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Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Purdue Libraries Celebrating Open Access Week (Oct. 23-29)

October 23rd, 2017

Open Access Week InternationalThis week is International Open Access Week, and Purdue University Libraries is joining libraries and other learning and educational institutions and organizations across the globe to celebrate the benefits of “opening up access to research and scholarship.”

As part of the Open Access Week celebration, Purdue Libraries is hosting Brian Hole, CEO of Ubiquity Press, who will give a talk on open access starting at 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 26 in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center (WALC), room 3121. The presentation is open free to the public.

In addition, Purdue Libraries will announce the 2017 Purdue University winner of the Leadership in Open Access Award later this week.

Open Access History

This year marks the 10th year Open Access Week as been officially celebrated, according to Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC, the organization responsible for creating Open Access Week to broaden support for Open Access to scholarly research.

“Since Open Access Week first began, we’ve made significant progress in building global awareness of the benefits of opening up access to research and scholarship. Around the world, institutions and individuals are increasingly embracing the use of ‘Open’ as an enabling strategy,” said Joseph. “Whether your mission is to tackle critical problems like climate change or ending poverty or to capitalize on the enormous opportunities that having the world’s knowledge at your fingertips presents, Open Access practices and policies can help you speed up progress towards achieving your goals—and that’sOpen Access @ Purdue University a very powerful, very appealing prospect.”

Open Access @ Purdue

To provide a bit of background about Open Access at Purdue University, Scholarly Publishing Specialist Nina Collins, who works in the Purdue Scholarly Publishing Division (part of the Purdue University Libraries), answered a few questions about the Open Access services and scholarly publishing resources offered.

Q. What is Open Access and why is it important to recognize?

Collins: According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Open Access is the “free, immediate, online availability of those works that scholars give freely to the world without expectation of payment.” It is an alternate business model for scholarly publishing, allowing free access to the end user. Traditional scholarly publishing business models can contribute to information access inequality—where only affluent research institutions or countries can afford scholarly literature. Open Access breaks down this barrier, allowing access to anyone. Open Access can increase the pace of research and innovation by removing paywalls that limit access to the most recent scientific literature.

Q. What are the Open Access services and resources that Purdue Libraries’ Scholarly Communication offers?

Collins: Purdue Libraries’ Scholarly Communication involves several departments within the Libraries, and personnel in Research Data @ Purdue University Libraries are available to assist with data management planning, data curation, and publishing datasets. In addition, Purdue University Libraries is the home of the University Copyright Office, and staff there are available to assist with copyright, helping make sense of copyright transfer agreements. Purdue Scholarly Publishing Division staff members are also available to assist with most scholarly communication questions.

Purdue University Libraries support Open Access by offering services such as PURR (Purdue University Research Repository), and Purdue e-Pubs, Purdue’s institutional repository.

Purdue e-Pubs staff members work with individuals and departments across campus to provide “open” copies of articles that have been published by Purdue faculty and researchers. We also engage in campus-wide outreach, giving presentations on various topics relevant to scholarly communication.

The Purdue Scholarly Publishing Division offers a free mediated CV review service to Purdue faculty and researchers. Our staff will review sharing policies of the journals in which staff have published their research; and, for those that permit sharing, we will upload the articles on behalf of the staff members—with their written permission, of course. We will review copyright transfer agreements upon request, and we seek to find ways to make Purdue research freely available.

Q. What is your role in regard to Open Access resources at Purdue?

Collins: Within the Scholarly Publishing Division, I am the go-to person for scholarly communication and Open Access concerns. I manage Purdue e-Pubs, engage in outreach, and collaborate across departments to help researchers find the right service for each scholarly communication concern.

Purdue University Libraries, which is an institutional member of SPARC, supports many Open Access initiatives including DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), HathiTrust, the Open Textbook Network, and SCOAP3.

We are institutional members of BioMed Central—qualifying all researchers at Purdue a 15 percent discount on article processing charges for BioMed Central journals. We are also institutional members of MDPI, qualifying all researchers at Purdue a 10 percent discount on article processing charges for publishing in MDPI journals.

Purdue University Press and Scholarly Publishing Division publishes several completely Open Access journals, and we are proud to have publications selected for “unlatching” by Knowledge Unlatched.


For more information, visit www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess or contact Collins at nkcollin@purdue.edu.