This week was the fifth annual Open Access Week. Open Access Week is a global event dedicated to highlighting the importance of open access and other issues of scholarly communication.
What’s Open Access? It’s a movement to provide access to scholarship royalty free via the internet. Information published as Open Access is freely available to everyone–not just those who can subscribe to a journal or are affiliated with an institution that subscribes to the journal. Open Access publications can be scholarly and peer reviewed. Open Access publications can be a textbooks. Open Access publications can be novels. In short, Open Access publications can be anything, so long as they are freely accessible.
It doesn’t sound like much to subscribe to a journal or buy a book instead of accessing it freely, at least at first. But the importance of open access becomes more evident when we look at subscription costs. In 2011, for example, the University of Puget Sound paid more that $650,000 to provide access to journal literature. Individual subscriptions to journals can run to almost ten thousand dollars a year–and we simply cannot and do not subscribe to some of the most expensive journals. Still, you can see the consumer equivalence of some of the journals Puget Sound subscribes to here.
If you’d like to learn more about open access, Karen Rustad’s short video Open Access 101 provides a quick, clear introduction to the issues. If you’re curious about open access at Puget Sound, check out our 2011 guide to the issues, featuring Puget Sound faculty who have published in open access journals, reasons why you should care, and contact information.