This year, October 25-31 is International Open Access Week, and Emory is celebrating its authors who have shared their scholarship openly by featuring them on the Open Access at Emory website, which features information about OA books, journals, and journal articles produced by Emory authors. The site is collaboratively sponsored by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the Emory Scholarly Communications Office, the Emory Digital Publishing in the Humanities Initiative, and the Emory Center for Faculty Development and Excellence.
For those who may be unfamiliar with open access, SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines it simply as “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” But open access now includes more than just journal articles. Scholarly books, textbooks, images, videos, and more can all be open access, which means that these materials are free of cost and licensed in a way that facilitates sharing and reuse. Open access moves away from paywalls and restrictions on copying and moves toward equitable access to knowledge for all.
SPARC is the international OA Week leader, and this year, they decided on a theme centered on equity: It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.
SPARC chose this theme to reflect the importance of the recently released draft UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which is expected to be adopted by UNESCO’s General Conference next month and will “define shared values and principles for Open Science, and identify concrete measures on Open
Access and Open Data, with proposals to bring citizens closer to science and commitments to facilitate the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge around the world.”
The Emory Scholarly Communications Office (@EmoryLibsOA) has tweets planned every day this week focused on various open access services we provide, so we hope you’ll follow us on Twitter and share the open access love with your followers!
by Jody Bailey, head of Scholarly Communications Office, Emory University