Kennesaw State’s Sturgis Library is hosting Open Access Week Oct. 22 to Oct. 25, to bring attention to the open access movement.
The library is holding four separate events during the week of Oct. 22, to teach students, faculty and staff about the benefits of open access research and about how the KSU community can further the open access movement.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition defines open access as “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.”
The first event, held on Monday, Oct. 22, served as an introduction to open access and how students can benefit from participating.
“When you think about open access, it’s kind of a reaction to the academic publishing system and how it may not necessarily reflect what researchers really value,” said Scholarly Communications Librarian April Schweikhard. “When you think about researchers, they’re doing the research mostly for a public good and they want to get their research out there. They want other people to be able to use their research and build upon it.”
Schweikhard explained that researchers often put together and write up their research not expecting to receive any payment. Researchers’ articles are then peer-reviewed by volunteers, and after it is finished, the research is often bundled and published with a journal that requires readers to pay to access the research.
Scheweikhard also said that usually when researchers publish their research in an academic journal, they give away their rights to the research. She said that during the library’s first event on Monday, she advised attendees on how to keep the copyrights to their research so that they can also publish their research in online repositories.
KSU has its own online repository where faculty and students can publish their research and other scholarly material and anyone from around the world can download scholarly, full-text articles. In Digital Commons @ KSU, faculty and students have the opportunity to have their work completely open to the KSU community and the opportunity to have open access to others’ research.
According to KSU’s website, the Digital Commons reached two million downloads earlier this month.
Scheweikhard said that it is important for students to know what open access journals and resources are available to them, especially after graduation when they may not have access to a library that pays for and provides access to certain research and journals.
Scheweikhard recommended that students use the Directory of Open Access Journals, an index of peer-reviewed open access journals. Scheweikhard said that the journals listed in the directory are high-quality academic articles and each one must go through a review process before it can be included in the directory.
As part of Open Access Week, the library also hosted a discussion with Professor of Business Law Niel Wilkinson on Tuesday, Oct. 23, about why he decided to make his book, “Running on Full: The Story of Ruth and Ruby Crawford” open access.
The library will hold an informal discussion on Wednesday, Oct. 24, about how the KSU community can advance the open access movement. It will also hold a discussion on Thursday, Oct. 25, about how students and faculty can apply for a Creative Commons license for their work, making it possible to allow others to republish their work without their permission, as long as they attribute the work to the researcher.
“[Our goal] is making this open access movement more visible and making people aware of it and the benefits from it and the opportunities,” Scheweikhard said. “And trying to make it easier for people to feel comfortable publishing in those outlets.”
Students can find more information about Open Access Week on the Sturgis Library’s website.
