Open Access at OSU
A five minute screencast of frequently asked questions about Open Access at OSU is now available on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGR7kgL_qQc. This screencast was developed at the request of the Faculty Senate President, Kate Hunter-Zaworski, and may be used by library faculty speaking to academic units about open access.
Video Transcript: OA_screencast_transcript.pdf
Frequently asked questions about Open Access at OSU
Open Access Resources
- The SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) website provides many resources on Open Access and scholarly communication trends and issues.
- Peter Suber who writes for the SPARC newsletter, also has developed specific resources for understanding Open Access, including his "Open Access Overview".
- Open Access Week resources: http://www.openaccessweek.org/
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), provides a portal to scientific and scholarly journals online, free of charge to readers.
- The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) includes links to and data about the repositories of the world (including OSU's very own ScholarsArchive).
- Local OSU initiatives (these links open in a new window)
Berlin Declaration
The "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" grew out of a 2003 international Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, initiated by the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany. Its goal is to make scientific and scholarly research more accessible to the broader public by taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital electronic communication. "The Declaration acknowledges that an institution’s mission for disseminating knowledge is incomplete if the information is not made widely and readily available throughout society. In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable, interactive, and transparent, and content must be made openly accessible."
Learn more at the Berlin Declaration Website: http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/
What is Open Access?
"Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. Encouraging the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, the Open Access movement is gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers put their weight behind it." (http://tinyurl.com/2e6gr4c/)
Open Access (OA) refers to the accessibility of research. Often described as a new model of scholarly communication, OA is an alternative to the currently unsustainable practice of providing access to all research through subscriptions. Those benefiting from OA include not just scholars, but anyone with an Internet connection and the need or want to access research.
Self-Archiving in the ScholarsArchive@OSU
Internationally and here in the US, a growing number of institutions are signing on to the concept of Open Access through OA Policies or Mandates which state that their researchers will make use of a local institutional repository to preserve their scholarly writings.
At OSU, to date, the faculty within the OSU Libraries and the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences have OA policies. But the effort really began with the decision campus wide in 2007 to deposit all graduate theses and dissertations. The ScholarsArchive@OSU is the vehicle for making these policies a reality. Even without departmental policies in place, many faculty are supporting an informal OA policy by self-archiving articles in this repository.
Within the ScholarsArchive@OSU every faculty member at Oregon State University will find a link to their department "community" and within that to a collection called "Faculty Research Publications" where they can deposit directly -- at which point anyone can view the article free.
What can be deposited depends on an understanding of your author rights.
