Open Access Week 2011 is here and it’s already made an impact in the library world at large as well as with CUNY librarians.
I’m looking forward to today’s Author’s Rights Event at Brooklyn College as well as tomorrow’s Open Access Scholarly Publishing as Thought and Action panel at the Graduate Center. But I had to miss a few of the other events that have been happening across the CUNY campuses. Therefore, I’m wondering: what are the things you’ll be taking away from Open Access Week 2011? How can we share what we’ve learned this week with the CUNY community and with other colleagues out in the wide world of academic publishing–and beyond?
I thought this year’s OA Week @ CUNY was terrific, and I’m finding myself more full of optimism and energy about OA than in years past. Maybe it’s solidarity with Occupy Wall Street (which, as I’m sure everyone knows, has a library, of course!). Maybe it’s the continuous cheerful SMASHing presence of OpenAccessHulk on Twitter this week, reminding us to #OccupyScholComm. I think I’m going to need to print up more of our “Ask Me about Open Access” stickers so I can keep on wearing them.
To be more serious, it can be hard to keep up the momentum once OA Week is gone and there’s less publicity about open access issues happening. We can keep updating the blog and site here, of course, but let’s also keep thinking on ways to remind our colleagues and ourselves about OA publishing even once the season has passed. I’d love to hear other thoughts and ideas, too!
I totally agree (as usual!) with Maura: I feel that this year’s Open Access Week had a fresh urgency and that as a result OA is going to be at the very forefront of my mind all year long. And while we can’t have OA events every week, we can make OA part of our daily language and encounters. We can make it clear when we’re finding something because it’s OA, and we can make it clear what’s going on when we’re not finding something. We can make sure that students understand that the articles in our databases aren’t free and won’t be available to them when they graduate. We can repeat and repeat and repeat the health consequences of not having universally OA medical literature. We can talk to administrators and faculty leadership about the connection between OA and CUNY’s mission — and the importance of recognizing the added value of OA faculty contributions. We can and should talk talk talk whenever and wherever appropriate. However, we should also focus. If we only have 5 minutes to slip in an OA message, what’s the most important message for faculty? For administrators? For faculty governance bodies? For students? Let’s get them outraged about the problems. And then let’s get them focused on the solutions.