International Open Access Week this year is October 23-29, and the Scholarly Communications team is taking open access on tour the month of October! We are planning to connect with faculty at different campus locations through a series of office hours and pop-up mini-events. These ‘tour stops’ are opportunities to raise awareness, highlight library services, and build relationships with faculty who are interested or already involved in OA publishing.

Stop by to ask questions and learn more about Open Access, scholarly publishing, Open Educational Resources, and other University Libraries initiatives! 

The Scholarly Communications Team is on tour the month of October! Below are dates and locations where you can find us and learn more about Open Access. Keep an eye on this page for possible changes or additional information. 

Allendale Campus

Mary Idema Pew Library
First floor, Learning Alcove

Wednesday, October 11: 1-3pm

Wednesday, October 25: 2-4pm

Pew Campus

Steelcase Library

Friday, October 20: 11am -1pm

Thursday, October 26: 1-3 pm

Health Sciences Campus

DeVos Center for Interdisciplinary Health (DCIH)
Kirkhof College of Nursing
Thursday, October 19: 10am - 12pm

Raleigh J. Finkelstein Hall (RFH)
Lobby
Monday, October 30: 1-3pm

Discover OER

We can identify Open Educational Resources that could replace your current textbook, be supplemental materials appropriate for your class, or combined into a new OER tailored to your course. Fill out our OER Curation Request form to start the process for OER curation and learn more about The Accelerating OER Initiative. 

How does it work? Tell us about your course and teaching needs The Curator will search OER directories for relevant materials You'll receive a list of potential OER to consider for your course.
 

New Funding for OER Projects

We’re excited to announce four new funding opportunities for faculty working with Open Educational Resources, as part of the Accelerating OER Initiative:

• OER Review Awards – review an OER and share your review in the Open Textbook Library to receive a $200 honorarium
• OER Development Minigrant – receive up to $500 to cover costs related to developing your own OER.
• Remix/Revise Stipend –  receive a $1000 salary supplement to develop OER by combining or adapting existing materials.
• Open Textbook Authoring Program – join a year-long cohort program beginning Winter 2022 to develop open textbooks from scratch.

Learn more and apply on the Accelerating OER Initiative webpage.

OA Publishing Grants

The Libraries' Open Access Publishing Support Fund helps GVSU faculty make their work Open Access, by covering the publication fees charged by some journals. 

A list of funded articles can be found in ScholarWorks, and more information on the fund is available on the Libraries' website.

Journal Publishing

Through ScholarWorks, the Libraries publish a dozen active journals managed and edited by GVSU faculty.  Our peer-reviewed faculty journals include:

• Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 
• Online Readings in Psychology & Culture
• Michigan Reading Journal
• Language Arts Journal of Michigan (articles are Open Access after 2 years)
• The Foundation Review (articles are Open Access after 2 years)

The Grand Valley Journal of History is a peer-reviewed undergraduate journal, produced by students in the History Department.

ScholarWorks@GVSU

ScholarWorks@GVSU is an Open Access repository containing scholarly and creative works from the GVSU community. ScholarWorks provides a platform for departments to showcase exceptional student work, for faculty to share papers, research data, or other scholarly work, and for GVSU scholars to publish Open Access journals and textbooks. 

ScholarWorks content reaches readers all over the world. The items in ScholarWorks have been downloaded millions of times since 2008.

Open Access refers to:

• scholarly work - articles, books, research data, multimedia, etc.
• which is freely available online
• which often has few or no restrictions on reuse

By removing financial and legal barriers, Open Access enables teachers, scholars, and learners to find academic information and to use that information to make new discoveries, create new works, and advance human knowledge.

The concepts of Open Educational Resources, Open Data, Open Source Software, and Open Research Practices share this core idea that Open means "free to use + permission to modify, share, or reuse," and allows more people to benefit from more information than ever before.

The OER Initiative is a cross-University collaboration which brings together services and resources to support faculty exploring, adopting, or creating OER.  Together, the University Libraries, Pew Faculty Teaching & Learning Center, Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence, Information Technology, and the Laker Store offer workshops and training sessions, consultations, grant funding, and other resources - like the Libraries' OER Guide, which is a great starting place for finding high-quality Open textbooks and course materials. 

In the 2018-2019 academic year, a Student Senate and University Academic Senate task force investigated opportunities to increase the use of Open and affordable course materials in GVSU courses. You can read the task force's recommendations as well as an environmental scan of Open/Affordable initiatives at other universities in ScholarWorks@GVSU.

The Libraries publish a growing collection of faculty-created OER in ScholarWorks@GVSU, including Teaching Tools for instructors and Open Textbooks on topics in Mathematics, English, Writing, Engineering, Ecology, and Anthropology.  Another GVSU OER success is the Mathematics Department's YouTube channel, which has received nearly 5 million views from all over the world.  

Interested in learning more about Open Access?  Inspired to take action to help open up access to research and scholarly information, in your own work, your discipline, or across academia and society?

Here are some great places to get started:

• Have a conversation with your department's liaison librarian about open access publishing and open educational resources in your discipline, or ask how you can retain your rights as an academic author when you publish research. 
• Visit the SPARC website for detailed information about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data, from one of the Open movement's leading organizations.
• Explore  stories of impact shared by people who have benefited from scholarship found in Harvard's Open Access repository.
• Explore the Open Textbook Library and OER Commons to find openly-licensed learning materials.
• If you are a student, check out the Right to Research Coalition, which advocates for access to research for all students.
• If you are a researcher, explore the question: Why Open Research?.
• Install the Open Access Button browser extension to encourage scholars to share open versions of their work whenever you run into a paywall. 
• Visit the Open Access Week Action Portal for specific commitments you can make to support Open Access.