Happy Open Access Week!

Open Access Week is here! There are lots of great events across the university this week, check out our Open Access Week 2013 page to see them all.

And of course there’s a dizzying array of blog posts, news, tweets, and other information about OA activities around the globe this week. Here are two that caught our eyes:

Open Access guru Peter Suber wrote a terrific article in The Guardian this week called Open Access: Six Myths to Put To Rest, a must-read for any open access fan who advocates for OA in their department, college, university, or profession.

Sarah Werner, a digital humanist who works at the Folger Shakespeare Library, wrote a great post on her blog about negotiating her contributor’s contract for a book chapter she authored. As Barbara Fister’s Library Babel Fish column in today’s Inside Higher Ed reminds us, book chapters often fall through the cracks when we talk about OA, and it’s great to see folks trying to free their work in books as well as journals.

Happy Open Access Week to all! Please share your thoughts, strategies, and observations in the comments.

Two Open Access Week Programs @ City Tech

The Ursula C. Schwerin Library @ City Tech is delighted to offer two events during Open Access Week this year.

Textbooks: Why is there a problem? What are some solutions?

What are the problems with textbooks? Why do students sometimes resist buying and reading them? How is the landscape of textbook publishing changing, and how can we take advantage of new strategies and platforms to ensure that our students have access to high quality curricular materials? Come to this Open Access Week workshop to learn more about open educational resources! You’ll hear from faculty across the college who use these materials in their courses, and learn more about library resources and support for open educational materials.

Wednesday, October 23, 1-2pm
Faculty Commons, Namm Building, Rm N227

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Open Access Happy Hour: Open Access for the Arts

Using or producing creative works in online environments requires artists and scholars to work with a set of nuanced (and complicated) copyright, license, and use guidelines. Find out ways to use public domain and open access resources in your creative work, how open access advocates are working to protect the rights of artists in online environments, and how artists, technologists, and policy makers are working together to create avenues for sharing and collaboration in the information age. We’ll also discuss how content creators can license and share their own work.

Thursday, October 24, 4:00-5:30pm
Faculty Lounge, Atrium Building, Rm A632

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Open Access to Scholarly Literature: Which Side Are You On?

120x240You are invited to the first event in the Information Interventions @ CUNY series!

Open Access to Scholarly Literature: Which Side Are You On?
Friday, October 25, 2013
10am – noon
The Graduate Center
Rooms C201/C202 (Concourse Level)
Refreshments will be served

Open access (OA) to scholarly literature recently hit a major milestone: Half of all research articles published become open access, either immediately or after an embargo period. Are the articles you read among them? What about the articles you write? Are the journals to which you submit open-access friendly? What about the journals for which you peer review? Are there any reasons why the public should not have access to the results of taxpayer-funded research?

Jill Cirasella (Associate Librarian for Public Services and Scholarly Communication, Graduate Center) will explain the motivation for OA, describe the details of OA, and differentiate between publishing in open access journals (“gold” OA) and self-archiving works in OA repositories (“green” OA). She will also dispel persistent myths about OA and examine some of the challenges to OA.

Please RSVP by Friday, October 18 to Jill Cirasella or Maura Smale. This event is sponsored by the LACUNY Scholarly Communications Roundtable and JustPublics@365.

And that’s not all! There are more Information Interventions @ CUNY coming up!

Save the Date for our upcoming event on predatory journals and conferences!
Friday, November 15, 2013
10am-noon
The Graduate Center
C203/C204 (Concourse Level)

And stay tuned for Spring 2014 events about open educational resources and the controversy surrounding dissertations and open access!

This workshop is being offered as a part of Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2013). For more information about the problems with traditional journal publishing and the promise of open access publishing, and to learn about Open Access Week events across CUNY, visit https://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.