International Open Access Week 2024
Memorial University Libraries is celebrating International Open Access (OA) Week from Oct. 21-27, 2024. Open Access is a global movement to make scholarly research more easily discoverable and accessible by removing subscription and login barriers. This year’s theme is “Community over Commercialization” and highlights the need to prioritize OA research in order to best serve the needs of the public and academic community.
How does Memorial University Libraries support OA? Memorial University Libraries has a number of OA initiatives designed to enhance visibility, discovery, and the impact of faculty and student research at Memorial University:
- Discovery and infrastructure - Developing a robust open scholarly network requires funding, and the library continues to invest in the global OA community. In the past decade, the library has supported the development of key OA tools, organizations and resources to increase the visibility of the work produced by MUN researchers. For example, SCOPA3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) is a partnership of 3,000 libraries, funding agencies, research institutions, and intergovernmental organizations across the globe to convert key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to open access. Another example is DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) which is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
- Open Journal Systems (OJS) – Memorial University Libraries are supporting faculty and student journal publishing with our electronic journal hosting.
- Memorial’s Research Repository is an OA platform to showcase and preserve Memorial’s creative and intellectual output. More information about our research repository.
- Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning resources that either exist in the public domain, or have an open license like those provided by Creative Commons. OERs provide students with no-cost access to course texts, and allows other instructors to use, adapt and redistribute with no, or very few, restrictions. Newfoundland and Labrador is collaborating with the other Atlantic provinces to invest in a 3-year pilot program that will fund efforts to increase the creation, adoption and adaptation of OER at publicly funded post-secondary institutions across Atlantic Canada. More information about OERS.
- Open Research Data Management - libraries are providing key opportunities and expertise to advance research through the creation and integration of workflow support, research data management tools, and technical infrastructure to support reearch data curation. More information about Borealis.
- The OA Author Fund - Memorial University Libraries created the first OA Author fund in Atlantic Canada in 2011. Over the past decade, the Libraries have invested over one million dollars covering APC costs for Memorial researchers, and continue to invest in broader negotiated transformative agreements and memberships that include discounts or waivers of APC charges for Memorial researchers. More information on the OA Author Fund. More information about APC Discounts.
Visit our OA library guide for more information.