The Washington University Faculty Senate recently adopted a formal open access resolution that places renewed focus on the dissemination of new knowledge and asks WUSTL faculty to seek out publishers that share a vision of broad digital access to scholarly information.
But just how to get scholarly work to all who may wish to access it can be confusing. Publisher agreements vary, as do the open access options that are emerging. Questions abound, including those about peer review, “gold” and “green” open access, and the National Institutes of Health’s new public access policy.
Next week, WUSTL Libraries is offering a series of five sessions to answer these and other questions during national “Open Access Week,” celebrated from Oct. 22 to 28.
The five sessions are:
• “Don’t Sign Your Rights Away: Author’s Rights,” a 30-minute workshop at 12:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22, in the library at the Brown School. Social work librarian Lori Siegel will suggest ways to retain rights to freely use one’s work for scholarly, professional and teaching activities.
• “Perspectives on Open Access: Practice, Progress and Pitfalls,” a 90-minute webcast at 3 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22, at the Arc Presentation Room, Level A of Olin Library. The webcast will feature a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition and the World Bank. The webcast also will be freely available through World Bank’s live portal.
• “How to Make Your Research Open Access (Whether You’re at Harvard or Not),” another webcast, will be offered at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 23, via a Harvard University site. Open access advocates Peter Suber and Stuart Shieber will headline the session, answering questions and recommending concrete steps for making one’s work openly accessible.
• “Electronic Theses & Dissertations and Open Access” will be at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 23, in the Arc Presentation Room, Level A of Olin Library. Andrew Rouner, director of the digital library, and subject librarian Brian Vetruba will give an overview of the process for submitting an electronic thesis or dissertation at Washington University. They will discuss factors to consider when deciding on open access or restricted access for such work. Pre-registration is requested but not required.
• “NIH Public Access Policy Overview” will close out the week’s events at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 24, in the Arc Presentation Room, Level A of Olin Library. Cathy C. Sarli, scholarly communications specialist at Becker Medical Library, will present on this policy, which requires that NIH-funded investigators and scholars submit the final, peer-reviewed manuscript version of journal articles generated by NIH funding to its PubMed Central site. Pre-registration is requested for this session.
All events are free and open to public. Visit http://libguides.wustl.edu/oa1 or contact librarian Ruth Lewis at rlewis@wustl.edu or 314-935-4819 for more information.