Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

International Open Access Week

November 1st, 2022

International Open Access Week is upon us! Open Access removes “reader pays” access barriers to scholarly research, allowing wider dissemination, access, and use of scholarly works. Scholarly research published using an Open Access pathway is free for anyone to read and reuse. International Open Access Week is an opportunity for academic and research communities to learn about the benefits of Open Scholarship and inspire wider participation in Open Access.

Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies provides support for Purdue authors to participate in Open Access. Through a series of Open Access Publisher Partnerships, Purdue authors can choose to publish openly—at no cost to themselves–in journals managed by our publishing partners. This includes journals published by PLoS, Cambridge University Press, Association for Computing Machinery, and Wiley. In addition, Purdue authors can apply for funding from the Open Access Publishing Fund to cover article processing charges (APCs) in journals that make all their content immediately Open Access. For approved applicants, this fund will cover up to $2,500 toward APCs while funds are available. Details, as well as a link to apply for funding, are available at https://www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess/fund. Questions and requests for in-person question and answer sessions about these agreements can be directed to Nina Collins, Scholarly Publishing Specialist, nkcollin@purdue.edu.

In addition to providing support for born-open scholarship, Purdue Libraries provides support for Green Open Access—archiving works on the institutional repository—and retroactive opening of gated scholarship. A vast majority of publishers support Green Open Access sharing policies. These policies allow authors to post their works to Purdue e-Pubs, the institutional repository for Purdue University. The Purdue e-Pubs team offers a free, publisher sharing policy review service. The team reviews sharing policies of publishers, provides a list of your works that can be opened, and will manage all the uploads and publisher fine print. Purdue authors who wish to retroactively open their works can email a list of publications, or a link to one, to epubs@purdue.edu to request this free service.

Scholarly works posted to Purdue e-Pubs are freely available to a global audience and auto-indexed in Google Scholar, increasing discoverability. Authors receive monthly auto-notices that include COUNTER-compliant usage statistics and access to the Author Dashboard. This provides insights for authors such as where their work is being downloaded and how frequently. Purdue e-Pubs also includes a PlumX Analytics integration. PlumX is an altmetric tracking tool that collects mentions of individual works on social media, blogs, news sites, and more. The Unpaywall browser extension further enhances discoverability of works in Purdue e-Pubs by directing users from the publisher’s version of record to our Open Access version. For further information on Purdue e-Pubs, Green Open Access, or to request a free review of your publications, contact Nina Collins or epubs@purdue.edu.