The University Libraries are celebrating International Open Access Week, October 24 - 30!  The theme this year is Open for Climate Justice. This year’s theme seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

International Open Access Week 2022 is a global event promoting access to knowledge, highlighting Open activities, and promoting actions that will help make more scholarly and educational materials freely available to teachers, learners, researchers, and the public.

To learn more visit the International Open Access Week website.

Open [Everything] Exhibit
Mary Idema Pew Library Exhibition Space | Atrium Level
Going on now until February 2023

Open information – free to access, with permission to reuse and share – is transforming research and education, at Grand Valley State University and around the world. Visit the University Libraries exhibit, Open [Everything] in the Mary Idema Pew Library Exhibition space, to learn more!

Open Access Week Display 
Seidman House - University Archives
Mid-October until January 2023

The University Archives and Special Collections will be highlighting the Polar Collection from former GVSU President, James Zumberge and how it is connected to the Open Access Week theme of "Open for Climate Justice".

Showing of the Film
Paywall: The Business of Scholarship
Mary Idema Pew Library, Room 030
- Friday, October 21 from 1pm-2:30pm 
- Thursday, October 27 from 2pm-3:30pm 
INT 100/201 Approved!

Join us for popcorn and to watch the film Paywall: The Business of Scholarship. This film is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science. The film questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher, Elsevier, and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google. 

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.

[email protected]

[email protected] 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 [email protected]

The Libraries publish a growing collection of faculty-created OER in [email protected], 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.