Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012

Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012.

We wrote last month about Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries.  The last full week of October is designated as Open Access Week, an initiative to educate about and promote open access journals.  From the  Open Access Week website:

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth 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.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Some open access resources:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – Search or browse open access quality-controlled journals.
• OAIster – Now an OCLC WorldCat catalog of millions of open access resources.
• Open Archives Initiative – Develops and promotes standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of scholarly content including OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE.
• Registry of Open Access Repositories – Search or browse repositories by country, system type, repository type, and deposit activity.
• SHERPA/RoMEO – Classifies (by color) and describes publishers’ general policies on self-archiving of journal articles.
• Wikipedia – Introductory information and background article on Open Access.

Some useful open access journal sites:

• Bentham Open – Over 230 peer-reviewed open access journals in science, technology, medicine, and social sciences.
• Cloud Journals – Open access e-journals in science, technology, engineering, medicine, art, humanities, and management.
• International Scientific Publications – Five peer-reviewed open access journals in science.
• Journal of Digital Humanities – Quarterly peer-reviewed, open access humanities journal.
• Libertas Academica – Open access peer-reviewed medical and scientific Journals site based in New Zealand.
• MDPI – A platform for over 70 peer-reviewed, scientific open access journals.
• PLOS – Publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals in a variety of scientific disciplines.
• SAGE Open – Peer-reviewed, gold open access journal.
• Springer Open – Hundreds of peer-reviewed open access STM journals in BioMed Central and Chemistry Central.

Resources for open access repository software:

• Digital Commons – A hosted open access digital repository service by bepress.
• DSpace – Open source software to build open digital repositories.
• Open Journal Systems – Locally-hosted online journal publishing software from the Public Knowledge Project with a list of journals.
• OpenDOAR – A directory of 0ver 2,000 open access academic repositories.

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, has just published a book titled simply Open Access.  Read the book description and a preview on the MIT Press website.

Visit the Open Access Week website for more information.

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