During the week of Oct. 20, NIU will present a series of lectures, panel discussions and other events to celebrate International Open Access Week 2014.
Now in its eighth year, International Open Access Week highlights the potential benefits that open access can bring to scholarly publishing and research.
Open access issues have come to the fore in Illinois since the passage in 2013 of the Illinois Open Access to Research Articles Act, which requires each public university in Illinois to develop a policy on open access to research articles by January 2015.
With the 2014-15 academic year well under way, many universities around the state are convening special task forces to research the various aspects of open access and, ultimately, to make a recommendation on how their university will further the open access goals laid out in the legislation.
In the spirit of increasing awareness and understanding of open access issues, the University Libraries, along with fellow sponsors Friends of NIU Libraries, POWRR and the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center, will offer a number of presentations.
Lorraine Haricombe
Some of the topics that will be covered include:
- An introduction to open access and the issues that surround it by Lynne Thomas, curator of Rare Books & Special Collections at NIU;
- Incorporating open educational resources into instruction by Tracy Miller, online teaching coordinator from NIU Faculty Development & Instructional Design Center;
- A presentation on how open access policies impact their institutions by Lorraine Haricombe, dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas and current chair of the steering committee for SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition);
- A view of open access from the individual, commercial and societal perspectives by Bob Schatz of Biomed Central, an online publisher of 265 peer-reviewed open access journals in the sciences, technology and medicine;
- Increasing the positive impacts of scholarly communication through open access by Dorothea Salo, faculty associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library & Information Studies;
- A panel discussion of where public universities of Illinois are in their research and preparation for compliance with the Open Access to Research Articles Act. The panel will also include the bill’s primary author, Illinois Sen. Daniel Biss.
All events are free and open to the public.
For more information, contact the co-chairs of the 2014 Open Access Planning Committee: Sharon L. Nelson at (815) 753-2021 or slnelson@niu.edu or Karl Pettitt at (815) 753-9495 or kpettitt@niu.edu.
