The University of Michigan Library is celebrating the sixth annual Open Access Week beginning Oct. 21 with a lineup of workshops and events highlighting university projects, research, and policies that allow the public to access and reuse the results of scholarly research.
This year’s Open Access Week theme is “Redefining Impact,” which speaks to the potential reach of, as well as new evaluation methods for, open access scholarship. The library’s slate of events covers a range of topics, including copyright, the practicalities submitting articles and promoting published open access work, and editing Wikipedia articles.
The opening keynote address will be delivered by Brandon Weiner, co-founder and Executive Director of Creative Rights, at 4 p.m. Monday in the Hatcher Library Gallery. Creative Rights is a non-profit that provides free legal, educational, and project coordination services for Michigan artists and creators. Brandon will discuss “the practical and existential obstacles encountered when implementing projects with strong open access principles.”
The week’s events close with a talk by Mike Buschman, co-founder of Plum Analytics, a company building the next generation of metrics for scholarly research, at 10 a.m. Friday in the Hatcher Library Gallery. Buschman will discuss Plum’s work to collect, analyze, and visualize alternative metrics for academic research institutions as well as scholarly publishers and individual researchers.
Learn more about Open Access Week 2013 at tinyurl.com/k39vvu8.
Gold for Gold program
While open access literature is free to users and is generally less expensive than traditional publishing methods, it isn’t always free of charge to authors, who pay article publication fees, commonly called “page charges.”
The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced a Gold for Gold program that enables researchers to publish their papers in RSC journals free of charge, as Gold Open Access articles, without paying an article publication fee that typically runs about $2,600 per article. As an RSC Gold package subscriber, the U-M Library has more than 20 voucher codes to distribute on a first come, first served basis to U-M authors.
Chemistry Librarian Ye Li says that the RSC program is a promising initiative to encourage more researchers to publish their articles as open access. “We hope it gives researchers the opportunity to experience the benefits of open access publishing, which makes a very positive contribution toward broader information and data sharing in the sciences.”
Each voucher code can be used to publish a communication, full paper, review or technical note. The article must be authored by at least one researcher at U-M, not previously published, and accepted for publication in an RSC journal.
Li says that authors should request a voucher as soon as their paper is accepted by an RSC publication. Requests are processed in the order they are received; and you can check voucher availability at any time.
“This program can benefit researchers in Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Life Sciences, and many areas in the Pharmaceutical Science and the Medical School,” says Li.
