It’s Open Access Week! Oct 22-28, 2018

It’s International Open Access Week! We’ll have librarians out at Perkins and Lilly Libraries a few times this week to talk about it, but if you don’t catch up with us that way, here’s a glimpse of what’s on our minds.

What is Open Access?

Open Access is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly research. At Duke, we put knowledge in the service of society. This means making the fruits of Duke research available as broadly as possible — to anyone who might benefit from the scholarship being done here. You can read about Open Access at Duke here.

Paywall (The Movie)

Come to a screening and panel discussion of Paywall: The Business of Scholarship on November 5, 7:30pm, at Rubenstein Arts Center von der Heyden Studio Theater. More details are here.

Big News Out of Europe

In July 2018, there was a joint announcement by Science Europe, various European national research funding organizations, and the European Commission. Dubbed Plan S, it stated that, “from 1 January 2020, all scholarly publications resulting from public research funding must be published in Open Access journals or on Open Access platforms.” In September 2018, a group of funders launched cOAlition S, an agreement to implement the 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way. Find out more about this important development: http://scieur.org/coalition-s

Supporting Duke Authors

Duke COPE Fund

The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) seeks to reduce barriers by underwriting publication fees for authors who want to make their scholarly articles available in an open access journal. Duke’s fund supports faculty, graduate students, and postdocs publishing with fully open access publishers.

Duke Open Monograph Award

Part of the larger collaborative project called Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem, this award funds Duke faculty members to publish open access scholarly books through more than 60 of the world’s leading university presses.

Duke Open Access Repositories

Duke Libraries supports sharing scholarship openly through two repositories, which are open to any Duke researcher: DukeSpace for publications and the Research Data Repository. These repositories preserve your work for the long haul and provide a persistent link that you can put on your website or share with colleagues. See instructions for submitting publications to DukeSpace here and policies and procedures for research data here.

Consultation

In addition, the library has resources to help you understand and negotiate your publishing contracts, so that you can retain the rights to distribute your work and use it in your teaching. Book an appointment through copyright-questions@duke.edu.

Investing in the Open Publishing Ecosystem

Another way that Duke University Libraries supports open access publishing is by setting aside 1% of our collections budget for open initiatives. The following are just some of the projects and organizations the Libraries contribute to:

Knowledge Unlatched: provides open access to books in various disciplines

Open Library of Humanities: publishing platform that supports journals from across the humanities disciplines

arXiv: preprints database for physics, math, computer science, statistics, and computational disciplines

If you’re interested, you can read more here.

You can contact us any time (not just during Open Access Week!) to talk about these issues. Reach out to your subject specialist librarian or write to open-access@duke.edu.