Open access week

Howard College Library Celebrates

OPEN ACCESS WEEK

In collaboration with ICT Division

The Marketing Group, in collaboration with ICT, is co-ordinating an Open Access Programme during the week 24th-28th October in an effort to promote this global effort. While developing the programme, our most frequent response was “What is Open Access?!”

So what is Open Access?
While the concept is still shaping itself, Open Access (OA) can be described as unrestricted online access to scholarly content such as journal articles, book chapters or monographs. The term has also been extended to include e-learning resources.

Peter Suber clarifies OA literature as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” and offers a useful Introduction to Open Access at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm dividing the concept into two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles: OA journals and OA archives or repositories.

Why is this significant?
Publishers tend to own the rights to articles published in their journals. Accessing, reading or using these articles requires permission from publishers and subscription fees. While researchers may access journals they need via their institution what they may not know is that the institution has often been involved in a complex web of often exorbitant fees and content licenses.

Paying for access to content makes sense in the world of print publishing, however, within a rapidly expanding electronic environment, it makes little sense to charge for content when it is possible to provide online access to all readers anywhere in the world. The Directory of Open Access Journals is available at http://www.doaj.org/.

What about Licensing and Copyright?
Open Access is facilitated by the Creative Commons License. Under this license, authors agree to make articles legally available for reuse, without permission or fees. Articles may be copied, distributed, or reused, as long as the author and original source are properly cited. After all, who wrote the article? Watch this YouTube video Open Access 101 to find out more about Open Access publishing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6wjh2I2Ggg&feature=related

To find out more about Open Access, ResearchSpace, OA Journal Publishing, OA e-Research Tools and UKZN OA Resources, visit Howard College Library during Open Access Week, 24th-28th October between 12h15 – 14h00. All staff, students and other interested visitors are welcome!
Link to programme