In honor of Open Access Week, visit the Libraries for a special exhibit that profiles a few of the many Temple University faculty members who are committed to reaching a wide audience with their research. These faculty come from different disciplines, schools, and colleges, yet they all believe that scholarly information deserves to be read and used beyond the walls of the academy.
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.