The Ames Library joins libraries, museums, scholars, and scientists in celebrating efforts to provide open and equitable access to scholarship and scientific research during Open Access Week 2019.
“Open Access,” according to SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), of which Illinois Wesleyan University is a member, refers to “the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.” While early discussions of open access focused on access to research-based articles, the movement now encompasses open access to scholarly monographs, textbooks, and data sets through related work around “open data” and “open educational resources.” The Ames Library has made a long-term commitment to promoting open access as part of its core commitments to equity, educational affordability, pedagogical innovation, and promotion of our students’ education as content creators and managers of their own intellectual property rights. In the contemporary information environment, an understanding of the commercial environment surrounding one’s own intellectual work, as well as one’s right to manage one’s own copyrights and personal data, is an essential component of a liberal education.
Students and faculty wishing to learn more about open access, to employ open access resources in their classrooms, to share their work through open channels, or to integrate education about open access into their student learning goals, can find resources through the library’s guides to open access resources and open educational resources. You can also make your own work “OA” by contributing it to our digital repository, Digital Commons, which houses the work of IWU faculty, as well as undergraduate research projects, journals and other peer-reviewed work, and more. If you would like to integrate education about copyright, scholarly communications, or the movement toward “open” in science and scholarship into your courses, please contact Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Collections and Scholarly Communications Librarian, or your liaison librarian.
