Research Guides: Open Weeks: Open Access Week

Learn More About Open

Open Access (VCU Libraries guide)
Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
Open Educational Resources (VCU Libraries guide)
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and made available without copyright or licensing restrictions that limit how they are used.

Hit a Paywall?

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Reach an online article you can’t access? The EZProxy Redirect browser extension reloads the current webpage so that if VCU Libraries subscribes to the article or ebook, and you’re a member of the VCU community, you’ll be able to access the full text.

Unpaywall
Free Chrome add-on powered by a database of millions of legal, author-uploaded PDFs.

Open Access Button
Search the web for an open access version of a paper, and automatically request a copy from authors when one isn't already available.

Open Access Week 2023

What is Open Access Week?

Open Access Week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn about the benefits of open access, coordinate in taking action to make openness the default for research and education, and ensure that equity is at the center of this work.

Open access resources are freely accessible (meaning they are not behind a paywall) and 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 Week Website

Open Access Week Events

Hacking the Academy: The Adoption of Open

Monday, Oct 23, 2023, 1 - 2 p.m. ET

The University of Washington Libraries' Hacking the Academy series looks at the new ways in which research is produced, shared, archived, and reused. Join panelists as they converse around their work to support the adoption of open:

Ashley Farley, Program Officer of Knowledge & Research Services, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Vani Mandava, Head of Engineering, eScience Institute’s Scientific Software Engineering Center, University of Washington
Jenny Muilenburg, Research Data Services Librarian, University of Washington Libraries
Lauren Ray, Open Education Librarian, University of Washington Libraries

Open Access Journal Editors Panel: Fostering Community

Thursday, Oct 26, 2023, 11a.m. - 12p.m. ET

The University of Oklahoma Libraries will be hosting a panel presentation to bring together open access journal editors across disciplines with a shared commitment to community-driven publishing.

Dr. Cristóbal Salinas Jr. (Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity)
Dr. David McLeod (Journal of Forensic Social Work)
Dr. Joe Alberti and Genoa Davidson (The Alexander Journal).

The presentations will be followed by a question and answer period during which the audience will have the opportunity to learn more about the panelists’ experiences publishing open access journals in partnership with a university library.