors such as institutional reports, white papers, and other gray literature.
For now, however, we are celebrating a decade of open access and OpenEmory’s 20,000th work and looking forward to sharing more brilliant Emory research with the world.
For your browsing pleasure, links to a few interesting or unusual works in OpenEmory follow.
Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab, an open access book by Deboleena Roy, senior associate dean for faculty in Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences, published in 2018 by the University of Washington Press and supported by Emory University’s participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries.
Cover of Molecular Feminisms; copyright Deboleena Roy; book licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0):
COVID-19 and the US response: Accelerating health inequities from BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine (doi: 10.1136/bmjebm-2020-111426, June 2020), authored by Patrick Sullivan, Charles Howard Candler professor of epidemiology, Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health, and several non-Emory researchers.
Image: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Image Library, image ID 23312.
Teaching health as a human right in the undergraduate context: Challenges and opportunities from Health and Human Rights (Volume 21/1, June 2019), authored by Bisan Salhi, assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine, and Peter Brown, professor of anthropology in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
Image: Raised Fist. Image credit: Oladimeji Odunsi on Unsplash.
Finally, we hope you’ll take a moment to browse other digital repositories produced by Emory Libraries:
- Emory Theses and Dissertations: A digital collection of all theses and dissertations produced since 2007 by Emory College Honors Program undergraduates as well as Emory master’s and doctoral students.
- Emory Dataverse: A site for datasets produced by Emory researchers who wish to openly share their data for the purposes of validation and replication.
- Emory Digital Collections: Our newest repository containing digitized materials from our rare book and archival collections.