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Open Access Week 2009

Why is unrestricted public access to scholarly articles important? *

Moral arguments

Pragmatic arguments

OA frees authors and readers from needless access barriers.
OA returns the control of scholarship to scholars.
By increasing the author's impact, it advances the author's purpose in writing journal articles for impact rather than money.
OA serves the under-served.
For the special subset of publicly-funded research, open access is part of fundamental fairness to taxpayers.

OA reaches a wider audience at lower cost than toll-access forms of distribution.
OA makes research literature and data available for crunching by new generations of sophisticated software (indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, linking, recommending, alerting, mash-ups, and other forms of processing).
OA widens dialogue, builds community, and supports cooperation.
OA accelerates research and increases the productivity of researchers.
OA makes research more useful and increases the research funder's return on investment.

* Adapted from Peter Suber's "Open access and the self-correction of knowledge"

Voices From The Community

Open Access 101 video

In partnership with student advocates, who are increasingly active around Open Access issues, SPARC has developed a new, animated Open Access 101 video. This 3-minute clip highlights the widespread concern among students for the cost of access, the dynamics of the scholarly publishing process, how Open Access is made possible, and the opportunities created by the open accessibility and reuse of research results.

Voices of Open Access Video Series
Watch 1-minute videos from a ...

teacher

funder

patient
advocate

physician
scientist

librarian

student

Webcasts about why they support Open Access from ...

Sir Richard Roberts

Dr. Phil Bourne

Piled Higher and Deeper: Nature vs. Science -- comics by Jorge Cham, PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Download Poster!

DID YOU KNOW?

Several OA journals are published by University of Minnesota departments.
University of Minnesota authors published 20 articles in Public Library of Science journals last year--twice as many as in 2007, and second only University of Michigan in the CIC/Big 10.
U researchers get a 10-15% discount when publishing in open-access journals from Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and Nucleic Acids Research, thanks to subscriptions by the U Libraries.
NIH-funded U researchers can get help from the U Libraries and SPA in meeting NIH's open-access requirement. See the effects of the NIH mandate to date.
Many commonly held beliefs about Open Access are not true. See Top Five Myths About OA.

TAKE ACTION

Check out peer-reviewed Open Access journals in your discipline at DOAJ: The Directory of Open Access Journals.
Deposit your work into the University of Minnesota's open digital archive, the University Digital Conservancy.