Image by openaccessweek.org, used under a CC-BY Attribution license.

This week (October 24-30) is International Open Access Week, an annual event encouraging students, faculty, librarians, and researchers of all kinds to consider and share the benefits of open access to scholarly literature, research data, and educational materials. Here at the Graduate Center Library, we make a special effort to spread the #openaccess message during #openaccessweek, but we like to think of every week as Open Access Week. Indeed, open access infuses our day-to-day work, both behind the scenes and in our interactions with students and faculty, all year long. Here are some of our recent blog posts, upcoming workshops, and 24/7 resources related to open access:

Recent Blog Posts

• Open Education and OERs: Moving Beyond the Jargon: A look at open educational resources (OERs) and the open pedagogy movement more broadly.
• Negotiating a Favorable Book Contract: Advice on negotiating a book contract that allows for more sharing, from Chief Librarian Polly Thistlethwaite, who, along with GC colleague Jessie Daniels, negotiated an author-friendly contract for their new book Being a Scholar in the Digital Era.
• FTC vs. “Predatory” Publishers: Explains the FTC’s recent charge against notorious “predatory” publisher OMICS. (See Beyond Beall’s List and Think. Check. Submit. for information about sussing out predatory publishers and evaluating journals.)
• Impact of Open Scholarship on Public Audiences: Provides a concrete example of how open access publications can reach and benefit new audiences.
• At Last, a Good, Long Look at Open Access for the Humanities: Not a blog post but a review (from the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, published on the CUNY Academic Commons) by yours truly of Martin Paul Eve’s book Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future.

Blog Oldies but Goodies

• Why You Should Ditch Academia.edu and Use CUNY Academic Works: Explains the benefits of posting your work on CUNY Academic Works, especially in contrast with Academia.edu and ResearchGate.
• Dissertation Dilemma: To Embargo or Not to Embargo?: Excerpts from a GC event that tackled the question of whether making a dissertation open access affects the author’s ability to publish the work as a book.
• Why Do Authors Boycott Elsevier?: A look at the reasons why Elsevier inspires anger and action among scholars. (Spoiler: It’s their exorbitant pricing and their author-unfriendly policies.)

Upcoming Workshops

• Lunchtime Open Access Week Webinars (Every day this week): Our friends at SUNY have organized a webinar series on open access and open educational resources. I’ll be presenting Friday on understanding and protecting your rights when publishing journal articles.
• Researching Publishing Opportunities (Nov. 9): This workshop will provide an overview of the multiple facets to consider when researching journals to which to submit your scholarship.
• Your Google Scholar Profile: Why to Create It and How to Fine-tune It (Nov. 10): Learn how to claim your Google Scholar profile, make your entries as correct and complete as possible, and interpret the citation metrics it provides. Also find out how to enrich your profile with links to the full text of your scholarly works.

24/7 Resources

• CUNY Academic Works: CUNY’s public access repository, brimming with GC theses, dissertations, and capstone projects and publications and research from across CUNY, as well as a growing number of CUNY-made open educational resources. (For more information, see the library’s guide to Academic Works.)
• Open Access Research Guide: The GC Library’s freshly reworked guide to open access publishing.

GC Librarians at the Ready! Wondering who you can talk to about open access and scholarly communication more generally? It’s one of our favorite topics! We encourage you to reach out to any of us:

• Polly Thistlethwaite, Chief Librarian (pthistlethwaite@gc.cuny.edu)
• Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication (jcirasella@gc.cuny.edu)
• Adriana Palmer, E-Resources & Institutional Repository Librarian (apalmer@gc.cuny.edu)
• Roxanne Shirazi, Dissertation Research Librarian (rshirazi@gc.cuny.edu)
• Any of our subject librarians!

What Can You Do?

• Commit to Putting Open in Action: A list of a few simple, concrete steps you can take to open up research and scholarship and encourage others to do the same.