This week celebrates Open Access (OA), a global movement to ensure that research is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Peter Suber, OA rock star, defines it as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” (OA Overview) We support OA at IWU in a few different ways: first, by educating faculty, staff and students about their rights to share their work; second, by developing and maintaining Digital Commons @ IWU, our online archive of scholarship and creative activity; third, by supporting and hosting IWU’s undergraduate journals; and fourth, with memberships in the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA).
To learn more about Open Access and its core components, please check out the newly published HowOpenIsIt? brochure, developed by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SPARC, and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). (Kevin Smith’s blog post on “Three things OA is not” is also a great read!)
If you’d like to hear more about Open Access, Digital Commons @ IWU, or how you can share your work more openly, please let us know!
