Since 2012, Virginia Tech's University Libraries have marked International Open Access Week with talks, panel discussions, and workshops to help faculty and students understand open access and the support for it that the library provides. Please join us!
Open Access Forum
Monday October 23, 6:00pm - 7:30pm | Newman Library Multipurpose Room
Optional for faculty: register for NLI credit
The Open Access Week kickoff event will feature a brief introduction to open access and its benefits and controversies, followed by a discussion with diverse panelists and the audience. Panelists:
- Karen DePauw, Dean, Graduate School
- Brian Hole, Ubiquity Press
- Sylvester Johnson, Assistant Vice Provost for the Humanities
- Marie Paretti, Professor, Dept. of Engineering Education
$150,000 Available to Publish Journal Articles
Tuesday October 24, 4:00pm-5:00pm | Newman Library 427
Optional for faculty: register for NLI credit
If you're writing an article for a scholarly journal, Virginia Tech Libraries will support the Article Publishing Charge (APC) of up to $1500 for publication in an open access (OA) journal. The fund also supports APCs for hybrid OA journals, if the publisher reduces institutional subscription prices. The Open Access Subvention Fund (OASF) is available to everyone In the VT community—faculty, staff, and students. In this session we will review Virginia Tech’s Open Access Subvention Fund award criteria, locate OA journals, and identify databases that help determine if the publisher meets the funding criteria. Bring your laptop or tablet and practice or create an OASF request with the fund manager at hand. At the conclusion of the session you will be in a good position to have your next article funded, which you can link to your résumé, annual activity report, or dossier for promotion and tenure/continued appointment. Come prepared to also learn more about the Libraries’ publishing services and VT’s draft open access policy.
Sharing Our Research: Exploring a Faculty Open Access Policy
Wednesday October 25, 2:30pm-3:30pm | Torgersen 3310
Optional for faculty: register for NLI credit
Faculty involved in governance at Virginia Tech are beginning to explore options for an open access policy, which would enable greater sharing of our research. This session, led by a member of the policy working group, covers the definition of open access, the policy rationale, benefits to faculty, how other universities have implemented policies, and the potential working details of a policy. Participants will learn about the current open access environment and have an opportunity to give feedback that would shape a potential faculty policy.
What Savvy Open Scholars Know and Do
Open Access Week Keynote Address by Dr. Lorena Barba
Associate Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University
Thursday October 26, 3:30pm-4:30pm | Newman Library Multipurpose Room
Optional for faculty: register for NLI credit
An open scholar’s work can be accessed and read earlier, and by more people. It can be quickly cited and built upon, and is more likely to have impact. Open access doesn’t require paying hefty author fees: savvy scholars use preprint servers, institutional repositories, and archival data repositories to make their work visible and public. ArXiv, born in 1991, is integral to the physical-sciences publishing tradition. In other fields, green open access with preprint servers is just taking off: bioRxiv, SocArxiv, EngrXiv, ChemRxiv, and others, are gaining acceptance. A large majority of journals now accept submissions previously deposited in preprint servers. Scholars who update their preprints post-peer review ensure their corrected articles are accessible. Archiving data and figures on data repositories to get digital object identifiers and an open license, then citing them in the manuscript, simplifies future reuse of the figures. Savvy open scholars are working to slash the hurdles for researchers to receive academic credit for all their output, including software and data. New-wave journals led by open scholars carry out double-open peer review, in public. Open scholars know about implicit bias in the review process, and seek to protect early career researchers and minority groups. They also scoff at metrics like the journal impact factor used to evaluate researchers, and work in their communities to change flawed promotion processes. The more savvy scholars invest in teaching their students about all this, planting the seeds of infrastructural change towards open science.
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