International Open Access Week, a global event now entering its 12th year, is an opportunity for open access advocates to engage their communities to teach them about the potential benefits of Open Access. University Libraries wants to share what it has learned with you to help inspire wider participation in making Open Access the new norm in scholarship and research.
SPARC
Open Access Day began in 2007 as a partnership between SPARC and students who organized local events on a handful of campuses across the United States. Since then, International Open Access Week has grown exponentially. SPARC, a global coalition committed to making open the default for research and education, empowers people to solve big problems and make new discoveries through the adoption of policies and practices that advance open access, open data and open education.
Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the right to use those articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these resources. In the past 10 years:
- The cost of college has kept 2.4 million college-qualified high school students from obtaining degrees
- The average borrower owes more than $30,100 in student loans
- The average student budgets $1,230-$1,390 for textbooks and course materials over a school year
- 59 percent of students report that they have had to wait for their financial aid check to purchase textbooks.
Open Educational Resources (OERs)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain and have been released under an open license that permits access, use, repurposing, reuse and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions (Atkins, Brown & Hammond, 2007). The main framework of the OER initiative is centered around the 5Rs, that was developed by David Wiley (2014) to help define how OER can be used. Learn more about OERS by viewing University Libraries’ libguide located HERE.
The 5Rs of Openness
- Retain – the right to make, own and control copies of the content
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
