International Open Access Week 2023

Open Access provides UND faculty an opportunity to expand access to their research by publishing their scholarship barrier-free online. An important outcome of Open Access is that it couples immediate online access with appropriate scholarly citation and credit.

International Open Access (OA) Week 2023 takes place from October 23^rd through October 29^th. This year’s theme, “Community over Commercialization”, focuses on which practices work and which don’t when promoting open scholarship to the public and academic community.

The purpose of OA Week is to raise awareness around Open Access publishing. For the past 15 years, this event has been regularly held to encourage Open Access as a more prevalent form of publishing. Organizers for the event include SPARC and the International Open Access Week Advisory Committee. This is a time for researchers and academics to promote and share what they know about Open Access and to raise awareness around key issues the scholarly publishing community is facing.

In 2018, the University of North Dakota University Senate approved an Open Access Statement of Support. UND supports Open Access in a couple of different ways:

• Read and Publish Agreements – these agreements allow UND faculty to publish OA at no additional cost. They also allow the authors to keep their copyright. While it’s still going the for-profit publisher route, these agreements minimize or eliminate the financial burden to faculty that arises with Article Processing Charges (APCs). UND currently has these three Read and Publish Agreements:
  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is already in place and will cover all ACM Digital Library articles, including research articles, review articles, and conference or proceedings papers.
  • Cambridge University Press (UP) allows UND authors to publish Open Access without additional cost in any Cambridge UP titles. Researchers can also retroactively change the status of their article to Open Access.
  • Springer Nature is still being finalized through Lyrasis, but is expected to go into effect January 1, 2024 and to cover hybrid open access Springer Nature journals. The agreement would include over 2,000 hybrid journals from Springer, Palgrave, Nature Academic, and ADIS, but would exclude Nature branded journals, BioMedCentral (BMC) journals, and gold open access journals.
• Subscribe to Open (S2O) Agreements – In this type of agreement, academic libraries use their journal subscription funds to support the journal transitioning to open access.
  • Annual Reviews – converts new volumes to open access once they have determined sufficient funding through subscriptions has been achieved. Their model does not require any author fees. They have seen article usage double or triple after conversion to open access.
• Other Agreements Supporting Open Access Publishing
  • Astronomy & Astrophysics offers a 10% discount on page charges for UND authors.
• The UND Scholarly Commons – UND’s institutional repository
  • An institutional repository is an online archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of an institution’s scholarly content. The UND Scholarly Commons makes over 35,000 items available to the global community. There have been over 3 million downloads since 2017.
• Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) membership
  • HELIOS brings together leadership from different US colleges and universities to work together in promoting a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem. This is a cohort of colleges and universities that are committed to advancing open scholarship on their campuses.
  • HELIOS defines open scholarship as “an expansive term meant to encompass the rapid and widespread sharing of a range of scholarly activities and outputs, across disciplines.”

Open Access publishing emerged as an alternative to the traditional journal publishing model. Researchers often forfeit their copyrights in the traditional journal publishing model, and their work remains behind a paywall. This limits who can read and access scholarly works that are beneficial to advancing society. We have seen a recent shift in OA publishing where traditional journal publishers are profiting from the Hybrid Open Access model. Article Processing Charges (APCs) can cost anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars. This creates a barrier for authors who wish to publish their work Open Access. The School of Medicine and Health Sciences Library Open Access Week post goes into more detail on how for-profit publishers have opted into OA. Librarians are recommending that researchers have a conversation around Open Access and how publishing influences our scholarly conversations and access to information.

UND has been very active in supporting Open Access. We want to continue increasing awareness and having conversations with researchers about how OA publishing can increase the impact their work has on the global community.

If you are interested in learning more, please feel free to reach out to Brittany Fischer, Scholarly Communications Librarian, at brittany.fischer@und.edu.