Open Access Week 2018

This year’s Open Access Week theme reflects a scholarly system in transition. While governments, funders, universities, publishers, and scholars are increasingly adopting open policies and practices, how these are actually implemented is still in flux. As open becomes the default, all stakeholders must be intentional about designing these new, open systems to ensure that they are inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community.

Setting the default to open is an essential step toward making our system for producing and distributing knowledge more inclusive, but it also comes with new challenges to be addressed:

How do we ensure sustainability models used for open access are not exclusionary?
What are inequities that open systems can recreate or reinforce?
Whose voices are prioritized? Who is excluded?
How does what counts as scholarship perpetuate bias?
What are areas where openness might not be appropriate?

This year’s theme highlights the importance of asking the tough questions, staying critical, and actively engaging in an ongoing conversation to learn from diverse perspectives about how to make scholarship more equitable and inclusive as it becomes more open.

International Open Access Week is an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research—to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives. The global, distributed nature of Open Access Week will play a particularly important role in this year’s theme. Strategies and structures for opening knowledge must be co-designed in and with the communities they serve—especially those that are often marginalized or excluded from these discussions.

International Open Access Week is an important opportunity to catalyze new conversations, create connections across and between communities that can facilitate this co-design, and advance progress to build more equitable foundations for opening knowledge—discussion and action that must continue throughout the year, year in and year out.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion must be prioritized year-round and integrated into the fabric of the open community, from how our infrastructure is built to how we organize community events.

UTA Open Access Week 2018 Schedule

Thursday, October 18 1:30 – 3:30pm 6th Floor Parlor Central Library	Tableau's Impact in the Business Analytics Space CANCELED
Friday, October 19 Rio Grande, University Center	4th Annual Research Integrity Symposium This symposium will focus on Reproducibility and Rigor in Research. Registration is required!
Friday, October 19 1:00pm - 2:30pm 315A Central Library	Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) We'll define OER, examine the impact of OER use in higher education, discuss copyright and open licensing, and explore avenues for identifying existing OER that can be remixed and reused. Michelle Reed, Open Education Librarian
Monday, October 22 All day event UTA Central Library	Awareness Day Visit the UTA Central Library to learn about Open Access and how "open knowledge" impacts your future.
Monday, October 22 1:00pm - 2:00pm 315A Central Library	Getting Started with Pressbooks for Open Educational Resources (OER) We'll review examples of OER created using Pressbooks and discuss basic features of the platform, including importing and exporting content, cloning, adding images, formatting text, and embedding multimedia. Michelle Reed, Open Education Librarian
Tuesday, October 23 12:30 - 2:00pm 6th Floor Parlor Central Library	Paywall the Movie Watch the trailer: https://www.paywallthemovie.com/trailers Producer/Director Jason Schmitt highlights the current climate of scholarship in this documentary production focusing on the business of research. Bring your lunch, watch the movie, and participate in the discussion led by Michelle Reed, UTA Libraries Open Education Librarian. Popcorn and drinks provided
Tuesday, October 23 3:00pm - 4:00pm 315A Central Library	Pressbooks and Open Educational Resources (OER): Options for Interactivity In this hands-on session, we’ll discuss using H5P and Hypothes.is to increase engagement and interactivity of OER developed in Pressbooks. Michelle Reed, Open Education Librarian
Wednesday, October 24 12:00 – 1:30pm 6th Floor Parlor Central Library	Highlighting Underrepresented Voices Via Open Access: A Panel Discussion Join us for this informative discussion focused on the collaborative work of UTA Libraries Publishing Program and UTA students and faculty that spotlights historically underrepresented voices in scholarly publications. Dr. Visnak will moderate the program and provide a broad overview of open access and how it increases the diversity of voices in the scholarly record. Dr. Reinhardt will describe the important work of the McNair Scholars Program, which prepares undergraduates from low-income/first-generation or under-represented backgrounds to enter the professoriate, and introduce three featured McNair Scholar speakers who will be published in this year’s edition of the UTA McNair Scholars Research Journal. Dr. Watson will discuss her work as coeditor on the journal Publication of the Afro-Latin American Research Association (PALARA), which until 2017 was a subscription-based print-only journal. Both journals are now published as open access titles in digital format by the UTA Libraries Mavs Open Press, and panelists will discuss their experiences with and thoughts on how open access can lead to greater diversity and opportunities for both authors and readers of scholarly works.
Wednesday, October 24 2:00 - 3:00pm 315A Central Library	Boost Your Scholarly Profile & Increase Your Research Audience Workshop presented by Brooke Troutman, UTA Libraries Scholarly Impact & Social Sciences Librarian • Do you need help creating a scholarly profile? • Are you interested in expanding your scholarly impact? You will be introduced to a number of tools and resources to create and manage your scholarly identity. You’ll learn how to boost your scholarly impact using social media and how to make sense of alternative metrics that come with these new methods of knowledge communication and dissemination. Light refreshments provided
Thursday, October 25 10:00 - 11:30am 6th Floor Parlor Central Library	Panel Discussion: Open Access + Wikipedia The Trouble with Disability: Wikipedia’s Problem with “Neutrality” and “Reliability” Dr. Olivia Banner, UT Dallas This talk describes a Wikipedia editing project undertaken by undergraduates in my Health, Disability, and Media course. Wikipedia’s systemic bias around gender and race is well-documented; less so is its bias around disability, and even less discussed is that its core principles sit uneasily with core principles in disability studies and activism. I will explain how, in light of this, my class edited key disability-related pages. Incorporating HERstory into Wikipedia: Examining Gender Bias on the world’s encyclopedia Samantha Dodd, SMU/UTA This talk examines the problematic gender bias found in Wikipedia’s content and also its content creators. I will also explain the steps taken by UT Arlington Libraries and the Department of Women and Gender Studies in 2018 to develop programming and instruction on editing, expanding, and creating new content on Wikipedia related to these minority groups. Continental breakfast provided
Thursday, October 25 1:30pm - 2:30pm 315A Central Library	Introduction to R and Rstudio Workshop presented by John Connolly, UTA Statistician, and Nitin Kanwar, UTA Libraries Research Data Services Graduate Research Assistant
Friday, October 26 All day event UTA Central Library	Advocacy Day Visit the UTA Central Library to learn about Open Access and how "open knowledge" impacts your future.
Friday, October 26 10:00am - 11:00am 6th Floor Parlor UTA Central Library	How to Get Started: Basics of Creation and Copyright Emilie Algenio, TAMU Are you wondering about the best way to create a presentation, an online module, or an OER, and deal with copyright issues? Join Emilie Algenio, Texas A&M's Copyright/Fair Use Librarian, for a discussion about different ways you can keep it legal. Light refreshments provided
Friday, October 26 12-1pm	Year in Review: Recent Copyright News Emilie Algenio, TAMU This session will cover the major copyright news in the last twelve months, including the Marrakesh Treaty and new copyright resources. Light refreshments provided
Monday, October 29 2:00pm - 3:00pm 315A Central Library	Pressbooks and Open Educational Resources (OER): Ensuring Accessibility We'll discuss UTA Libraries' process for evaluating OER for accessibility and highlight proactive steps content creators can take to ensure OER created in Pressbooks are accessible for all students. Michelle Reed, Open Education Librarian

