This article is from the archives of the UB Reporter.
Electronic Highways

Celebrate Open Access Week

Published: October 14, 2010

The fourth annual Open Access Week, the global event to promote free, immediate, online access to research, will take place Oct. 18-24, and the University Libraries will be celebrating with a series of presentations that can help you better understand how open access is impacting the scholarly communication landscape.

Bob Schatz of the prominent open access publisher BioMed Central will kick off Open Access Week at UB with an overview of how open access is impacting the scholarly communication landscape. BioMed Central is one of the most highly regarded, open access academic journal publishers. With library budgets shrinking and research output increasing (both in cost and volume), it is becoming increasingly important that scholars become aware of the viable alternatives for disseminating their research. (10-11:30 a.m. Oct. 18, B-15 Abbott Hall, South Campus)

Charles D’Aniello, history librarian at UB, will discuss Open Access eBooks. Electronic book (eBook) publishing) is rapidly evolving and this session will highlight past, current and planned initiatives—including open access publishing—that will make eBooks more accessible. Google Books, as well as a variety of digital eBook efforts, promise great benefit for the public good, but many intertwined issues remain, among them financial sustainability, the role of copyright law, permanence in the online environment and control of access. (3:30-5 p.m. Oct. 19, 212 Capen Hall, North Campus)

Four open access journal editors will describe their experiences starting, running and editing open access journals. Speakers are Christopher Hollister, editor of Communications in Information Literacy; Pamela Jones, editor of the Journal of Library Innovation; and Cayden Mak and Olivier Delrieu-Schulze, editors of a.version. (3-4:30 p.m. Oct. 20, 435 Capen Hall).

Dean Hendrix, coordinator for education services for UB’s Health Sciences Library, will describe new and improved ways for scholars to measure the value and impact of the research they publish. The UB Libraries subscribe to dozens of individual resources that list publications from talented UB faculty and researchers. Collectively, these resources provide a compelling look at faculty publications, and may be of value when assembling materials for promotion and tenure consideration. This lecture will offer insight into such tools as Web of Science, Google Scholar and the Journal Citation Reports so researchers can better understand the contribution their work has made to the scientific literature. Further, the lecture will address the quantifiable citation advantages of publishing in open access journals. (10 a.m. to noon Oct. 21, B-15 Abbott Hall)

Gregg Gordon, president and CEO of the Social Science Research Network, will present a brief history of how scholarly communications have changed in recent years and outline an approach for using online communities to produce innovative results. As the amount of scholarly research increases each year, simply providing access to epic amounts of content is not enough—online communities also need to increase the efficient use of information. This session will describe some of the user-focused tools, such as article level metrics, that online scholarly communities offer to empower scholars to be more efficient and effective in their research activities. (1-2:30 p.m. Oct. 22, Special Collections Research Room, 420 Capen Hall).

For more details about these events, visit the UB Libraries website.

—Laura Taddeo, University Libraries