University Library News
Georgia State University

Open Access Week is Oct. 21-25

Open Access LogoThe Georgia State University Library will celebrate Open Access Week October 21-25, 2013.

“What’s open access?,” you ask.

According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, open access scholarship is characterized by “…free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”  Simply put:  open access has as its goal the democratization of information access, but is also fully compatible with scholarly practices such as peer review, attribution, and intellectual property.

Those interested in learning more about how technology is ushering in a new age of scholarship characterized by the free exchange of impactful ideas should plan on attending these events, which will be held in Library Classroom 2 on LN2:

  • Open Access Week Kick-Off Event, sponsored by SPARC and the World Bank, Monday, October 21, 2013, 3-4:30pm
  • Jeffrey Beall talks about Scholarly Open Access Publishing and the Peril of Predatory Publishers, sponsored by the Georgia Knowledge Repository, Tuesday, October 22, 2013, noon-1:30pm
  • The State of Open Access with Peter Suber, sponsored by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, Wednesday, October 23, 2013, 2-3pm
  • Digital Initiatives Librarian Sean Lind hosts a discussion of your “Copy-rights” and open access, Thursday, October 24,2013, 3-4pm

For more information about open access, please visit research.gsu.edu/openaccess, and to see Georgia State University’s very own open access electronic theses and dissertations, select faculty publications, journals, and conferences, please visit the institutional repository, ScholarWorks.