During October 2015 the CUA University Libraries hosted three events to start people talking about open access.

How Open Access Benefits Faculty and Research; Open Access & Institutional Repositories; and Scholarly Publishing & the Open Access Ecosystem.

Rikk Mulligan, ARL provided overview slides and panel moderation for our third event; read the blog post from Kevin Gunn, CUA Coordinator of Religious Studies and Humanities Services.

Thanks to all who presented, all who came to the presentations and all those who asked questions! Questions came from university administrators and faculty and graduate students and librarians. Questions during the events ranged from – what is open access  – to mandates for open access – to levels of open access – to what will really increase the access, preservation and impact of a university’s scholarly output?

One question kept coming up in every event – how do we keep up with the evolving issue of open access? During the Scholarly Publishing event, the moderator, Rikk Mulligan from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) pointed to three headlines from last week:

From Martin Paul Eve, Academia.edu’s peer-review experiments 

From Kathleen Fitpatrick, Academia, Not Edu 

And, this announcement, Groundbreaking University of California policy extends free access to all scholarly articles written by UC employees

It is obvious from these articles and our events that open access conversations across the campus will continue!

 

— Kimberly Hoffman