Open Weeks

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn about the benefits of Open and inspire wider participation to make Open a new norm in scholarship, research and education. Open is the movement to remove access barriers to educational and research materials. Open resources are freely accessible (meaning they are not behind a paywall), and they may also be shared with open licenses. Open licensing moves away from the standard copyright model of “all rights reserved” to a model of “some rights reserved.” In other words, when creators share their work with an open license, it reduces the number of rights that they retain and allows the work to be used more freely by others. The concept of Open can apply to any kind of work: images, video, music, software, journal articles, books, data, textbooks and other educational materials. 

Open access:

• Promotes accelerated discovery, allowing researchers to read and build on findings without delay or restriction.
• Provides an alternative to high-cost, unsustainable commercial publishing.
• Removes paywall barriers, enabling more equitable access for students and researchers throughout the world.
• Satisfies requirement of many public and private funding agencies to make articles open access.

Learn more about the benefits of open access from SPARC Impact Stories.