This year’s Open Access Week is from October 19 to October 25. With the theme Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion, this year’s celebration of awareness is focused on making online access to scholarly work free, immediate, and permanent for anyone connected to the internet.
Defining Open Access
By publishing research licensed for Open Access, authors can make their work free while retaining its copyright. Removing legal, technical, and financial barriers makes it easier for students, scholars, and communities to interact with and learn from published research.
“When authors start to create literature, what they often want to do is to have their work benefit the world,” said Anastasia Chiu, scholarly communications librarian. “Barriers to information access limit this goal quite a bit, so having open materials moves scholarship into becoming more about engaging with information.”
Many published works—including self-published articles—are licensed for open access, although they sometimes do not use the “open access” label. Since the start of this movement, publishers have begun to market their journals as entirely open. There are two ways to publish work openly. Gold Open Access refers to access provided through a publication that is open by default, whether journal or monograph. Green Open Access refers to access created by authors who self-archive, often with an institutional repository such as NYU's Faculty Digital Archive.
Costs Associated with Free Research
Open Access promotes broader connections to research by removing price and permission barriers. Seventy to 75 percent of Gold Open Access publication models result in free resources for both author and reader. Costs are usually covered in different ways, such as private funding or institutional memberships. For the other 25 to 30 percent, publishers charge varying rates depending on the journal’s popularity or importance to a particular discipline.
“Within the NYU Libraries, we really try to emphasize the fact that Gold Open Access is usually cost-free,” said April Hathcock, director of Scholarly Communications and Information Policy. “Because often when users find publishing opportunities associated with a cost, they think this is typical when actually it's not.”
Equity in Open Access
Every year the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) sets the theme for International Open Access Week. SPARC is a global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education. This year’s theme is meant to move beyond just access to address equity.
“Scholarly research has become privatized. Many institutions spend millions of dollars buying back the research of their faculty because of the profit margins publishers have put in place,” said April. “Open Access helps put the scholarship back in the hands of scholars.”
Associated costs sometimes cause additional issues with equity in research. Requiring payment to publish or to access other scholars’ work without institutional backing essentially blocks marginalized perspectives from the conversation, limiting the number of views and positions about a particular topic, said April.
“This means that all of the knowledge that we could be gathering and benefiting from is not there,” she said.
Resources from the NYU Libraries
The NYU Libraries’ KARMS (Knowledge Access & Resource Management Services) team is working to make Open Access materials discoverable through our catalog for a more straightforward search process. In tandem, the University is working on passing an Open Access policy and providing support to researchers committed to making their work available to students, other researchers, and communities at large.
“This is work that's been years in the making, and so many people have contributed to it,” said April. “The policy passed the Contract Faculty Senate Council unanimously last spring, and we’re now working through University governance to have the policy encompass all researchers at NYU. The goal is to make a University-wide commitment to Open Access.”
Learn more about available Open Access resources at the NYU Libraries at guides.nyu.edu/openaccess.
The New York University Division of Libraries is a global organization that advances teaching, learning, research, and scholarly inquiry in an environment dedicated to the open exchange of information. Stay connected, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
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