Open Access Week 2013

Harvard is celebrating Open Access Week, an international series of events highlighting open access to research, and promoting open access as the new default for peer-reviewed scholarship and research.

This web page lists announcements already out, and the page will be updated with new announcements as we release them.


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Open Access Week 2013 At Harvard

October 21

Open Access Week 2013: Promoting Access to Federally Funded Research

Wasserstein Hall Room 4063
Harvard Law School
 12pm

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) and Harvard Open Access Project and Scott Lapinski, Harvard Medical School Digital Resources and Services Librarian and Open Access Liaison, are discussing the year-to-date progress in public access to federally funded biomedical research. This event is co-sponsored by the Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights, Office for Scholarly Communication, Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, Right to Research Coalition, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

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More Events

Peter Suber is also speaking remotely at an event at the University of Ljubljana (find a recording of the event here).

In a Georgia Tech interview, released on October, 21st, Peter Suber provides background on the open access movement, and in a Guardian Higher Education Network article, published on October 21st, Suber dispels six common open access misconceptions.

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October 22

Webinar, "Developing and Implementing Open Access Policies," 1pm. 

Sue Kriegsman, Harvard Library's Office for Scholarly Communication Program Manager and Ada Emmett, Head of the University of Kansas's Office of Scholarly Communication and Copyright, are leading a webcast for the Association of College & Research Libraries titled, "Developing and Implementing Open Access Policies." This interactive event will address elements of effective open access policies and their implementation. 

This webcast is now freely available here and slides are available here.

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More Events

Peter Suber is speaking at Brandeis University.

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October 23

The Univesrity of Florida and ASRL

Peter Suber is speaking remotely at an ASRL event. Find a recording of the presentation here.

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Register for an ORCID to identify your scholarship. 

Registration is quick, and once you have an ORCID you can unambiguously identify yourself with your work across disciplines and other identifying systems globally. 

In May 2013, Harvard became an institutional supporter of ORCID, "an open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers."

Because the theme of this year's Open Access Week is "Redefining Impact," the OSC would like to encourage Harvard authors to distinguish themselves with this unique identifier. 

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October 24

Explore Harvard's DASH

Read an article from DASH, explore our user stories, and write a highlight.

The OSC is also pleased to announce that Harvard's open access repository, Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), has reached an impressive milestone: the over 13,000 articles in DASH, which include work from almost 2,800 faculty across the disciplines in the eight schools with policies, have been downloaded over 2 million times globally.

Open access to this wealth of research has had a demonstrable impact on the diverse cross section of DASH users. Scholars and students, researchers and journalists, doctors and nurses, and social workers and parents from the world over have shared stories of how access to Harvard scholarship has touched their lives. 

Samples of these user stories are posted across campus this week, and may also be found here.

The OSC thanks the University community for participating in DASH and looks forward to continuing this effort of opening Harvard's research.

To celebrate having crossed this threshold, the OSC would also like to welcome the community to select work from DASH to highlight in the DASH features section. If there is faculty, student, or staff work that you would like to showcase, then please contact the OSC for more details. 

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October 25

Watch a video about open access.

Office for Scholarly Communication, 2013. Office hours: Alyssa Goodman. Harvard Library YouTube.

Office for Scholarly Communication, 2013. Office hours: Ben Finio talks about OA and science funding. Harvard Library YouTube.

Office for Scholarly Communication, 2013. Office hours: Faculty talk about Open Access. Harvard Library YouTube.

Office for Scholarly Communication, 2013. Office hours: Jonathan Zittrain. Harvard Library YouTube.

Office for Scholarly Communication, 2013. Office hours: Peter Bol. Harvard Library YouTube. 

Office for Scholarly Communication, 2013. Office hours: Peter Suber. Harvard Library YouTube. 

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Background

Harvard has been, and continues to be, a leader in the open access movement.

Since the unanimous vote by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to implement a school-wide Open Access Policy in February 2008, seven other Harvard schools - the Graduate School of Education, the Graduate School of Design, the Business School, the Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Divinity School, and, in November 2012, the School of Public Health - have adopted open access policies. The FAS policy was the first of its kind in the United States, and has served as a model for other institutions.

Harvard is dedicated to sharing its resources in other ways. Of note is the opening of more than twelve million Harvard Library catalog records in April 2012, and advocacy efforts on the national policy level. Harvard continues to champion the open distribution of scholarly knowledge both within and outside its gates. 

To this end, Harvard affiliates have developed and distributed the following resources, which provide information on the open access movement, open access policies, and open access journals: 

In June 2012, Peter Suber published Open Access. This book became openly available in June 2013, and during this year's Open Access Week, Peter Suber wrote a guest post on the evolution of the book for the MIT Press blog. 

In 2011, Stuart Shieber, the OSC's faculty director, and Peter Suber developed the "Good practices guide for open access policies." On October 23rd, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society released the first print and PDF editions of this guide.

Last, a collaboration between the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) and Open Access Society Publishers Association (OASPA) catalogs and maps open access journals from society publishers. An October 21st announcement by Peter Suber describes what is now the third edition of this project.

To keep up to date with news about open access, you can subscribe to the email feed from the Open Access Tracking Project here.