Open Access Week 2018

About Open Access

Diagram illustrating the benefits to Open Access publishing

Benefits to Open Access publishing. (Source: Danny Kingsley and Sarah Brown via Australasian Open Access Strategy Group – CC-BY license)

Open Access publishing is an ongoing effort to secure the intellectual and creative output of your community and create paths to broaden user access to articles, research, and other materials. Some scholarly publishing corporations use their ownership rights to maximize profit at your expense. The Open Access community employs an understanding of copyright law and some technological infrastructure to build a knowledge commons that is freely available to all.

Benefits to Open Access Publishing Include

  • Greater exposure for your work
  • The opportunity for other practitioners to apply your findings
  • Higher citation rates
  • Potential for your research to influence policy
  • The public’s ability to access your findings
  • Compliance with grant rules
  • Increased return on taxpayers’ money
  • The potential for researchers in developing countries to see your work

Learn more about Open Access at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Open Access Week 2018 Events at UNC, October 22-26

The University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will present a series of presentations and interactive events on our campus to promote Open Access efforts on our campus. UNC supports and celebrates community efforts to expand access to information and “to disseminate the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”

The series will coincide with International Open Access Week events going on in libraries and affiliated organizations all over the world.

We will tap into questions of information equity outside of academia that the Open Access community has worked to address. How do we make measurable steps toward information equity on a global scale? As we build and disseminate open resources for research and education, who are the underserved and what are their barriers to entry? International Open Access Week fosters a community uniquely suited to confront these questions, a network of stakeholders that spans continents and cultures.

We will explore the function and viability of the tools created using OA resources through this lens, recognizing that the work to answer these questions must be ongoing as issues continue to emerge and we work toward sustainability. We will highlight the WiderNet Project and its ongoing efforts to deliver offline libraries of both open and proprietary information resources to underserved groups.

We will update the calendar regularly as the week approaches!

Local Partners and OA Community

WiderNet @ UNC

The WiderNet project works to improve access to organizations, facilities, and communities with inadequate information infrastructure. A major piece of this effort is their eGranary program, which delivers large curated educational and research resource collections in an offline format to areas in the U.S. and abroad that lack broadband internet access, whether through economic, geographic, or political disadvantage.

International Open Access Week

Open Access Week is a global phenomenon involving thousands of libraries and other advocates. Tap into the international community supporting Open Access and see the various events and conversations surrounding this year’s theme.

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

SPARC is a global organization for the advancement–literally, the normalization–of open access, “committed to making Open the default for research and education,” through collaborative efforts among research, publishing, and funding groups as well as libraries and students.

Contact Us

For more information about the events, to get involved, or to learn more about Open Access at UNC in general, please contact Jennifer Solomon (jsolomon@unc.edu), Open Access Librarian for the University Libraries.