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October 19th, 2020
By: Nina Collins, Scholarly Publishing Specialist
As we begin our celebration of Open Access Week 2020, it is important to define what Open Access means and why it matters at Purdue University.
Open Access, in the broadest sense, is free and immediate access to scholarly literature, coupled with re-use permissions. Open Access does not require subscription fees. Anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, or re-use Open Access scholarship, regardless of whether or not they have the ability to pay subscription fees. Open Access content is immediately available to everyone. This immediacy helps to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and creation of new scholarship. In this way, Open Access also helps to encourage innovation and enrich education.
According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), “Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education form a broad Open Agenda that is critical to accelerating the way we discover knowledge and unlocking our potential to solve big problems and make new discoveries.”
Never has the necessity to accelerate scientific discovery and solve big problems been more important than it is in 2020. “On 30 March 2020, UNESCO hosted an online meeting of representatives of science ministries of 122 countries to exchange views on the role of international cooperation in science and increased investment in the context of COVID-19. During the meeting, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay called on governments to reinforce scientific cooperation and integrate open science in their research programmes to prevent and mitigate global crises”. (reference) On April 7, 2020, the Executive Committee of the German Commission for UNESCO released a statement calling for global open scientific cooperation in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The release emphasized that open science is a question of survival and is necessary to overcome the pandemic (reference).
The benefits of Open Access scholarship reach beyond the pressures of discovering solutions to the current pandemic. Open scholarship has numerous advantages for teaching and learning. If an educator cannot access scholarly works, they can’t teach it. If students cannot access it, they cannot learn it. A 2015 report from UNESCO, titled, Rethinking Education: Towards a global common good, stated, “. We must consider not only how knowledge is acquired and validated, but also how access to it is often controlled and, therefore, how access to it can be made commonly available”(79).
At Purdue, Open Access helps fulfill our land-grant mission. Open Access Scholarship can more readily be accessed and taught, it can speed up discovery and innovation, and can help with engagement by ensuring access to all. To support the myriad benefits available to scholars who publish their work openly, Purdue Libraries established Purdue e-Pubs, our institutional repository for scholarly works. Launched in 2005, Purdue e-Pubs currently hosts more than 76,000 Open Access documents. These works have been downloaded more than 22 million times across the world. With the current focus on virtual teaching and learning throughout the world, Purdue e-Pubs downloads have increased more than 25% this year.
Filed under: general, OAWeek2020, Open_AccessJanuary 18th, 2017
Purdue University Press Book Previews is a new initiative from the Purdue University Libraries Scholarly Publishing Division and their open access text repository, Purdue e-Pubs. PUP Book Previews, created from the first proofs of the book to include several pieces of the front matter and first chapter, will provide an early look at forthcoming books.
To begin this new initiative, PUP has posted previews of books from very late 2016 and forthcoming books for early 2017. New books will be added monthly to coincide with the 25 new books published by Purdue University Press annually.
The first five previews posted are:
The Writers, Artists, Singers, and Musicians of the National Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association (OMIKE), 1939 – 1944 by Frederick Bondy
From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood by Vincent Brook and Michael Renov
Leaders of the Pack: Women and the Future of Veterinary Medicine by Julie Kumble and Donald F. Smith
Advances in Research Using the C-SPAN Archives by Robert X. Browning
Mishpachah: The Jewish Family in Tradition and in Transition by Leonard J. Greenspoon
Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with new previews and information from Purdue University Press.
Filed under: Open_AccessJanuary 18th, 2017
Purdue University Press Book Previews is a new initiative from the Purdue University Libraries Scholarly Publishing Division and their open access text repository, Purdue e-Pubs. PUP Book Previews, created from the first proofs of the book to include several pieces of the front matter and first chapter, will provide an early look at forthcoming books.
To begin this new initiative, PUP has posted previews of books from very late 2016 and forthcoming books for early 2017. New books will be added monthly to coincide with the 25 new books published by Purdue University Press annually.
The first five previews posted are:
The Writers, Artists, Singers, and Musicians of the National Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association (OMIKE), 1939 – 1944 by Frederick Bondy
From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood by Vincent Brook and Michael Renov
Leaders of the Pack: Women and the Future of Veterinary Medicine by Julie Kumble and Donald F. Smith
Advances in Research Using the C-SPAN Archives by Robert X. Browning
Mishpachah: The Jewish Family in Tradition and in Transition by Leonard J. Greenspoon
Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with new previews and information from Purdue University Press.
Filed under: Open_AccessOctober 22nd, 2013
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue e-Pubs, one of the three institutional repositories as part of Purdue University Libraries, has reached another significant milestone, hitting 5 million downloads this past month.
A key collection piece downloaded as part of this milestone is the Birck and NCN publication series, one of the most popular and highly utilized collections housed in Purdue e-Pubs, which has seen more than 281,000 downloads to date. The 5-millionth download was an article from the Birck and NCN publications series, “Conductance Asymmetry of Graphene p-n Junction,” by Tony Low, Seokmin Hong, Joerg Appenzeller, Supriyo Datta, and Mark S. Lundstrom.
As part of Open Access Week, Oct. 21-27, the Mark Lundstrom, Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, will be awarded the Open Access Research Award on Oct. 25 for his leadership in creating NanoHUB, a radical departure from traditional forms of scholarly communication in nanotechnology with a strongly open access character. Lundstrom also is a co-author on the 5-millionth article download.
For faculty wishing to make their work available through Purdue e-Pubs and start receiving monthly download counts, visit: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/openaccess/getstarted. For center directors and others interested in more formal publishing options, repository specialist David Scherer, dscherer@purdue.edu, is available for consultations.
About Purdue e-Pubs
Purdue e-Pubs is a service of the Purdue Libraries, providing free global online access to Purdue-affiliated articles, reports, conference proceedings, student scholarship, and more. Purdue e-Pubs also provides online publishing support for original publications.
About the Birck and NCN Publications Series
The Birck and NCN Publications Series contains more than 1,400 publications authored by members of the Birck Nanotechnology Center and the Network for Computational Nanotechnology. Formed in 2007, the Birck and NCN collection of publications was one of the earliest collections in Purdue e-Pubs and has become one of its most popular collections to date. The collection of publications in Purdue e-Pubs serves a portal into some of the important and fascinating research being conducted at Purdue on nanoscience and nanotechnology from these two centers.
Contact: Dave Scherer, scholarly repository specialist, Purdue e-Pubs, 765-494-8511, dscherer@purdue.edu
Filed under: general, Open_Access, press_release, RSRCH, scholcomm