Open Access Week designed to remove barriers to knowledge
Open Access Week, a global event now entering its 10th year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
The theme for the 2018 Open Access Week, taking place Oct. 22 to 28, is “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge.” But what does “open” mean? How is it “open?” How does Open Access affect researchers?
The goal of Open Access (OA) is to remove barriers and increase transparency so that available knowledge, in the form of published works, can be freely examined, shared, used and reused.
The freeing of knowledge is an evolving process that is quite complex, and affects creators, processors and users of scholarly works. Issues at stake are legal, financial, ethical and more. There are no easy solutions, but the conversation must continue to provide maximum access to available knowledge in a financially sustainable way and, at the same time, ensure that disseminated works represent quality research that is transparent and methodically assessed by the community of peers in their disciplines.
Penn State spends millions each year to provide access to a large percent of the scholarly output via subscription programs, and supplemented by interlibrary loan as well as individual item purchases. The use of these materials is further restricted by copyright laws and licensing agreements; additional usage requires permission from copyright holders and often incurs royalty payments. Institutional budgets directly affect the availability of published information, and scholars at low-resourced institutions often do not have access to the published work that they need. Developing countries are at the mercy of publishers and their special access programs for low-income countries.
Many grant funding agencies require funded authors to make their publications openly available, using repositories like Pubmed Central. Institutions are also implementing Open Access initiatives to encourage faculty and researchers to retain permission (prior to signing the publisher’s copyright agreement) so that a copy of their work can be archived in their institutional repository. See information about the Open Access resolution passed by the Penn State Faculty Senate here. Publications with proper permissions can be archived at Penn State’s Scholarsphere.
The cost of textbooks for the learning community also continues to rise, and the financial burden is a barrier to education at all levels, especially since publicly funded education is not available worldwide. It is another area where discussions are ongoing to make provision of educational materials at low or no cost.
Open data – making research data openly available – is now a requirement by many funding agencies and/or publishers. The goal is to provide access to data for transparency and reexamination purposes. Datasets are stored in repositories built by government agencies, disciplinary organizations, and individual institutions. See Penn State’s data repository here.
With this international dialog, many positive outcomes have emerged. However, various bad actors have also surfaced. For instance, there are for-profit organizations with no regard for quality science and scholarship that charge author fees for publishing on an Open Access platform but do not provide the rigorous peer review process that is expected of quality work. Also, do not utilize or contribute to illegal repositories of stolen content, which is against Penn State policy and can also jeopardize personal as well as institutional network security.
For questions about Open Access at Penn State College of Medicine, contact Esther Dell at eyd1@psu.edu or 717-531-8633.
Penn State University Libraries has planned a series of events during Open Access Week to introduce various programs that support “Open” initiatives. These presentations can be found in the Library calendar.
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