Open Access Week

NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATE: 10/9/09

CONTACT: LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION COORDINATOR, (413) 545-0162

LIBRARIES AND OIT HOST OPEN ACCESS WEEK

"Advancing the Sharing of Knowledge"

Amherst, MA - The first international Open Access Week, October 19-23, includes talks on copyright issues for instructors, open access journal publishing, graduate student publishing, finding copyright-free images, and using open educational resources in the classroom. The Students for Free Culture will host a launching party. All events are free and open to the public. For a full schedule of events: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/oa/2009/.

In 2008, 120 campuses in 27 countries celebrated Open Access Day. October 19-23, 2009 will mark the first international Open Access Week. Over 100 international institutions are registered to participate.

"There's no more certain sign of the momentum behind Open Access to research than an annual, global celebration of this scale," said Heather Joseph, executive director, Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition. "Occasions like this are the best possible way to attract attention from busy faculty members and administrators."

Open Access is the principle that research should be made freely available via the Internet, especially in the case of publicly funded research. Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and often free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Students for Free Culture (http://freeculture.org/) is an international chapter-based student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and information & communications technology policy.

Research has shown that providing open access to scholarly work dramatically increases the number of times the work will be cited in the future. Faculty can provide open access to their work by participating in ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, the University's digital repository, a service provided by the UMass Amherst Libraries.

Open Access Week is sponsored by the UMass Amherst Libraries and the Office of Information Technologies. For more information, contact Marilyn Billings (mbillings@library.umas.edu, 545-6891), or see: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/oa/.

Last Edited: 9 October 2009