Open Access Week
October 23rd -29th is International Open Access Week (OA Week)! OA Week is an annual awareness-raising campaign for individuals and organizations across the globe to encourage and reflect upon efforts to increase open access to information - free, immediate, online access to research and the right to use information as needed. This year’s theme of Community over Commercialization “encourages a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community - and which do not.” You can use the official social media hashtag #OAweek to keep up with news and share your own.
According to open access advocates, “When commercial interests are prioritized over those of the communities that research seeks to serve, many concerning issues arise.” As we learned from Banned Books Week earlier this month, one current concern is rising calls for censorship. While the general public is continually against book banning, censorship efforts are often led by well-resourced individuals and special interest groups. Over 2,500 unique book titles were challenged in 2022 – a 38% increase from the prior year and the highest number of attempted book bans in the American Library Association’s recorded history.
Today, information is a commodity and a form of currency. A lack of access to accurate and timely information can significantly impact our health, well-being, and success as individuals and our larger communities. This has been made especially clear during the global COVID-19 pandemic, as vital information about disease spread and vaccination must be rapidly disseminated to support public health.
Commercial publishers control most scholarly information and require either an institutional affiliation or payment to be accessed. This creates an obvious disparity in who can benefit from information. Less obviously, however, it also has the potential to create bias in what information is published and made available in the first place. Commercial publishers are profit-driven, which can and does create bias in what research is deemed valuable and/or fit for wider consumption.
This OA Week, we, as members of the academic community, should ask ourselves some challenging questions. As consumers, what types of information resources do we prioritize? Recognizing we live in a capitalist economy, what type of publishers and vendors do we choose to support monetarily, and what does that say about our values? As creators, what types of information resources do we prioritize? Do we choose to share our creations? If so, where and how?
At the Libraries, as information professionals, we are regularly having these conversations and working to promote open access. Some of our efforts include our Read and Publish Agreement with Cambridge University Press, our institutional repository Digital Commons, and our membership and partnership in various OA efforts. While we have a long way to go, we are committed to prioritizing community over commercialization in scholarly communications.