Week to promote advantages of open-access scholarship

In less than a year since the launch of the Scholarship at UWindsor institutional repository, users have made almost 75,000 downloads, reports information services librarian Dave Johnston.

“Faculty, graduate and undergraduate researchers have helped Scholarship at UWindsor have a very successful inaugural year,” he says. “The repository is now home to over 5,000 documents including published journal articles, theses, dissertations and conference proceedings and presentations from events like the International Symposium on Arab Youth.”

It’s one of the campus projects he plans to showcase during the seventh annual Open Access Week, promoting the practice as a new norm in scholarship and research. With a theme of “Redefining Impact,” observances run October 21 to 27.

The open-access movement promotes making scholarly literature available for free on online, maximizing its accessibility and impact while still being compatible with key features of scholarly research like peer review.

Johnston says open-access literature makes publicly-funded scholarship accessible to a wider audience rather than just to institutions that can afford to subscribe.

“This can be beneficial for developing countries, not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, other academic institutions, and members of the public that may not have access to this research,” he says.

Other activities he highlights are the launch of Windsor Studies in Argumentation, an open-access monograph series by the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric; and a session Friday entitled “A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Ecosystems.” Led by Mita Williams, it is open to the campus community and begins at noon October 25 in room 302W, Leddy Library.

Read a pamphlet by Johnston on the library’s open-access activities and how they can help support UWindsor research; follow the Leddy’s activities this week on its website.

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