Library Gears Up for Open Access Week
October 7, 2014
The UC Merced Library will celebrate International Open Access Week, Oct. 20 through 26.
International Open Access Week is a global event for the academic research community that promotes the potential benefits of open-access publishing. Open access to information is the free, immediate, online access to scholarly research and the right to use and re-use those research results.
The library kicks off Open Access Week 2014 with a webcast hosted by World Bank and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Other events include a film screening of “Copyright Criminals,” and information tabling outside The Lantern. For event details, visit Open Access Week. We hope faculty and staff members and students will join us for these events.
The open-access movement is gaining momentum around the world. Based on a 2013 study funded by the European Commission, approximately 50 percent of scientific papers published in 2011 are available online and free to the public.
The University of California recently lent its weight to the movement by passing an open-access policy. The policy covers more than 8,000 tenure-track UC faculty members, and as many as 40,000 publications a year, ensuring the university’s research output will be made available to the public at no charge. The policy will be implemented at UC Merced in November.
For more information about the UC open-access policy, visit the Office of Scholarly Communications Policy FAQ page or contact Susan Mikkelsen, scholarly communications and instruction librarian, at smikkelsen@ucmerced.edu.
