Open Access: Free the Research

Woo hooooo! Open Access Week is here! Hard to contain your excitement, isn’t it? If you weren’t around for last year’s global event promoting OA, and are wondering if anyone other than librarians should be interested, here’s how the organizers describe open access:

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

The best OA introduction is still Open Access 101 from SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This great animated video (~3 minutes), explains the scholarly information landscape and why we need open access:

And check out A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access (PDF), which explains two ways the research community provides open access, through OA journals (more on those tomorrow) and OA archives or repositories.

Be sure to stop by the Library between now and Friday to pick up information about Open Access, chat with your librarian, and enter our Open Access raffle. And stay tuned to RFoD for more information throughout the week.

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Open Access at Antioch

Here are a couple of ways Antioch is supporting open access:

• ANE’s Environmental Studies doctoral candidates deposit their dissertations in the OhioLINK ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) Center, an open access repository, as do doctoral candidates in Antioch’s PhD in Leadership and Change program.
• Dr. Carolyn Kenny, a faculty member in Antioch’s PhD in Leadership and Change program, is co-editor-in-chief of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, an open access journal.
• ANE faculty members, such as Jim Gruber, submit articles to open access journals.

Jim sporting his new OA t-shirt.

And here are some other actions Antioch could be taking:

• Antioch’s leadership could commit resources to developing an institutional repository, similar to the one at The Ohio State University, its Knowledge Bank.
• Faculty could pass a resolution, similar to ones passed by faculty at Harvard, MIT, and many other universities, requiring researchers to deposit articles and other work in an open access repository.

That’s a start. Let’s get going!

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An OA Journal for You

Open access journal publishing is one way that scholarship and research can be made available to the worldwide community, and a good place to find OA journals is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Here are some examples from browsing the DOAJ subject lists:

• Under psychology in social sciences: Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Current Research in Social Psychology, Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review.
• Under ecology in earth and environmental sciences: Avian Conservation and Ecology, Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Urban Habitats, Green Theory and Praxis, Conservation Evidence.
• For organization and management (business and economics in DOAJ): International Journal of Business and Management; Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy; Information Technologies & International Development.
• And education journals (listed under social sciences): Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, Early Childhood Research & Practice, Educause Quarterly, Innovate: Journal of Online Education.

Most OA journals are peer reviewed, and journals from DOAJ are included on the ANE Journals A-Z list.

You can also search DOAJ for articles rather than browsing journals. Look for the Find Articles link in the upper left of the homepage.

Have you read an OA journal today?

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Open Access 101

SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has produced a great animated video, Open Access 101 (~3 minutes), explaining the scholarly information landscape and why we need open access:

And be sure to check out A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access (PDF), which explains two ways the research community provides open access, through OA journals (more on those tomorrow) and OA archives or repositories.

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Did you know?

You’ve probably seen the earlier version of this video. The updated 2008 version (5 minutes long) is below. The information presented is mind boggling. Do you have an answer for the question posed at the end?

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Create a “Unit of Knowledge”

Do you have an expertise? Want to share it? Then you could be the first Antiochian to post to Knol, Google’s answer to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has an article on Knol, but not vice versa. For media coverage, check out ABC and the Telegraph.

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