Open Access Week is an annual international celebration to raise awareness of the issue of access to published scholarly research.

In 2015, Open Access Week at UMN is all about getting the word out on the many, many open access efforts going on all over the University, and from federal research funders!

What is Open Access, anyway?

Open access is access to published scholarly research free of charge to any reader, anywhere in the world! Learn more with our Overview

Did you know?

• There are tons of different ways to make your work open to the world!
• Federal research funding agencies are developing new public access requirements for published articles.
• The University has a fund to support author charges related to making works openly available!
• You can share your publication at the University Digital Conservancy, and your data at the Data Repository for UM
• You can get help with any of this from your University Libraries subject specialist librarian!

Previous years

In 2014, the Libraries hosted a round-robin event, bringing together experts in publishing, data management, altmetrics, digital scholarship, open educational resources, and more!

In 2013, speakers were Nicole Allen, OER Program Director at SPARC, and David Wiley, a professor at Brigham Young University who is a pioneer of open education.

In 2012 Libraries staff partnered with volunteers from graduate student government groups (GAPSA and COGS) to go outside the Libraries and publicize open access issues across UMN campuses.

Pics of meetups:


Click for full-size images. More images in the OAUMN and Walter Library Twitter feeds.

Adapted from "Money" CC BY Andrew Magill

Why is public access to scholarly articles important? *

• 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.

Voices of Open Access Video Series

Watch 1-minute videos from...

Barbara Stebbins, Middle School Science Teacher from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.

Dr. Mark Walport, Wellcome Trust Director from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.

Sharon Terry, Patient Advocate from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.

Ida Sim, Physician Scientist from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.

Diane Graves, Librarian from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.

André Brown, Grad Student from Open Access Videos on Vimeo.

Piled Higher and Deeper: Nature vs. Science

comics by Jorge Cham, PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. (Used with permission)