It's Open Access Week!

This post appeared first on ANAMED blog the 24th October 2016

October 24–30: it’s Open Access Week!

This is a global event “to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what we’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research” (https://openaccessweek.org/).

To spread the word, we are running an informal event with two concise presentations to be followed by time for questions, comments, and discussion. We will discuss Open Access policy, its main goals, and some opportunities arising from it on Friday 28 October, at 11:00 at ANAMED. Çiğdem Yıldırım – Reference and Research Librarian at Koç University – will present a point of view from a Library and the author of this blog post (Néhémie Strupler) will expose a perspective from a Post-Doc researcher to open the discussion. Everyone is welcome to join the discussion.

What is Open access?

Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Why? Peter Suber said of (paid) researchers that “selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts.” (2012, Open Access, p. 2).

For those unable to attend and seeking more information, a good place to start is:

• The website of SPARC: https://http://sparcopen.org/
• One of Peter Suber’s books: Open Access (MIT Press, 2012) or Knowledge Unbound, Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011 (MIT Press, 2016) (To download see https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access and https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/knowledge-unbound)

How to do Open Access?

The easiest way is to choose to publish in an Open Access Journal. The Directory of Open Access Journals (https://doaj.org/) provides a curated list. For archaeology, there is a specific list at http://www.openaccessarchaeology.org/

Additionally, one of my favorite tools is the “Author Rights & the SPARC Author Addendum.” It is a legal agreement that helps you keep some of your author’s rights, even when you are publishing in a non-OA journal. Among other things, the Addendum will help you to legally:

• Distribute copies in the course of teaching and research,

• Post articles on a personal or institutional website,

• Create derivative works.

It is very quick, you just have to sign the Addendum, and return it with the agreement your publisher sends to you. Try it, it’s easy! This is only one solution among a lot of different possibilities (“Gold Open Access”, “Green Open Access,” etc…), which we will discuss on Friday, 28 October.