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University of Calgary
10 Key Things About Open Access and Open Access Week
Open Access Week 2010 - October 18-22
- Open Access (OA) involves making scholarly content available online, free of charge and without
- OA mostly deals with journal articles but, increasingly, there are other formats that are openly accessible including open monographs and open data.
- There are two "roads" in Open Access, the "green" road and the "gold" road. The green road involves Open Access repositories (OARs), like the University of Calgary's institutional repository, while the gold road is Open Access publishing.
- There is openly accessible material in every subject.
- OA content is not free to produce. It still has to be paid for in some way. There are a wide variety of methods in place for paying for OA.
- OA material gets more views and downloads and there is evidence to suggest that it is cited more often than non-OA material.
- Open Access is a good news story: It makes scholarly information available to everyone, it makes publicly-funded scholarly information available to the people that paid for it (most research in Canada is funded by tax dollars), and it saves trees (OA material is all online).
- Always keep OA resources in mind when helping users. Check sources such as Google, Google Scholar, and OAIster to find OA articles and other material.
- LCR supports OA through several programs: The Open Access Authors Fund, the institutional repository, the University of Calgary Press, digitization activities, and the Synergies project.
- Open Access Week 2010 runs from October 18 through October 22. LCR will be celebrating OA Week in many ways. Keep your eyes and ears open for details of the activities that week.