What is Open Access?

According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), open access:

Is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
Ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.
Is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research.

Advantages of Open Access

Open Access seeks to return scholarly publishing to its original purpose: to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not prevent students (or anyone) from getting access to research they need. Open Access, and the open availability and searchability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the practice of medicine to the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.

Research is useless if it’s not shared: even the best research is ineffectual if others aren’t able to read and build on it. When price barriers keep articles locked away, science cannot achieve its full potential.
Open Access ensures students get the best possible education and are not artificially limited by the selection of scholarly journals their campuses are able to provide.
The current system puts students from smaller schools at a disadvantage: due to the staggering price of journal subscriptions, not even the largest, most well-funded institutions can provide their students with the complete scholarly record.
Researching beyond the degree: many students pursue degrees in order to become qualified researchers. Whether they become professors, doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs, they will continuously rely on access to research in order to make an impact in their respective field. Yet, students' access to journals expires along with their library card at graduation. If they take a job at another university, that institution may have a very different level of access than what they need, and if they take a job outside of the university setting, they will no longer have the library to provide them access to journals.
Better visibility and higher impact for your scholarship: Studies have shown a significant increase in citations when articles are made openly available.
Developing countries are home to the same groups that require access to research in order to thrive (students, researchers, doctors, etc), but they often face much steeper access barriers. While many institutions in the developed world can afford journal budgets of several million or more dollars, institutions in developing countries make do with a fraction of that budget.
Access to the latest research speeds innovation: price barriers prevent small businesses from accessing and utilizing cutting-edge research.
Return on our investment: making research publicly available as soon as possible allows other researchers to build on new ideas as soon as they are published. To have the greatest possible impact, the research we fund as taxpayers must be made available to the largest possible audience to make use of and build upon new ideas.
Shorter publication processing time. The processing time for open access articles is shorter and accepted articles are rapidly published online compared to those of traditional journals.
For further information visit, The Right to Research Coalition, http://www.righttoresearch.org/

What We are Doing to Support Open Access

The workshops listed above are great opportunities to engage in conversations around Open Access.
UTA Libraries is also supporting Open Access by ensuring the preservation of scholarly work in our digital repository, the ResearchCommons.
Through the UTA Libraries publishing service, Mavs Open Press, we establish and publish new open access journals or move traditional journals to our platform like the International Journal of Research on Service-Learning in Teacher Education.
Mavs Open Press can also help you publish your book in open access, digital format. Whether it's a scholarly monograph discussing high-level research or a less formal work that focuses on teaching practice or other topics.
And, we have joined the Open Textbook Network to increase access to freely available textbooks.

For more information, see our Open Access Publishing Guide, Scholarly Communication Website, or email library-sc@listserv.uta.edu.

Or, talk with your UTA subject librarian, https://library.uta.edu/subject-librarians.