October 10, 2023
International Open Access Week 2023: Celebrating Open Scholarship
See all UW Libraries Open Access Week Events
International Open Access Week, observed each October since 2008, is an opportunity to learn about and celebrate our collective momentum in building a more open and equitable system for sharing knowledge.
The theme for this year’s Open Access Week (October 23–27) is “Community over Commercialization.” Rooted in ongoing professional and public concerns about consolidation within the scholarly publishing industry and publishers’ continued efforts to monetize scholarly outputs by extending their control of all aspects of the scholarly publishing ecosystem, the theme “encourages a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not.”
Open Scholarship
What is “Open Scholarship?” Also referred to as “Open Science,” “Open Research,” and “Digital Scholarship,” Open Scholarship is an expansive worldwide, interdisciplinary, and inclusive movement among researchers, scholars, learners, universities, libraries, and funders intended to ensure that research results and scholarly works of all kinds are shared openly as soon as possible for the benefit of the public good.
- On the one hand it encompasses rapid, unrestricted, and open access to scholarly works in all formats, open research data, the ability to reproduce and verify research results, and encourages an open infrastructure that values community over commercialization.
- Open Scholarship also integrates traditional scholarly methods with new and emerging technologies to question and investigate traditional scholarly paradigms and utilize new methods of working. Examples of this aspect of Open Scholarship include open publishing, community-engaged research, text analysis, data mining, visualization, modeling and simulation, geospatial analysis and mapping, multi-modal storytelling, network analysis, and mark-up.
Open Scholarship at UW
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The University of Washington community has long embraced and exemplified the principles of Open Scholarship. In 2018 the faculty of the University of Washington adopted an Open Access Policy intended to make their peer-reviewed scholarly articles freely and widely available to the people of Washington and the broader research community. In the fall of 2022 the University joined a growing body of peers in the Higher Education Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS), a coordinated effort to align higher education practices with open scholarship values. This strategic decision not only aligns with local institutional values and open initiatives, but also helps position the University to respond to upcoming federal research funding policy changes requiring immediate public access to published research results and the data supporting them, especially those from the National Institutes for Health and the Office of Science, Technology, and Policy. These changes in federal policy will require federally funded authors to share their research articles and supporting research data freely and publicly upon publication. This will be especially important for a research-intensive institution like UW, which in FY23 was awarded $1.52 billion in federal funding. The work funded by the grants, in turn, resulted in thousands of peer-reviewed articles and underlying data sets.
The Libraries’ 2023-2026 Strategic Plan affirms that “UW research attains its greatest impact on our most pressing global challenges when we advocate for open, public and emerging forms of scholarship.” The UW Libraries has centered and integrated the importance of Open Scholarship as a guiding principle into our strategic thinking and practice, helping to influence and shape our programs and initiatives over the past decade.
Open Scholarship Commons
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OSC Tech and Work Spaces:
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One of the most successful and visible examples of how the Libraries is supporting Open Scholarship is our new Open Scholarship Commons (OSC) space and its supporting services.
The OSC’s mission is to be “an interdisciplinary set of spaces and services intended to advance open, public, and emerging forms of scholarship. It provides opportunities for scholars, creators, and learners from diverse backgrounds to learn from each other and build the skills necessary to co-create, share, translate, and make the impact of their research visible to the world.” One of its primary goals is to serve as a campus hub to help build community and capacity. In its first year, nearly 1,000 people attended OSC events that explored trends and perspectives around different aspects of open scholarship and its importance to sharing research for the public good.
Initially begun as a virtual space and service in the fall of 2020, this past summer the Libraries was able to create a physical space to complement our online presence with the help of funding from UW’s Programmatic Renewal Fund and the Libraries Catalyst Fund for Innovation.
Located on the first floor of Suzzallo Library, the Open Scholarship Commons is an attractive and interdisciplinary set of spaces and hybrid services dedicated to knowledge creation and digital and open scholarship. The OSC offers a wide range of in-person and online workshops, events, and consultation services to build skills and inspire our UW community to co-create, share, translate, and make the impact of UW scholarship visible to the world.
We’re very excited to welcome new students, faculty, and staff into the space this fall!
Open Access Week at UW
We invite everyone to join us during the week of October 23-29 to celebrate Open Access Week and Open Scholarship. You can find a schedule of UW Libraries events with descriptions and registration information on the newly redesigned Open Scholarship Commons webpage.
Here’s a preview of what we have planned:
Hacking the Academy: The Adoption of Open
Monday, October 23, 2023
10-11am
Online
UW Theses and Dissertations
Tuesday, October 24
2-3pm
Online
Open Education Resources 101: Find and Create Affordable Course Materials
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
2-3:00pm
Online
Reading the Fine Print: a Workshop + Hackathon on Privacy and Terms of Service for Common Research and Classroom Tools
Thursday, October 26, 2023
1-2:30pm
Hybrid – OSC and Online
Seattle Research Software Engineer Meetup
Thursday, October 26, 2023
3-5:00pm
Hybrid – OSC Space and Online
Creative Commons Workshop
Friday, October 27, 2023
10-11:00am
Online
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