Librarians are changing the world of scholarly communication for the better. In honor of Open Access Week, join us for a discussion of how Temple University Libraries are working to increase access to information. From helping the City of Philadelphia preserve open civic data, to digitizing and making freely available out-of-print Temple University Press books, learn about some of the different projects the Libraries are undertaking that support not just Temple students and faculty, but the global scholarly community.
Open Access Week is a yearly international celebration that aims to increase awareness about open access (OA). Most academic work is locked up behind a paywall, available only to those who are affiliated with a college or university. Libraries pay publishers millions of dollars a year to provide students and faculty with access to this content. However, many people from outside of the university community could also benefit from access to cutting-edge scholarship.
Acknowledging this, researchers have begun to look for different ways to make their work more widely available to the general public. OA scholarship is completely free to read and reuse. Researchers can make their work OA by publishing in an OA journal or by sharing a version of their article in an open digital repository (this is often called “self-archiving”). There are also a growing number of publishers who produce OA books and digital projects.