Open Access Opens Windsor to the WorldOctober 20 to 26 is International Open Access Week.

Open Access Opens Windsor to the World, says librarian

Making its scholarship freely available opens the University of Windsor to the world, says information service librarian Dave Johnston.

“It is a perfect theme for International Open Access Week,” he says.

Open Access literature is digital material available online, free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Running October 20 to 26, the week draws attention to the benefits of Open Access to research and seeks to make it the new norm in scholarship.

Johnston says the Leddy Library and its campus partners have been active participants in the movement for years. He points to the publication of several Open Access journals and books, including Informal Logic, Collected Essays on Teaching and Learning, and Windsor Studies in Argumentation, and notes that collection will soon add the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice.

“These scholarly publications are accessible to anyone in the world online without a pay-wall, helping to increase the impact of the work and ensuring anyone can benefit from it,” he says.

Also, Scholarship at UWindsor is home to thousands of publications from various sources form faculty members and students at the University of Windsor. The repository is optimized for discovery in Google Scholar and so helps to showcase Windsor scholars and their work to the world.

The Leddy Library and the Office of Research and Innovation Services are preparing to help Windsor researchers understand and meet the requirements of a Canadian Tri-Agency Open Access Policy, expected to be announced this week. For more information, visit Johnston’s discussion page on the policy.

He invites readers to visit all of the library’s OJS journals, Scholarship at UWindsor, or its open access pages. To learn how to make a journal, conference or publication available open access, contact him at djohnst@uwindsor.ca.