Open Access (OA) refers to research that is made freely available online. One of the most recent additions to the Library’s repertoire of Research Guides is the Open Access Guide which provides pointers to OA policies and resources and describes the ways in which a publication can be made openly accessible. An interesting feature of this guide is the aggregation of Open Access resources that are available through our A-Z database list which aims to highlight the resources that are openly accessible through the Library’s portal as well as on the web.
The Open Access movement aims to increase the number of freely available online resources. One recent analysis estimated that the OA movement now makes available about 78 million open access documents. With Open Access Week (October 22-28) approaching, we were interested in finding out how DePaul faculty, staff, and students engage OA and how many published in OA journals. To obtain an estimate, we consulted the Web of Science. According to this analysis, the College of Science and Health (51) and the College of Computing and Digital Media (13) have the largest number of faculty and students who published in OA journals (Figure 1). One noteworthy result was that Professor Leonard Jason, Director of the Center for Community Research, has authored a most impressive number of 81 articles that are openly accessible.
Open Access is employed differently across different disciplines and the Sciences have often led the way in the OA movement. The Web of Science data represents only one view onto the OA activities and interest of DePaul faculty, staff, and students. Multifarious aspects of OA are reflected in the multitude of colors that OA is associated with (more information is available here). Different colors refer to different author’s rights with respect to depositing a preprint and/or postprint version on their web site and institutional repository and also to the OA publication start date that sometimes starts with a preprint and sometimes with the actual publication date. One thing that ties together the different colors of OA is the need for an infrastructure that supports access to openly available scholarship and this infrastructure and the paths that lead to its creation has been a topic of many discussions and debates in both North America and abroad.
To hear directly from faculty and staff members at DePaul who published in Open Access journals and to mark the Open Access week this year, the DePaul University Library is organizing a roundtable discussion followed by a wine & cheese reception on:
Monday, October 22, 3:00-5:00pm
John T. Richardson Library
Idea Lab 2, Room 207
The roundtable discussion will feature Dr. Leonard Jason, Director of Center for Community Research, Dr. Pablo Gomez, Associate Professor and Psychological Science Program Director, Dr. Elizabeth E. LeClair, Professor of Developmental Biology, Dr. Douglas Bruce, Associate Professor and Chair of Health Sciences, and Dr. Jacob Furst, Professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media.
Faculty and staff with a story to share or questions to ask about Open Access are encouraged to attend and/or participate in the roundtable discussion. If you are interested in participating in the roundtable discussion, please email us at digitalscholarship@depaul.edu or contact your liaison librarian.