Open Access Week is an annual global event organized by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). Targeted to the academic and research community, Open Access Week provides opportunities to to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to provide a platform to share information about local and global  Open Access initiatives, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

Learn more about Open Access Week

Letting the Foxes Guard the Henhouse: For-Profit Publishing and the Corruption of Open Access

Presenter: Clayton Hayes, Digital Publishing and Learning & Research Support Librarian

The Open Access (OA) movement was originally intended to push back against high subscription costs of scholarly journals and came to be seen as a way to increase equity in the world of scholarly publishing. Instead, it has instead been co-opted by for-profit academic publishers to extract ever-larger sums from researchers and institutions. By discussing the parallel development of library OA and for-profit OA, I hope to contextualize Article Processing Charges and Read-and-Publish Agreements as “Open Access” systems which preserve the status quo (in favor of for-profit publishers) and reinforce existing inequities. This presentation is intended for a librarian audience, however, all who may have interest in learning more about open access and equity are welcome to attend

Open Access is an Equity Issue

Presenters: Cheryl Ball, Director of Digital Publishing and Joshua Neds-Fox, Coordinator of Digital Publishing

Library publishing primarily takes the form of digital publishing through open access, which means that research is made freely available to read with as few barriers as possible beyond basic internet access. From a library publisher’s perspective, open access publishing is an equity issue because it promotes the accessibility of research to audiences beyond the confines of economic indicators (i.e., who, or whose institution, has the financial resources to pay for the heavily inflated commercial subscriptions that most academic journals fall prey to). In addition, open access publishing often means that who gets counted as a researcher can be expanded, and what counts as scholarship is greatly expanded in ways that promote equity, diversity, and inclusion far greater than the market-driven methods that print-based scholarship allows. DEI effort are fundamental to many library publishers, not just through open-access publishing but also through the recognition of and necessity for change within the discipline and practice itself. Librarianship and publishing are both majority-white disciplines (89 and 87%, per Inefuku and Roh, 2016, https://repository.usfca.edu/librarian/8/). So, in early 2021 when the Library Publishing Coalition's (LPC) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Task Force published their Roadmap for Anti-Racist Action (https://librarypublishing.org/roadmap-for-anti-racist-practice/)--a guiding document with short-, mid- and long-term actions that LPC can undertake to advance equity in its organization, communities, and in library publishing as a discipline—it provided a moment for Wayne State University’s library publishing unit to reflect on how such a document could be adapted to promote anti-racist and more equitable publishing practices in our own organization. At the same time, other groups and organizations were creating similar action-oriented documents, such as the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications’s (C4DISC) Joint Statement of Principles and a group of researchers from the field of technical communication who authored a statement on Anti-racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. This session will outline the mission of open-access publishing within libraries with a focus on anti-racist and DEI efforts and discuss how these organizations’ equity statements and guidelines offer a pro-active foundation for authors, reviewers, and editors to develop strategic anti-racist and anti-oppressive initiatives in their own spheres of influence

Getting Started with Open Educational Materials (OER)

Presenter: Veronica Bielat, Student Success Librarian

Creating and adapting open education materials for teaching provides educators with the opportunity to bring forward voices and communities that are underrepresented in commercially published textbooks. This workshop will introduce participants to the MI ExplOER, a self-paced free online course focused on exploring the basics of OER, guidance on adapting and creating, understanding Creative Commons licensing, and Michigan OER initiatives and projects. Those who complete MI ExplOER receive a certificate for their efforts. Build your confidence and understanding of OER and how it can support your individual teaching goals.